P2P Essay of the Day: Hacking_the_Food_System

The future of urban agriculture is not vertical, nor even simply horizontal. It is distributed and networked throughout the city. In a growing number of cities, suburbs,and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using interconnected networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources. In the process, they are forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

* Special Issue: Food+Tech Connect – how can information and technology be used to hack the food system?

Read the above special issue if you want to learn about the following trends in p2p agriculture and food production:

1. Social Food Cooperatives
2. Farm-to-Table Groceries
3. Food Subscription
4. Open Food Supply Chains
5. Open Menu
6. Open Food Shed Data Standard
7. Crowdsourced Food Guides
8. Real Time Farms
9. Online Food Distribution Systems
10. Food Hub Distribution Software
11. Food Traceability Software
12. CSA-Management Systems
13. Farm Management Systems
14. Open Food Data Standards

(or find them in the specialized section of our own wiki, along with many other agrifood trends that are peer-driven, see here)

We’re excerpting from the contribution and introduction by Nevin Cohen:

“The future of urban agriculture is not vertical, nor even simply horizontal. It is distributed and networked throughout the city. In a growing number of cities, suburbs,and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using interconnected networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources. In the process, they are forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

These ventures are unique in that they apply social networking tools, mapping technologies, unusual land tenure arrangements, and novel business models to forage and farm cities and suburbs. In addition, while they are grassroots, and based on aggregated small-scale production, collection, and distribution, they are replicable components of a civic agriculture network that has the potential to scale up, producing an increasing amount of food in cities and suburbs, putting urban land to productive use, recovering food that would otherwise be wasted, and helping to re-localize urban food systems.

The programs and businesses are distinctive because they are tailored to the unique people and places in which they are created. However, they generally fall into one of the following broad categories:

(1) Gleaning Social Networks – urban foragers who harvest fruits, nuts, and other edibles growing on public spaces and, sometimes, on private land, often to contribute this bounty to the needy;

(2) Peer-to-Peer Agriculture – networks of urban landowners who lend their properties,perhaps as little as a rear or side yard, to those with the inclination to produce food, in some cases to share the bounty and in other cases simply for altruistic reasons;

(3) Aggregated Urban Micro-Farms – urban farmers who aggregate multiple small parcels of privately owned land into quantities that are cost-effective to farm. The food production is either provided for a fee or for a share of the produce, which is in some cases distributed through a CSA model.”

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