Jelal Younes's blog

"The freshest, healthiest, most flavorful organic food is what's grown closest to you. Use our website to find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area, where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies. If you are a farmer, market manager, or run a business related to locally-grown food, you can add your listing to our directory - free."

At LocalHarvest.org, you can search for online stores, farms, community supported agriculture (CSA), farmers' markets, restaurants, g

Having downloaded NetLogo and played around with it for a while, I am unsure whether it will meet the needs of our modeling project.

• NetLogo is particularly aimed at modeling systems as they adapt over time. Agents in NetLogo continuously respond to each other's decisions, resulting in an ever-changing environment. To a great extent, we are interested in modeling a system that will develop over time: at a farmers' market, for example, a seller makes a decision (setting up a vendor station), a buyer makes a decision motivated by the seller's decision (walking over to the vendor station), then another decision (whether or not to buy from the this particular vendor), etc. For these types of interactions, it is crucial to have a simulation program that effectively displays change over time in the system, showing how decisions by each agent impacts each following decision by other agents.

Located here is a directory of links to applications of agent-based modeling, arranged by subject area. Of greatest importance to us is the economics section, which includes such projects as "artificial life simulation of the textile/apparel market," and "agent based simulation of the hotelling game." The page is put together by Craig Reynolds.

For those who are unfamiliar with agent-based modeling (ABM), here is an easy-to-understand introduction to the subject. It is a list of answers to frequently asked questions about ABM, entitled "Agent-based modeling of complex, adaptive systems." It explains how agent-based modeling allows these systems to be modeled, and why modeling is a useful tool for understanding these systems.

Just to update on some of the work I've been doing, here and here are links to a couple articles I've read about agent-based simulation that I did not find worthy of individual write-ups as they are not particularly useful to our project. The first article, by Robert Axelrod, presents a walk-through for those who plan to begin an agent-based simulation project, but does not really advance any new ideas for us.

Located here "Conceptual Model for the Canadian Food and Nutrition System," used by Health Canada. This model is more complex than ours will be, as it takes into account five levels of food use: food supply, distribution, consumption, utilization, and health outcome. Our model will certainly elminate the last two, as it will not incorporate the health aspects of the food we eat to that extent.

...Rethinking how our society

Aaron says that he thinks the best way to get America back into agriculture is to turn it into a spectator sport.

These two quotations go back to a point of Sohodojo's that I have often mentioned in my blog posts: that shopping can and should be an experience in itself. Michael Ableman, the author of "Fields of Plenty" firmly believes in this himself. He stresses the importance of knowing who made your food, how it was made, where it was made. There should be a connection, he says, between yourself and your food.

From Michael Ableman's "Fields of Plenty:"

Satur Farm is a reliable source; it's about production, consistency, about always being able to say yes to every request from every restaurant. I'm sure such reliability has helped give chefs in the region the confidence to commit to regional and organic ingredients and promote them to their customers.

From all the readings and research I have been doing into local foods and their viability, I can only find two legitimates reason why a restaurant or supermarket might refrain from using local foods. The first of these is the lack of reliability that can sometimes go along with local foods. Farmers are often not as dependent as a corporation such as Sysco in consistently supplying the same quality and quantity of foods. I think that if this stumbling block can be addressed, than corporations such as Wal-Mart will have no excuse for not using local foods.

Just a note to say that I am busy reading Michael Ableman's "Fields of Plenty: A Farmers' Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow it." Similar to Jenny Kurzweil's "Fields that Dream," Ableman uses the stories and methods of many individual farmers to provide a context for the current state of American agriculture. Having read about half of Ableman's book so far, I would say that Kurzweil's is a better read--the stories of the farmers she tells are more gripping, and overall she makes a better case for the use of local foods. Ableman's book, though, has its advantages. He travels the country to interview many farmers from different areas, and his thoughts on each visit are detailed at each stop.

As an additional to my earlier post about Jenny Kurzweil's "Fields That Dream," here are some facts about local foods and farmers' markets from her book:

• In a recent survey, 19,000 farmers reported selling their produce only at farmers' markets.
• Shoppers spent $584.6 billion for food produced in the United States in 1998, with farmers earning only a 20 percent share of the food dollar.