In eastern Chester County, the rural zoning is typically one house per two acres, with only a few municipalities requiring one house per 10 acres. Chester County’s master plan seeks to acknowledge and support agricultural economic planning through a variety of measures that focus economic development efforts on farm-related businesses, promote agritourism, transition younger farmers into employment, and allow construction of farm labor housing. The county has committed its own staff for agricultural economic development and local food marketing within the county, while offering county facilities as host sites for farmers markets. The county plan also recognizes the synergy between agricultural land uses and alternate energy or emerging bio-fuel markets- but does not go so far as to encourage model siting legislation for these industries. Going further than agricultural economic planning, Chester County ties its county plan to food security planning. In the effort to keep farms viable, plastic plant pot the county makes a commitment to work with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in regional food system planning.
The County plans recognize that nearly 25% of the county is food insecure and encourages local farms and citizens to volunteer in the local food bank’s gleaning program .Farming networks are represented by 754 unique geographic locations with 1087 connections between these nodes. The total farm network reach on average was 44 km, drawn to the east with a magnitude of 89 km, indicating that the majority of farming networks are drawn to the urban market of Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs . Despite using methods which were expected to reveal more direct-to-consumer relationships, findings are dominated by sales to wholesalers, representing medium and large-scale grocery chains, food hubs, and produce aggregators . Farm sales to farmers’ markets, CSAs and Buyer’s Clubs are the next most prominent networks. The longest reaching networks are farmers’ markets, farm-to farm sales, wholesale distribution, and sales to restaurants . Farm participation in farmers’ markets exhibits the direct network with the longest average reach, with farm employees travelling nearly 60 km to visit farmers’ markets, predominantly located in the south east toward urban populations in Philadelphia. Conversely, the most common relationship in farm to-farm networks are those where farms located in more rural western settings partner with Chester County farms for farm-gate sales. For example, one farm outside the county supplied milk to a Chester County farm that made cheese, which it sold further from its farm gate and to local wholesale distributors.
The reach of farmers’ markets and restaurants contrasts those of the CSA and institutional sales, which are roughly half the distance and oriented more toward surrounding suburbs. The most proximate networks are those for byproduct, educational visits and the county food bank, showing that these networks may rely more on proximity of resources and social contacts. Farm byproducts, such as compost and spent grain generally move away from urban areas toward rural land. Similarly, the gardening and gleaning programs organized by Chester County Food Bank are proximate in space.Social network mapping of Chester County farm networks by the ten network-type codes indicates the degree to which various farm relationships are intertwined . Based on the network connections, the food bank plays an important role in linking volunteer groups to educational farm visits. Many of the farms involved in the food bank’s gleaning program are centrally located in the social network, and are connected to numerous other networking typologies. For example, farms that participate in the food bank’s gleaning programs are also likely to host educational visits from the same institutions that participate in the gardening program for the food bank. The Force Atlas layout of the social network draws apart disparate nodes based on their network coding. From this layout, we see that many farms specialize in one network type, be it CSA sales, sales to wholesale distributors, or participating in multiple different farmers’ markets.
One can also see threads that run centrally to the social network, such as farm-to-farm and farm-to restaurant sales. This view also allows us to see overlap in networks. Every CSA node has a link to a farmers’ market, but the opposite is not true. Likewise, many farms that specialize in wholesale markets also sell through farmers’ markets.Interviews with key agricultural and food policy experts helped to verify the social network findings and provide explanations. Many interviewees emphasized how networks evolve over time and in relation to one another, adding a time-component to this analysis. Chester County has had a long history of direct-to consumer sales. Interviewees agreed that the proximity of suburbs, particularly wealthy suburbs, aided in the establishment of farm-to-market networks throughout the region.These statements indicate that the geographic distance-decay function of social networks built around food marketing. Indeed, Anthony’s assertion that farms involved with CSAs “bring people to the farm” is visualized with the social network map where numerous farms involved in CSAs also host educational visits that tend to be geographically proximate in nature . The central role of the food bank in purveying directly from farms and coordinating on-farm volunteer efforts may also help explain the breadth of Chester County farming networks. Larry Welsch, director of the Chester County Food Bank, notes that the food bank currently has a fleet of over 3000 volunteers, which “flock” to volunteer opportunities on farms after school and on the weekends. The size and willingness of this volunteer base speaks to Chester County’s wealth but also the draw of agritourism. Through the volunteer participation in the gleaning program, the farms generate goodwill and donate excess food to the food bank. Larry Welsch, asserts that the gleaning allows farms to showcase the good work they do to volunteers and further build their market potential for agritourism activities beyond volunteer days. As a result, farms involved in the gleaning program get practice and market exposure, helping them to later operate on-farm agritourism events, CSAs, and farmers’ market stands to further their market base and generate more profit per pound of product sold. Indeed, plastic planter pot the social network mapping indicates that participating food bank farms use multiple networks that are all highly localized geographically . Welsch noted that the majority of the forty farms that participate in the gleaning program are incapable of contiguous expansion and surrounded on all sides by urban and suburban land-uses. The network analysis in this research captures only 11 farms currently involved in the food bank gleaning program . Welsch also noted that many of the participating farms are located in southwest Chester County, the headquarters of the Food Bank before it moved to its more central location in 2010. Though the northwestern portion of Chester County has large, contiguous blocks of farmland, few of these farms participate in food bank programs. The food bank readily leverages geographically and socially proximate networks. Welsch attributes the success of gleaning program with spawning the more recent “raised-bed” program, in which local churches, businesses, schools or residents grow produce for the Food Bank. The Food Bank now has 546 gardens at 129 sites, including 49 schools, up from a total of 25 in 2009. From this rapid success, the Food Bank launched a greenhouse initiative, providing schools with high tunnels so that students can grow food year-round for their cafeterias. The school presence spurred the development of curriculums for healthy eating, farming and nutrition in elementary and middle schools with high tunnels.
