- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen, I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for the Division of Extension.
And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night by Zoom, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you
Michelle Miller.
She was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin,
went to high school in Sun Prairie.
Then she came to UW-Madison to study landscape architecture.
She stayed for a master's degree
in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
And she's now the Associate Director
for the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems
in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
Tonight, she's gonna talk with us about food systems,
especially in the era of COVID.
Would you please join me in welcoming Michelle Miller
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?
- Thanks, Tom, for the kind introduction,
and thank you Public Television for the invitation
to share our work on University Place .
This hour, I'll be sharing work of thousands of people
across our good state, farmers and food businesses,
but also PTAs and school nutrition programs,
tribal governments, University of Wisconsin Extension
and people on campuses across the state,
nonprofits, and state government workers.
Our research at the center
is part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
And we work with these community partners
on sustainable agriculture.
We're guided by a citizen advisory council,
made up of farmers and others who work in food.
Since 1989, the center's identified ways
to build food system resilience.
Our food system work is funded in part by the USDA,
their Agricultural Marketing Service,
the Transportation Services Division,
and the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
So today, I wanna share with you three ideas
about food systems.
The first is that the food system is a network
of businesses and relationships.
Second, food systems are regularly disrupted,
and we can learn from those events
to help us become more resilient.
Building resilience improves the food system
so it can bounce back after a disruption.
We wanna build back better.
So first of all, let's talk about the food system
as a system that operates at different scales.
This graphic shows different ways
we engage with food systems.
All these scales are necessary
for the functioning of our food system,
and each is affected differently by disruption.
When we look at the graphic a little closer,
we can see that personal production of food
is at the heart of the food system.
We're empowered by our efforts to garden
and gather our own food.
Hunting and fishing are a longtime Wisconsin tradition.
These kinds of activities
help us build an understanding of the world around us
and how the seasons affect what food is available,
things like that.
This spring, seeds were sold out
as people took control and started gardening
in the face of uncertainty around COVID.
In the fall, canning supplies have been in short supply,
especially canning lids for those of you
who like to put up a few tomatoes now and again.
So in tier one of the food system,
one step away from that tier zero of personal production,
we have direct connection to farmers.
Here we go to farmers markets, farm stands.
We might subscribe to a
community-supported agriculture farm or a CSA.
And in those relationships,
we understand what farmers are facing.
We know about the drought in southeast Wisconsin
or about the flood in the Driftless region.
And those direct connections
add a lot of value to our day-to-day lives
and our understanding of the food that we are eating.
Tier two is where local grocery stores
and small food processors reside.
Here, we get to know our local grocery store,
we ask them for donations
for events that we might be doing.
They support our community in many ways,
not only by providing food and jobs for people
in our communities.
Consumers are part of the trust relationships
through this point of the food system.
At tier three, we're looking at large volume aggregation
and distribution of food.
These tend to be national companies
that distribute products in very large lots.
They might take a 53-foot truck and fill it full of one product.
And for the most part,
these are bound for private distribution centers,
where they service large institutions
and big box grocery stores.
Consumer trust is less of a part of the equation
at this level.
I think in many ways, we rely more on brands that we trust
rather than look for trust in the company itself.
Tier four is largely anonymous
and consists of businesses that take crops
like corn and soybeans
and break them down into food components
like corn syrup and lecithin.
So the food system is a network, and the network has a structure.
That structure is very complex.
It is self-organized, adapts freely
to whatever come what may, it's shaped by market rules.
Some of those rules are created at the federal government level,
and other rules are based on trust and transparency.
Really relationship rules.
The formal federal rules were overhauled
during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s,
to better serve citizens during the Great Depression
and the disruption that came from that event.
If we zoom in on that graphic,
we can see how beautifully complex the system is,
how food is traded between states.
For instance, if you can look at the...
It's like a green yellowish line
running between Georgia and Florida.
That arc represents food that moves from Georgia to Florida
to go out on the seaport, out through the seaports.
Wisconsin has the 14th-highest trade volume of the 50 states.
Illinois is number one and Washington, D.C. is last.
This research also identified Wisconsin
as a key node in the network.
If the Wisconsin food system is disrupted,
it will have a strong effect on the food system
in other states.
And like any structure, it has weak points.
So let's think about food geographically.
Where is it grown?
The olive green areas on this slide,
on this map of the U.S. are called the Fruitful Rim.
And these areas are where most of the nation's fruits
and vegetables are grown.
Mexico is really part of this region,
but it isn't included in this map.
So just remember how important Mexico also is.
