Goal 6 – Resilience
Strengthening Our Preparation for Future Food System Challenges
Our regional food system is so large that it is vulnerable to threats from many directions. It operates in a fragile equilibrium that can easily be disrupted. We may not know what the next crisis will be, but advance planning can help us be resilient in the face of the unknown.
Climate change will present a clear challenge, as floods, droughts, high heat and other severe weather events can impact crop production and the agricultural workforce, while also introducing new pests and invasive species into our area. Meanwhile, political and economic volatility can cause shutdowns that disrupt nutrition assistance. For each of these potential threats, the question becomes: how can we tap into the capacity of our regional food system to keep people in Dane County fed during a crisis?
Strategies
1. Strengthen and Diversify Supply Chains by Increasing Local Food Production
During pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, certain products became hard to find in grocery stores or prohibitively expensive for families that relied upon them. In response, strategies were developed to increase local production and invest in local producers to supply the emergency food system with fresh produce sourced from Dane County. This approach supported farmers while also increasing the availability of healthy, local products for food insecure members of the community.
Actions
- Expand and make permanent programs that purchase local food for emergency feeding organizations, such as Dane County’s Farms to Foodbank Initiative or the state’s Food Security and Wisconsin Products Grant Program.
- Strengthen local production and supply chains for products that are imported into the region, when possible.
- Improve connection between Dane County’s regional food system and neighboring regions to enhance coordination, reduce the supply chain points of failure, and increase redundancies of key functions during emergencies.
- Increase community-wide food production and donation through initiatives such as Grow Your Own, victory gardens, food pantry/faith-based gardens, and the national Plant a Row for the Hungry campaign.
2. Align Food System Planning With Emergency Preparedness Goals
The strength of our food system can be measured by how successfully it can react to unanticipated challenges. Different threats can put unique pressure on supply chains and disrupt food access. Using existing tools for emergency preparedness in and out of local government will improve response and create new opportunities to bring resources into the area to support disaster recovery efforts.
Actions
- Connect strategies from production and infrastructure goals into longer-term community-wide emergency preparedness goals.
- Expand membership of Community Organizations Active in Disaster (COAD) to include emergency food organizations, mobile food businesses, and agricultural producers.
- Identify Community Resiliency Hubs and ensure they have food distribution plans in place.
- Build off the success of FEED to Go and other initiatives to develop plans for deployment of mobile food businesses and grocery delivery to reach areas of the community that could be cut off from access to food in an emergency.
- Prepare for unique crises that would tax the system such as community-wide shortages of key products like infant formula, dairy, meat, or shelf-stable protein options.
- Inventory the critical food resources in our community and map out scenarios for community responses if one or more were made unavailable (e.g. flooding in a supermarket or fire at a food pantry).
3. Anticipate the Needs of a Growing Dane County Population
Dane County’s rapidly growing population will create new challenges to sustain existing levels of services and community food access, with those challenges amplified for emergency food providers and food insecure households. Population growth will occur through increased density in existing urban areas as well as continued suburban growth outside of Madison. New supermarkets, retail food outlets, and emergency food providers will need to be established to serve larger suburban population centers. Emergency food providers will need to plan for continued growth and the reality that even low levels of food insecurity can cause greater demand in a county with more people.
Actions
- Identify future demographic trends and population growth to project future needs of emergency food providers.
- Connect municipal development plans with Food System Action Plan goals to align future development with food access considerations.
4. Increase Availability of Food, Funding, and Volunteers for Emergency Food Providers
The most prominent organizations working to resolve household food crises for the people of Dane County are the network of shelters, food pantries, and food banks that make up our emergency food system. These organizations are the safety net for thousands of families in Dane County each month and yet they have seen tremendous growth in recent years that is, in many cases pushing capacity and stretching resources to the limit. The community response and support for these organizations will need to be elevated to meet future demands.
Actions
- Develop coordinated strategies across all food access partners for community-wide donation campaigns of both financial resources and food.
- Support strategies for strengthening the capacity, training, and retention of volunteers while also recruiting new volunteers to offset the aging volunteer workforce.
- Develop and expand anticipatory mutual aid strategies and infrastructure such as direct person-to-person aid for food insecure families.