Foods Cubed Insights
Farm to Plate to Farm
We often hear about a divide between people in urban and rural areas. The FoodS3 platform, which maps agricultural supply chains, reveals a different story, one about connection and interdependence.
Where do our crops go?
Within the U.S. Corn Belt, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has identified the Upper Mississippi River Foodscape as an area ripe for collaborative agricultural transformation to help mitigate environmental threats from intensive corn and soybean production. Transformation will require collaboration among growers, livestock producers, and ethanol plants within the foodscape. But growers and downstream buyers do not know how they might be connected, making it difficult to know how they might work together.
Using the FoodS3 platform we find that crops grown in the foodscape are mostly used as fuel and feed within the foodscape - so producers and consumers depend on each other.
Tracing Land Conversion
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food, land, and agriculture sectors requires reducing crop production emissions, which are largely connected to fertilizer use, irrigation, and management operations but also to the conversion of land to row crop agriculture.
Focusing on corn, soy, and wheat, the FoodS platform can calculate emissions from land conversion for a given industry using county-level production, land use, and crop practices data.