Wisconsin is part of the Northern Crescent region
along the Great Lakes.
We used to grow a much wider variety
of fruits and vegetables than we do now.
So this is a map that USDA creates,
showing how refrigerated trucks transportation
gives us information about where food is coming from
in real time.
This particular chart is for September 2020,
and we can see most of the food is originating
from Mexico and California.
Those top bars show how many thousands of pounds
move from Salinas-Watsonville in California,
the Mexico crossings through Texas.
There are actually quite a few,
I think there's three or four Mexico crossings
through Texas.
If you look way down near the bottom,
you can see Wisconsin District.
And the blue and the green bars under Wisconsin District
indicate that we shipped potatoes and onions
during September.
Now compare that to a few bars up,
it's the Michigan District.
It's quite a bit longer, you know,
which indicates much more product coming from Michigan.
And you can also see that Michigan is shipping
a lot of different products.
They have a greater volume and a greater variety of products,
including apples, watermelon, celery, tomatoes,
all sorts of food that we could be growing
in Wisconsin as well.
Another way to think geographically
about the food system
is to look at where the markets are.
This map of emerging megaregions
gives us an idea of where population centers are
and where they're growing over the next 30 years.
If you look carefully,
you can see that we're part of the Great Lakes megaregion.
And we've got a couple of big cities very close to us,
Minneapolis and Chicago...
Minneapolis/St. Paul and Chicago.
Really, these two large markets are within a day's delivery
of most of Wisconsin,
which makes it a very short regional haul
to move product to those markets.
Chicago really serves as the gateway
to food that moves from west to east,
and is home to the largest concentration
of food warehousing.
Another way to think of food system structure
is to consider how supply chains work.
Farmers produce food, shown on the graphic on the left.
And that food then moves from fields to packing houses
and processors where it's washed, cut,
and otherwise prepared for sale.
The segment between the farmer and the processor
is called the first mile.
The processor then moves the food to wholesale buyers.
That's an over the road, longer haul generally.
And it's primarily large companies
with private warehousing.
In some cases, wholesale markets are places
where numerous sellers and buyers can congregate
and share services.
These multi-tenant markets are common in large cities,
but are also very common in Europe and Asia,
where they're found in medium-sized cities as well.
We once had markets throughout small cities in Wisconsin.
This slide illustrates the structure
of business relationships in the food system.
We wanna know where distributors send their food,
how different businesses are are supplied.
After Hurricane Sandy, New York City commissioned
a close look at the city's food system.
We can learn a lot from looking at this study.
Take a look at that first bar.
These are regional distributors.
They're supplying 53% of the food that is retailed
and consumed in New York.
Of the different businesses that they supply,
bodegas and independent restaurants and cafés
are the most important.
So they're supplying a lot of the small,
independent businesses that make up New York
and make it the interesting city that it is.
Supermarkets also are supplied
by some of those regional suppliers.
So they have regional food in their supermarkets,
even if those supermarkets are national chains.
If you look further down,
you can see that national grocery distributors
primarily distribute to the supermarkets,
and those are supermarkets that they own.
So those are somewhat closed supply chains.
It's very difficult for a local producer
or a small food processor to get their product
into those grocery distribution chains.
And then we can see that the National Food Service
supplies a lot of independent restaurants and cafés.
So that's kind of a pleasant surprise
because it means that if you've got a local food product
that you've created
and you'd like to get it into restaurants and cafés,
you can do so through a national food service distributor,
depending on how able you are
to build a relationship with that distributor.
So structures can fail in a number of ways,
and weak spots become critical during a disruption.
One kind of failure that food systems
are vulnerable to is fracture.
And this is in part because we've got food coming
intended for consumption at home
and food intended for consumption away from home.
USDA tracks food sales for these two market channels.
And we see that in 1960, only 25% of food
was eaten away from home.
And by 2006, it was about equal, 50/50.
That's where on this graph,
where the blue and the orange lines collide.
And then by 2018, about 56% of the food
was eaten away from home.
So when COVID hit, we had restaurants and schools close,
and the food away from home dropped precipitously,
while grocery store sales increased dramatically.
The other thing we saw
was that CSA memberships also increased.
As consumers started thinking about, you know,
"I might not be able to get food from my grocery store
"because of all the disruption in the supply chain.
"So how do I access food?"
They started home gardens
and honed their cooking skills too.
The companies that process, package, and deliver food
to grocery stores are different
than the companies that supply restaurants,
schools, and other institutions.
They package their food differently
and they label it differently.
