The evidence base to evaluate ecological, economic, and social impacts of local and regional food systems remains too small to reach definitive conclusions. However, the National Research Council (2010) report Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century makes a convincing argument that sustainability will require a combination of incremental and transformative changes to agricultural systems. Seen in this light, local and regional food systems offer, at the very least, a compelling subject to study in search of less environmentally harmful agroecosystems. Using quantitative modeling approaches to study the land requirements of human diets and agricultural carrying capacity, this talk will examine two questions regarding the potential of local and regional food systems. First, what is the capacity for locally- and regionally-scaled food systems to provide a diet comparable to the current American diet? Second, how sensitive are the estimates of agricultural carrying capacity to assumptions about diet, land availability, and land suitability.
Results/Conclusions
Local food production capacity was examined for four states: Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, and New York. These states vary widely in terms of climate, soils, land in agriculture, and population size. Accordingly, they vary widely in terms of potential to meet their internal food needs, with New York able to feed about 20% of its population and Mississippi able to meet more than 100% of its needs. Deeper examination of the sensitivity of the model to starting assumptions was examined for the Northeast U.S. Preliminary results suggests that agricultural carrying capacity ranges from approximately 11 million people for current diets to 18 million people for a lacto-vegetarian diet. These results assume that the current area in cultivated cropping remains constant, and initial exploration reveals that estimates of carrying capacity are sensitive to the assumption about the area available for cultivated cropping.