About the Local Food Policy Resource Hub
States and municipalities across the country are shaping laws and policies that support local food systems, which can contribute to strong local economies, improved environments, food security, and community health.
The Local Food Policy Resource Hub highlights how local and state governments can play a role in supporting locally grown food through thoughtful policymaking and implementation.
This resource hub includes a resource library that offers learning tools to understand how local policy works and how it can best be used to support local food. The policy database organizes more than 1,400 local food policies into a navigable database. The Policy Technical Assistance Lab offers an opportunity for food and agriculture organizations to reach out to our team of law and policy experts for consultation.
The Local Food Policy Resource Hub was developed by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS), a research-based center at Vermont Law and Graduate School that produces original scholarly research in the field of food and agricultural law and policy to serve the broadest range of food system stakeholders.
The Local Food Policy Resource Hub is an updated iteration of CAFS’s Healthy Food Policy Project (HFPP), which produced resources and a policy database that highlighted policies related to healthy food access. The Local Food Policy Resource Hub expands HFPP’s scope to include other areas of local food systems, such as food production, distribution and markets, and food waste. This resource hub pulls from other CAFS projects—the Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Policy Project, the National Gleaning Project, the Farmers Market Legal Toolkit, and more—alongside resources published by other organizations and institutes working in local food policy.
Learn more about CAFS at cafs.vermontlaw.edu
Methodology
The Local Food Policy Resource Hub resulted from CAFS research on state and local policies related to local and regional food systems.
1) Resource Library
The Local Food Policy Resource Library was developed through a comprehensive review of publications from the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) and other organizations working at the intersection of law, policy, and local and regional food systems. Resources were identified through keyword searches, reviews of CAFS publications, and targeted searches of reports, toolkits, guides, and legal analyses produced by government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and other trusted sources.
Resources were selected based on their relevance to legal and policy issues affecting local food systems. General resources about food systems were not included unless they contained a substantial legal, regulatory, or public policy component. Each Resource was reviewed and categorized using a consistent taxonomy to improve search and filter functions, and help users quickly locate materials relevant to their interests.
2) Policy Database
The Local Food Policy Database contains enacted state and local laws, ordinances, resolutions, plans, and other official policies that influence local and regional food systems. It includes policies at the village, town, city, regional, county, or district levels. Federal or tribal law and policy is beyond the scope of this research.
Policies were identified through reviews of other CAFS policy databases, including the Healthy Food Policy Project Policy Database, the Farm to School State Policy Database, and the Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Policy Project. To be included in this database, each policy must 1) directly affect one or more aspects of the food system, 2) have a clear connection to local or regional food systems, 3) be officially adopted or enacted, and 4) have verifiable documentation.
Policies that are only indirectly affecting food systems, are solely general agricultural or environmental policies without an explicit food systems connection, or are temporary measures were excluded. However, we included a limited number of COVID-19 emergency policies because they provide valuable examples of legal and policy approaches that can strengthen local and regional food systems during future emergencies, including climate-related disasters and other disruptions.
Each policy was summarized and tagged using a consistent classification framework covering major topic areas such as food access, agricultural production, urban agriculture, institutional procurement, markets and distribution, land access and tenure, and food system governance, among others. This standardized methodology creates consistency, transparency, and comparability across jurisdictions, and creates a structure for future expansion of the database.
For future updates to the database, policies will be identified through systematic reviews using standardized inclusion methodology.
Contact us for more information about our methodology.
Acknowledgments
The Local Food Policy Resource Hub thanks its current and past advisory group members for providing their insight and feedback: Anita Adalja (Ashokra Farm/Not Our Farm), Yemi Amu (Oko Farms), Duron Chavis (Happily Natural), Andrea Clark (independent consultant), Nelson Hawkins (We Grow Farms/Ujamaa Farmer Collective), Christian Kanlian (The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers), Amanda Karls (Foodvocate LLC), Kyle Karnuta (Cornell Cooperative Extension) Susie Marshall (GROW North Texas), Flynne Olivarez (Mariquita Medicinals), Molly Riordan (The Center for Good Food Purchasing), Ismail Samad (Loiter East Cleveland), Mina Seck (SPROUT), Molly Stanek (The Aquaponics Association), and Latha Swamy (City of New Haven).
Amanda Karls led legal analysis for the Healthy Food Policy Project policy database and authored many HFPP resources. Her significant contributions have laid the foundation for this resource hub. HFPP is a collaboration of CAFS, the Public Health Law Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut. This project’s policy database also includes information from the State Farm to School Policy Handbook and policy database, co-produced by CAFS and the National Farm to School Network.
This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library and Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production.