And many of these things are by law.
The president of the Wisconsin Cheese Association
told me that it would take about a year
and a lot of money to switch from food service
to retail production of many, of cheese in Wisconsin.
Some companies collaborated during the pandemic
to relieve the situation.
And one of the first really big efforts,
collaborative efforts was between US Foods,
a food service company
that worked with CNS Wholesale to move food service product
into the retail channel.
Dairy farmers I work with
observed that Wisconsin is heavily dependent on milk,
on processing milk into cheese for food away from home.
Potato growers have a more balanced market portfolio,
but expect that growers in other states
may compete with them in the near future.
This fall of 2020 into the winter for retail markets.
The food system is a network of businesses,
and that network has a structure,
and that structure can buckle.
Processing plants are the pinch point in the food system.
Here, food from farms is washed, cut,
and sometimes cooked and packaged for retail
and food service sale.
The food system buckled at this pinch point
at the processor level,
when restaurants and institutions closed
and workers fell ill.
The CDC was tracking a lot of this,
and this graphic describes what happened
at a South Dakota meat processing plant
early in the pandemic.
Workplace safety really suffered.
People needed more physical distance
to stay safe within the plant.
If the plant spaced workers out,
they were unable to process the same volume of food.
If the plants didn't, the workers fell ill
and were unable to work anyway.
So then there was a shortage of workers
either way they went.
As plant capacity fell,
farmers were left with animals that were destined for market
and nowhere to be processed.
They were forced to euthanize animals.
They were also forced to dump milk
in the case of cheese plants.
So this...
problem with the pandemic happened
at all sorts of different processing plants;
it wasn't just meat processing.
But that was where we first started to see the problem.
It also became a workplace safety issue in Europe,
as well as the United States
in all kinds of food processing plants.
As the CDC noted in this graphic of theirs,
people of color are disproportionately affected
by the pandemic.
To be able to address persistent structural inequities in food,
we require that we must pay attention to ways that women,
people of color, rural communities, and the poor
are disproportionately affected.
So the structure of the food system
can also fail as it warps over time.
And this structural failure we've seen
first in the graphic I showed you
about the food away from home and the food at home.
We could see from 1960 to basically 2020,
the shift in whether or not people ate food at home
or away from home.
And that shift really has caused some problems.
It basically fractured.
So another kind of warp that we've seen
is in concentration of the food system.
In 2016, four grocery companies
accounted for almost 45% of the grocery sales.
They were Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize.
Concentration in the grocery industry makes it difficult
for independent grocery stores,
those that often serve rural Wisconsin communities,
to compete fairly.
An example would be Copps Family Food Stores in Wisconsin.
Some of you may remember Copps.
In 2000, they sold to Roundy's,
and then shortly later, by 2015, Kroger bought Roundy's.
And all of those stores that used to be owned
by a Wisconsin family are now part
of one of the largest grocery chains in the country.
This makes it very difficult,
if you've got a local product, to sell into that store.
Concentration in food supply chains creates efficiency,
but it also reduces diversity
and makes the overall food system less resilient.
When 20 companies control more than 65%
of the grocery sales,
our community-based food businesses suffer.
This isn't just happening with grocery stores.
Concentration is happening at all points in our food system.
While it may seem like we have a lot of choice,
in reality, our food is under the control
of just a few companies.
Phil Howard from Michigan State put out a wonderful book
called Concentration and Power in the Food System .
And in it, he documents how the structure
of different businesses has changed over time.
In this graphic, we can see all those little blue dots.
Those were all independent companies at one time.
But slowly, they were acquired by much larger companies.
And even the large companies
have been acquired by even larger companies.
An example, toward the bottom right of the graphic,
you can see Corteva.
And Corteva actually is the parent company
of Dow and DuPont.
It used to be Dow and DuPont were completely independent,
and now even they've been bought up.
So we can learn a lot from past food system disruptions.
And one of the key pieces is that
disruptions have a lot of different characteristics.
Basically, either we know about them,
they're planned, or they're predictable,
or they happen rapidly, or they happen abruptly.
And events can also vary from local to global in scale.
So the less predictable, larger the disruption,
the harder it is for a system to bounce back.
Some examples.
Refrigerated trucks really disrupted our food system.
They are an example of a planned global disruption.
Before these trucks
and the federal highway system were in place,
our food system was regionally reliant.
After, the food system changed to a national
and now global system.
In transportation, the technological disruption
on the horizon is an electric freight and regional haul.
Is this an opportunity for Wisconsin?
