The Data and Metrics initiative is focused on fostering greater data efficacy and literacy across local and regional food systems by engaging project stakeholders in completing a gap analysis of existing local and regional food system data, fostering peer mentorship, and providing technical assistance. In part to accomplish these goals, teams of researchers and community partners reviewed and compiled available data using an equity lens into a single data warehouse to facilitate analysis and visualization.

The initiative first began by reviewing the mission statements from national local and regional food system network leaders. Mission statements were organized into six categories -- labor, farm development/local food sales, business development/food infrastructure, community wealth/well-being, nutrition security/food access, and policy. For each of the categories, except for policy, the teams created document briefs identifying key related data indicators available nationwide at the county level. Creators of data warehouses, data explorers, and data dashboards encounter several challenges when it comes to the issue of equity. Reliance on existing data limited the ability to disaggregate data by dimensions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. As a result, we encourage the use of practices that invite community members to help contextualize data, share their personal stories, and amplify community solutions. The data warehouse is open-source and additional contributions are welcome, see below.

• Support the utilization of data in program evaluation and decision making.

• Improve access to data from an array of sources including government, NGOs, network partners, and researchers.

We will accept suggestions of data to add to our data repository and website. Please follow instructions, as described on localfoodeconomics.com, to submit a request to add data.

Accepted data contributions will be added one time per year. Visit localfoodeconomics.com for criteria used to accept or reject suggestions.

A detailed description of the project and all of the data, including code, can be found in U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service: Data and Metrics. Code can also be found on the FoodSystemsModeling Git Hub site. This is not an active code base and we are not accepting contributions to the code. The code is made available for you to use in your own work if it is helpful.

All data associated with this project can be found in our FAME Dropbox folder. Data includes original data sets used and all final data that has been compiled (located in data_final). Links and description of the raw data are provided in the code files. Additional data from USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), not available publicly elsewhere, is also available in this folder.

Last update date: 5/03/2024

• Ashley Chaifetz
• Becca B. R. Jablonski
• Allison Bauman
• Diana Broadaway
• Libby Christensen
• Tony Coble
• Dar Wolnik
• Hailey Edmondson
• Mackenzie Gill
• Hannah Leighton
• Abby Long
• Cullen Naumoff
• Ela Rausch
• Jairus Rossi
• Megan Sankey
• Samantha Schaffstall
• Joshua Stoll
• Americo Vega-Labiosa
• Brett Wolff
• Darlene Wolnick
• Tim Woods

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license - see LICENSE.txt file for details.

We wish to thank Ela Rausch for her continued guidance and leadership with developing an equity framework for the local and regional food system data. We would also like to thank the Data Elevates team, especially Prem Durairaj and Xan Paxton, for their support with the development of the Food and Agriculture Data Explorer.