Staff have pioneered cooking classes and lunch-time tastings of fresh food, such as frozen squash popsicles, in order to introduce children to vegetables that they grow and try to persuade school catering companies to source locally and provide more fresh food. All of these programs make use of the same networks to facilitate food donations through gardening and gleaning along with farm visits for educational purposes with the aim of promoting healthy eating for low-income Chester County residents. Chester County interviewees agreed that the limits to farm networks were not based on farmer will or consumer demand, but land-use regulation. As Marilyn Anthony stated, “The barriers to entry-it’s policy, regulation. Many of those things are controlled by small groups-whether that’s county commissioners or land conservation groups. They can change the language in their easements, but that doesn’t happen easily.” Moreover, zoning regulations “can be counter-intuitive, irrational, arbitrary. A lot of it is really outdated. It’s based on false assumptions of agriculture.” These sentiments are supported in recent studies, such as the Green Space Alliance Commission’s report on “Transforming Open Space,” which highlights zoning language as an obstacle for the transformation of vacant land . Zoning restrictions apply not only to the farm parcel, but to traffic regulation. As Anthony explains, “you may be farming in an area that is zoned agricultural, but it may not be able to have any retail or commerce on that site, so you would have ag zoning but not commercial. And you may not be able to conduct retail or have a farm store. There may be ordinance restrictions on traffic, so you may not be able to have parking for 20 cars- or it’s a two-lane road and they don’t want that level of traffic on it.” Such land-use regulations would limit the ability for farms to host any network which brings users to the farm, such as: education tours, gleaning volunteers, CSA pick-up locations, or roadside stands. Restrictive land-use regulations may force farms into a long-distance network typology characterized primarily by wholesale marketing. Interviewees noted that farms struggle not only with land-use regulations at the farm, but also variations in state and county level land-use regulations encountered en route to the market. Matthew Wiess works for Farm-to-City, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit which helps farmers navigate urban market regulations while also helping communities who would like to open a farmers’ market in their neighborhood. Farm-to-City manages over 20 farmers markets in Philadelphia, but does not work with New Jersey farms or farmers’ markets due to the numerous differing county and state health regulations. Wiess notes that the chief concern for farmers’ market managers is the cost of street closure permits and various approval processes for new farmers market citation. Philadelphia has an ordinance allowing farmers’ markets, but to put a new site on the ordinance, the city council member in the proposed district has to introduce and pass new legislation. Weiss notes that the demand for farm-city connections is as much as urbanite driven as farmer-driven. At the time of the interview, Farm-toCity had a waiting list of 40 farms for farmers’ markets and over 20 applications to open new farmers’ markets throughout the city. The waitlist speaks to both an abundance of supply and demand, but forming the connection for each farm network is difficult due to land-use regulations and public service limitations in access to restrooms, parking and water. Moreover, Farm-to-City likes to see desire by neighbors for the market in the form of resident petitions. Some residents may not want the traffic, noise or commercial activity that a farmers’ market brings. Bryan Snyder, one of the original founders of Buy Fresh Buy Local, a national local food marketing campaign that started out of Pennsylvania, goes further in asserting that more local networks could be had if there were higher quality public receiving points in urban areas. The farm-to-city network requires infrastructure; ironically, an infrastructure that most cities had until shortly after the 1950s when many central covered farmers markets were removed for public health reasons . As recently as 1918, a majority of cities in the United States with populations over 30,000 had a municipal food market where local and fresh produce was hocked to urbanites .As Hinrichs supposed, CSAs and farmers’ markets appear to connect over differing geographies as represented by the generalized reach diagram . Namely, CSA markets are more proximal . Yet, this research shows that CSAs and farmers’ market networks cluster socially ; and both marketing typologies are not well interwoven in other food system networks. This finding begs the question: are direct markets embedded socially at the local level? The social network analysis reveals the important role that the food bank plays in convening many of the farms involved at this nexus of networks . Interviews and review of the comprehensive plan corroborate the social embeddedness of the food bank in land-use policy and food planning in Chester County.