Or is this disruption going to cause more difficulties?
Another kind of disruption are natural disruptions
such as hurricanes.
They're an example of a rapid regional event.
In some ways, they are predictable,
so that these coastal regions develop response plans
that they can put into motion when a storm is on the horizon.
We have disaster management specialists in universities,
state and local governments
that prepare and respond to these regional disruptions.
I get to be part of a five-state research team
looking at COVID disruption.
The University of Florida is part of the team,
and they have deep experience with managing
regional disruptions to systems.
Fire, flood, and drought are local and regional disruptions.
They are predictable or sometimes rapid.
We have systems in place to respond to these
and adjust to these disruptions,
as long as they don't happen too often.
However, COVID is different.
COVID is a transformational systems shock.
Paul Bingham, an economist, says that COVID
is the biggest shock seen since World War II.
Many public health experts predicted this disruption,
but for most of us, it was a rapidly developing crisis.
Another global disruption, climate change,
is coming on much more slowly.
It was predicted decades ago.
COVID is an opportunity for us
to invest in what really matters,
what's really important to us, to transform our systems
and make them more resilient for coming disruptions.
So regional experts have advice for dealing with disruption.
First of all, they suggest that
immediately after the disruption,
that we focus on immediate needs first.
We respond quickly and adapt.
And I think we've done a really great job of doing that
here in Wisconsin.
I have the pleasure of working with Joel Kuenhold,
he's the chair of our citizen advisory committee.
He rapidly adapted on his farm,
putting in physical distancing,
he sewed his own masks for workers,
and he started doing wellness checks for people.
Joel is also farmers market manager in Stevens Point.
He required masks and instituted physical distancing
between vendors.
Like much of the food system,
physical distancing requires more space or fewer workers.
Wisconsin school districts kicked into high gear,
recognizing that families depend on school lunch programs.
Farm to school programs continue to help link food
from Wisconsin farms to school districts across the state.
So this slide is from a Texas pantry, food pantry.
But Texas's emergency food system
faced many of the same issues as we have in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin has three emergency food warehouses
or food banks that serve more than 1,000 pantries
across the state.
They rely on federal food assistance,
private donations, and volunteers
to serve Wisconsin's hungry.
The need for food increased rapidly as people lost jobs.
Many of these people
were already living paycheck to paycheck
in jobs with little security.
Restaurant jobs, hotel jobs, personal care.
Many of these jobs may not have even had health insurance.
Restaurant, or emergency food is critical in the short term,
but is not a long-term solution
to economic recession and hunger.
Supporting and building businesses
is an important part of improving resilience.
And it is a more of a long-term solution.
I'll also note that food banks saw a dwindling of donations,
both food and monetary donations as a result of COVID.
And a really big problem was a decrease in volunteer hours.
I was surprised to learn that most of the people
who make the food pantries happen
across our state are volunteers.
And many of those volunteers,
probably the most of the volunteers are elderly.
Under COVID, this became a really big issue
because as we all know, the elderly are more vulnerable
to the worst of COVID.
And so these elderly volunteers were encouraged to stay home.
But that also meant that it was much more difficult
to get food to the hungry.
Experts in regional disruption point to two areas of concern:
communications and operations.
Under communications, a really big issue
pertaining to food systems is the rural internet access.
Internet access is very important in food communications
during the pandemic.
Many parts of rural Wisconsin
are still without adequate internet access.
And this has made it difficult for them to participate
in online markets.
Operations issues like how to keep
the workforce safe and healthy,
packaging requirements for retail sale,
distribution driver needs were all immediately apparent
during the beginning days of COVID.
For instance, drivers who are doing those cross haul,
those cross the country hauls from California to Chicago
had nowhere to eat or take a break.
All those facilities were closed or were overused.
It was hard to find overnight parking
for truckers before the pandemic,
but even worse after.
Longer-term operational issues for food system disruptions
are things like shortage in warehousing,
especially refrigerated warehousing
and regional warehouses.
Another long-term operational issue
is the economic hardship farmers face
due to oversupply and unfair market rules.
We quickly learned how important food system workers are.
These essential workers were short in food retail,
processing, and on farms.
Very large farms such as those on the West coast
relied on seasonal workers from Mexico.
These workers could get visas to come to the United States
and work on farms, but were unable to cross at the border.
This was also an issue in Europe.
Farms were chartering jets to bring workers in illegally
or calling for youth volunteers
to pick high-value crops like strawberries.
Meat plants and cheese plants were also short on workers.
So another thing we can learn
from past food system disruptions
is that systems' change can accelerate.
