This guide provides a primer and introductory toolkit for planners and municipal officials in Connecticut on planning for agriculture. It outlines a broad range of tools and resources available to help local governments plan for agriculture. The guide focuses on the current challenges facing agriculture and provides specific ways the practice of agriculture, from planting and cultivating to processing and marketing, is affected and sometimes hindered by current rules and regulations.
Blog Archives
Practicing Food Democracy: A Pragmatic Politics of Transformation
This article explores the tensions between stakeholders of the alternative agrifood movement. The author makes the case for
Green for Greens: Finding Public Financing for Healthy Food Retail
This guide provides a general overview of economic development and ideas for how to approach economic development agencies with healthy food retail proposals. It also provides a comprehensive overview of local, state, and federal economic development programs that have been or could be used for healthy food retail projects.
Planning for Agriculture in New York: A toolkit for Towns and Counties
This guide helps communities engage farmers and rural landowners in local planning efforts; assesses current town policies and their effectiveness; and provides a range of tools available to help New York towns and counties support local farms. The guide contains case studies demonstrating how towns and counties are successfully planning for agriculture. Publications, state laws, local plans and ordinances are available online by opening the resource index.
Increasing Farm Income and Local Food Access: A Case Study of a Collaborative Aggregation, Marketing, and Distribution Strategy that Links Farmers to Markets
This article reviews the development and outcomes of the Intervale Food Hub in Burlington, Vermont using a participatory action research approach. The authors suggest that the case study offers promising practices and limitations that could benefit the work of others and recommend related topics for future research.
Health on the Shelf: A Guide to Healthy Small Food Retailer Certification Programs
This guide describes how to create a strong healthy small food retailer certification program that requires participating stores to increase the variety of healthy foods they sell, reduce the offerings of unhealthy foods, and proactively market healthy options with help from a sponsoring agency or organization. It provides step-by-step instructions for developing a certification program, with ideas and examples from existing programs.
Supporting Agricultural Viability and Community Food Security: A Review of Food Policy Councils and Food System Plans
American Farmland Trust identified and reviewed 134 food policy councils and food system plans to determine if they lead to state and local government actions to strengthen community food systems.
Dig, Eat, and be Healthy: A Guide to Growing Food on Public Property
This guide provides consumers with the necessary tools to start growing food on public property. The guide includes opportunities to work with public agencies to identify suitable property, common types of agreements between food-growing groups and public entities, common provisions in agreements, special issues related to growing good, and sample agreements from real-world projects.
Emerging Assessment Tools to Inform Food System Planning
Food system planning is an emerging field engaging planners and planning organizations, civic leaders, citizens, food policy councils and others interested in creating more sustainable food systems. Planning practices are being developed to address the complex soil-to-soil food system, which spans production to consumption to reuse and recycling of waste. This article outlines a variety of approaches and suggests further research to evaluate the efficacy of assessment tools used to inform the food systems planning process.
Regional Food Hub Resource Guide
This resource guide is designed to give readers a greater understanding of regional food hubs, including strategies to assist in their development and growth. This guide is organized into four main sections: (1) clarifying the regional food hub concept, (2) regional food hub impacts, (3) economic viability of regional food hubs, barriers to growth, and strategies to address them, (4) resources available to support regional food hub development. The target audiences for this guide are food entrepreneurs and their supporters who are interested in starting food hubs and operators of food hubs who are interested in expanding. This guide is also intended to help philanthropic foundations, public agencies, lending institutions, and economic development organizations understand the nature, function, and operating models of food hubs, helping them to engage hubs in their areas.