Dane County Food System Action Plan Preview

A food system includes all of the people, institutions, places, and activities that play a part in feeding us all. No single entity is responsible for the food we eat at every stage. Understanding how different foods move from where they are grown or produced to our plate and beyond, also known as supply chains, illustrates that feeding a community involves much more than just farmers and grocery stores.

The UW–Madison Community & Regional Food Systems Project developed a framework to visualize how food systems function (Figure 1). The stages of the supply chain (right inner circle), the “enabling environment” that surrounds it (right outer circle), and the values driving it (left circle) combine to define what the food system looks like in a specific location. While supply chain sectors from production to distribution, consumption, and so on tend to be represented in most food systems, the policy, environmental, and cultural conditions of the enabling environment and the values that a community applies to food may vary from place to place. 

For example, food production is influenced by policies that dictate land access, impacts of climate change, and the local market price of specific products. Meanwhile, community values for low chemical inputs, fair wages to workers, and sufficient access to retailers that sell local products can also influence producers’ decisions of what to grow and sell. Food systems exist on multiple levels of society and do not simply stop at county or state boundaries. Depending on the scope, a food system may center on a very small or very large geographic area, and one food system may exist within another. For the purposes of this Plan: 

• Local food systems refer to food grown, raised, or produced in Wisconsin and sold directly to consumers in Dane County with minimal intermediaries. This can be through farmers’ markets, CSAs, farm stands, or direct sales to locally owned restaurants and retailers. Dane County’s local food system is comparatively well organized and serves as a model for local food systems across the country.
• Regional food systems refer to food grown within Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest and distributed through small- and mid-scale wholesale channels to grocery stores, institutions, restaurants, and food businesses that need consistent volume. Unlike the local food system, Dane County’s regional wholesale market is less organized. The wholesale relationships that would connect mid-sized farms to grocery stores, hospitals, schools, and restaurants lack the aggregation, distribution, and coordination needed to function efficiently; this is the missing middle infrastructure referenced throughout this plan.
• National and international food systems are the large-scale supply chains through which most Dane County residents currently access the majority of their food, moving products from across the country and world into local grocery stores and restaurants regardless of where they were produced. Foods from other regions or countries that are imported into Wisconsin represent these national and international systems. Some of these markets may relate to the sale of commodity foods. 

While the focus of this Action Plan is on the local and regional food systems that connect in and around Southern Wisconsin, Dane County is not independent from larger systems and shouldn’t aim to be. Control over national and international systems is largely beyond the scope of individuals in Dane County, but increasing the strength of our regional food system will naturally reduce the reliance on those larger systems. 

Still, Dane County is deeply interconnected with neighboring counties, states, and beyond through consumer preferences, availability of products, and economic relationships. A significant volume of food sold in Dane County arrives weekly by truck from Milwaukee, Chicago, and other distribution hubs within the region. Products grown in our area may be exported to other places just as foods that aren’t typically produced in Southern Wisconsin may be imported. These layered food systems are the reality of a globalized food environment, and the systemic challenges we are facing here cannot be fully removed from the larger structures that the Dane County food system resides within.