The food system was changing before the pandemic,
but change accelerated after the disruption.
Online food sales skyrocketed
as people followed stay-at-home orders
and restaurants and workplaces closed.
E-commerce is expected to become the new normal.
Independent grocers were pressured into creating
online ordering, curbside pickup, and home delivery
to compete with Amazon and other big retailers.
These big retailers were already offering new services,
albeit on a limited basis before the pandemic.
This has been a very expensive proposition for grocers.
These additional costs may account for in part,
the increase in grocery prices.
USDA tells us that comparing August 2019 to August 2020,
food prices were 4.1% higher overall.
Another thing we can learn from past disruptions
is that the more prolonged the disruption,
the more the changes will persist.
We're looking at a new normal.
In April 2020, Nielsen predicted that
as COVID wore on, there would be a polarization
of purchasing patterns.
Some consumers would be insulated from the downturn,
while many others would have to restrain
their spending habits because of unemployment
or other COVID-19 related challenges.
And this sobering statistic.
I had a chance to catch a webinar with supply chain expert
Anne Strauss-Wieder, who braved Hurricane Sandy
and brought that part of the country back to life
after that major regional disruption.
She said that 60% of local businesses fail
during regional disruptions.
And that's a regional disruption,
not even a global disruption like we are currently in.
Our small businesses are extremely vulnerable
to permanent closure.
McKinsey projected that as many as 36% of businesses
could close permanently,
just from the first four months of the pandemic.
And as the pandemic soldiers on,
we're looking at masks and physical distancing,
at least through a good part of 2021.
We can expect this to just really devastate
our small businesses, unless we do something about it.
This graphic shows some of the sectors
that are most at risk, and the top risk,
top sector at risk
is accommodations and food services.
So almost 50% are likely to have a negative effect.
And probably, I'd say that it looks like about 45%
are likely to have a large negative effect
just from the first four months of COVID.
Other areas of note,
the arts, entertainment, and recreation piece
is really food-related in many ways.
A lot of farmers that I know
have wedding barns, for instance.
Those are going unused.
There are the food festivals
and all sorts of things that are related
to our food culture here in Wisconsin.
Those are all shut down.
We're also looking
at transportation, warehousing, retail,
and wholesale trade as being small businesses in those areas
having, being largely negatively affected by COVID.
So let's talk about building back better.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back
and transform a system.
I use the term Build Back Better
because it has important history to understand.
Japan has had its share of disasters:
typhoons, earthquakes, wars.
In 2015, they coined this phrase, Build Back Better,
for the United Nations Conference
on disaster risk reduction.
Disaster is a trigger for improvement.
Their top three approaches
are to focus on infrastructure, revitalizing the economy,
and restoring culture and the environment
that may have been negatively affected
from whatever the disaster is.
The good news here
is that Wisconsin has more food system resilience
than many other parts of the United States.
We have a strong farm economy and processing sector.
We have state-inspected meat plants and USDA plants,
large and small cheese processing,
packing houses for fresh fruit and vegetables,
canning companies.
We have cities and towns of many sizes
and many independent businesses.
But we need to uphold and support that resilience.
We need to Build Back Better.
Our state government is aware that Resilient Wisconsin
is worth investing in.
The current program really emphasizes
the importance of communication and connectedness.
Another lesson learned from other disasters has been to
nurture collaboration between businesses.
I've featured Wisconsin Dells Maurer's Markets.
Some of you may be familiar with that market.
And you can see that little IGA symbol there.
That stands for Independent Grocers Association,
started back in 1926.
So independent grocers came together
and started to work together and collaborate
to build their community businesses.
That's the kind of collaboration we need to see more of.
Early in the pandemic,
we have some examples of how collaboration really kicked in.
The State Department of Agriculture
and the Wisconsin Pork Producers worked together
to have a state-inspected meat plant process hogs
that were turned away from the USDA plant due to COVID.
Another example is the Hunger Task Force Food Bank
in Milwaukee worked with the
Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association to move cheese
destined for now nonexistent food service markets
to food banks for distribution.
We know how to collaborate and work together in Wisconsin.
We need more like that.
This is Sarah Elliot, Dane County Farmers' Market Manager.
She responded very quickly
and built on existing collaboration
at the farmers market to automate ordering
and payment for local food.
This made it possible for farmers to safely sell products
at this huge farmers market.
To celebrate Farm to School Month each year,
our center organizes the Great Lakes Great Apple Crunch.
Here, students in Juneau County
bite into local apples to celebrate Wisconsin bounty.
