United States Department of Transportation
i
Cold chain food distribution from the Driftless Area : keys to attaining self-reliance in the circle city.
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2014-05-01
[PDF-11.74 MB]
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Abstract:In recent years, small- to mid-scale farms have increasingly emphasized the importance of branding and establishing
the appropriate identity to enter the value-added market. Farms in the Driftless Area (mostly Southwest Wisconsin) are
slowly developing a regional food system and their attempts to take advantage of its strategic location in supplying
abundant, quality cold chain product to the metropolitan areas, recognized as the Circle City (Chicago to the Twin-Cities). A large proportion of Circle City’s food is imported from outside the Upper Midwest, while the Driftless are is
capable of producing more food to meet the region’s needs. Farms specialize in small-scale and organic food
production, but production must increase and producers must shift from direct marketing to intermediation in order to
increase food supply from the area to the Circle City. At the same time, Driftless producers should continue and
enhance their sustainable production methods and experiment with producing a more diverse array of food products;
both of which are important dimensions to a self-reliant food system. This paper uses analyses of Transearch and ESRI
ArcGIS Business Analyst to synthesizes the supply-demand relationship of food products that the Driftless Area shares
with the Circle City by quantifying the amount of cold chain food product that is transported on a regional level. This
paper makes recommendations that small- to mid-scale farmers can follow to scale-up production and to enter
wholesale markets by developing relationships between each other and logistics firms, and then developing and
utilizing aggregation points, which reduce risk to the producers.
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