It's one way to increase collaboration
between school purchasing agents and local farmers every year.
During the pandemic, the event will be held online.
Another key lesson about Building Back Better
is to invest in system infrastructure.
Although Wisconsin's food system is relatively resilient,
we are missing critical business to business infrastructure
for food wholesaling.
We may also want to shift some of our reliance
on processing for food away from home
to the higher value retail market channel,
such as dairy farmers observed.
Large metro areas host terminal markets
to move food to and from many businesses
and improve the flow of food.
We don't have a terminal market in Wisconsin anymore,
although we used to when food was regionally marketed.
Chicago does have a terminal market,
but it's not very active
and it's very difficult to get product into it.
So the city of Madison commissioned
a terminal market business plan
to create a spot market for refrigerated products
that would bolster independent supply chains
in south central Wisconsin.
This would allow small and mid-sized farms to sell retail
through both farmers markets and wholesale
through the multi-tenant terminal market.
On this slide, you can see how that kind of plays out.
We've got large farms on the left.
They've got their own big box logistics
and they sell to their big store and their multiple chain stores.
But for small and medium-sized farms,
they have farmers market to sell retail,
direct to consumer,
but we're missing that terminal market
that can really feed product,
local product into distributors, restaurants,
retailers, and institutions.
Building collaboration between those independent businesses
is something that's missing in our state.
Another lesson about Building Back Better
is to look for opportunities to upgrade,
automate, and reconfigure.
High-density warehousing, big data logistics, RFID tags.
All those things are innovations
that large companies are able to take advantage of,
but smaller independent businesses cannot.
If however, if food businesses collaborate,
they can invest in automation, blockchain,
and other upgrades to food distribution.
An example is Organic Valley.
Organic Valley is a cooperative in Wisconsin,
a dairy cooperative in Wisconsin
that serves hundreds of organic dairy farmers
across the state.
Together, those farmers were able to invest
in state-of-the-art automated cold storage warehousing
to improve efficiency.
Another rule of thumb for Building Back Better
is to reduce single points of failure
by increasing diversity.
Businesses of all kinds are thinking about this right now.
Each region in the U.S. needs to think of ways
to source food from multiple regions
rather than relying on a couple of regions,
such as Mexico and the West coast.
Regional sourcing rather than global sourcing
of all products, not just food,
is on the minds of many, many supply chain managers today.
This was discussed some before COVID,
but adoption is accelerating.
So we often think of diversity
in agriculture at the field scale,
like is shown in this photograph,
where we've got multiple crops growing in rows
next to each other.
But diversity creates resilience at multiple scales
and in multiple aspects of the food system.
Diversity at the landscape scale
would suggest that Wisconsin could grow
more fruits and vegetables than it currently does,
like we saw with Michigan.
How can we help fruit and vegetable farmers access markets
if they were to grow more food for wholesale?
Can we help dairy farmers access more profitable markets
for specialty cheeses and yogurt?
What about meat processing?
How can we help those
state-inspected local meat lockers?
So the real question then becomes,
how do we support diversity in businesses
so that independent food businesses thrive?
So that food businesses emerge from communities
to serve those communities?
How do we lessen the dependence on food pantries
and grow our local economies?
So in summary,
we just went through three different areas:
Build Back Better,
recognizing that disruption is predictable
and we can learn from those events,
and the food system is a network of businesses and relationships.
This is really an opportunity to transform our food system
to be better than ever.
To do so, we need to do some soul-searching
and think about some very specific questions.
What is most important to us?
How do we pool our resources
to transform the Wisconsin economy
into a resilient food system for the 21st century?
We know we are gonna be facing more disruptions
in the future; how can we prepare for that?
That is the challenge before us.
How do we increase diversity,
upgrade infrastructure, and nurture collaboration?
We can learn from past disruptions.
How do we support local businesses?
How do we shape the new normal?
What changes are accelerating, and is that good for resilience?
How do we improve communications and food system operations?
Should our early responses dictate long-term strategies?
We know that the food system is a network with a structure.
How has that structure suffered?
Is it likely to fracture, buckle, or warp again?
How are the different businesses connected?
And how do market rules promote or undermine
the way it functions?
Ultimately, building trust between businesses
will increase the resilience of our state's food system.
We know that relationships hold food systems together,
and that trust energizes those relationships.
The bottom line, food is how we care for one another.
Thank you to the thousands of Wisconsinites
who are working together to transform our food system
into an equitable, resilient, and robust network
for the 21st century.