Abstract
As local food activities expand and grow, an important question to answer is how various participants contribute to a local food system’s overall vitality and strength. This paper does so by focusing on the relationships between locally-oriented farm and retail actors and assessing what the configuration of these relationships tells us about the workings of the broader local food system. Such an analysis reveals two things. Empirically, it shows the important role food retailers play in the overall vibrancy of local food exchanges: food retailers form crucial links holding the broader system together and significantly expanding consumer access to local foods. Further, different retailer types have distinct impacts on network configurations, each serving particular roles in the development and maintenance of local food systems. Methodologically, this paper shows the value of applying social network analysis techniques to the study of local food systems: such an approach yields insights that may not be as readily assessable from other strategies. In this paper, I overview common network analysis techniques and apply them to a case study of local food activities in New England, suggesting how such an approach might be applied to local food systems in other places.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In many situations profitability wins out when these three dimensions are in conflict. However, true sustainability in such systems requires that economic interests be made subservient to social and environmental interests (Cleveland et al. 2014; Trivette 2012). This is incredibly difficult to achieve in a capitalist system.
I–O models, which approach economic impacts from a systemic level, are common in the field of economics. However, they offer two key differences from the present study. First, their focus is exclusively on estimating economic impacts of possible input changes and, second, such models assume factors based on entire industrial sectors. In contrast, this study is concerned with the holistic configuration of individual actors and their relationships to one another.
Other work on this region’s food system (Trivette 2017) indicates that participants do share similar goals and values.
Entities could be isolates because they only operated DTC operations (which was common for farms) or because they had gone out of business following addition to the site and had never been removed.
Approximately 11% of all ties are from a retailer to a farm; two-thirds of these originate with food processors.
With the exception of comparisons between restaurants and grocers (no significance) and between grocers and distributors (p = 0.0718), independent t tests confirm that retailer types do have significantly different rates (at the 0.05 level) of above-average ties.
Table 1 shows a breakdown of farms by type that are included in this modified network; this low rate of inclusion is fairly evenly spread across all farms, as only a quarter or less of each farm type is connected to another farm entity.
A breakdown of retailer types (see Table 1) shows this is relatively consistent across retailer types; approximately half or more of each retailer type is connected to at least one other retailer entity.
Independent t tests show significant differences (at the 0.05 level) between general produce farms and specialty, orchard, and other type farms and between livestock and other type farms.
Abbreviations
- CSA:
-
Community supported agriculture
- DTC:
-
Direct-to-consumer
- DTR:
-
Direct-to-retail
- SNA:
-
Social network analysis
References
Acton, R. M. 2010. scrapeR: Tools for scraping data from HTML and XML documents. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/scrapeR/. Accessed 3 Feb 2010.
Allen, J. 2006. Assessing the market dynamics of ‘value-added’ agriculture and food business in Oregon: Challenges and opportunities. Portland: Portland State University: Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices.
Allen, P., and A. B. Wilson. 2008. Agrifood inequalities: Globalization and localization. Development 51 (4): 534–540.
Barndt, D. 2002. Tangled routes: Women, work, and globalization on the tomato trail. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Benson, P. 2011. Tobacco capitalism: Growers, migrant workers, and the changing face of a global industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chiffoleau, Y. 2009. From politics to co-operation: The dynamics of embeddedness in alternative Food supply chains. Sociologia Ruralis 49 (3): 218–235.
Cleveland, D. A., N. M. Müller, A. C. Tranovich, and D. N. Mazaroli. 2014. Local food hubs for alternative food systems: A case study from Santa Barbara County, California. Journal of Rural Studies 35: 26–36.
Colloredo-Mansfeld, R., M. Tewari, J. Williams, D. C. Holland, A. Steen, and A. B. Wilson. 2014. Communities, supermarkets, and local food: Mapping connections and obstacles in food system work in North Carolina. Human Organization 73 (3): 247–257.
Fischer, E. F., and P. Benson. 2006. Broccoli and desire: Global connections and Maya struggles in postwar Guatemala. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Fonte, M. 2008. Knowledge, food, and place. A way of producing, a way of knowing. Sociologia Ruralis 48 (3): 200–222.
Friedmann, H. 2009. Feeding the empire: The pathologies of globalized agriculture. Socialist Register 41: 124–143.
Giddens, A. 1981. A contemporary critique of historical materialism. vol. 1, power, property and the state. London: Macmillan.
Glowacki-Dudka, M., J. Murray, and K. P. Isaacs. 2012. Examining social capital within a local food system. Community Development Journal 48 (1): 75–88.
Granovetter, M. 1985. Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91 (3): 481–510.
Heiss, S. N., N. K. Sevoian, D. S. Conner, and L. Berlin. 2015. Farm to institution programs: Organizing practices that enable and constrain Vermont’s alternative food supply chains. Agriculture and Human Values 32 (1): 87–97.
Hinrichs, C. C. 2000. Embeddedness and local food systems: Notes on two types of direct agricultural market. Journal of Rural Studies 16 (3): 295–303.
Howard, P. H. 2016. Concentration and power in the food system. New York: Bloomsbury.
Izumi, B. T., O. S. Rostant, M. J. Moss, and M. W. Hamm. 2006. Results from the 2004 Michigan farm-to-school survey. Journal of School Health 76 (5): 169–174.
Izumi, B. T., K. Alaimo, and M. W. Hamm. 2010. Farm-to-school programs: Perspectives of school food service professionals. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 42 (2): 83–91.
Jaffee, D. 2007. Brewing justice: Fair trade coffee, sustainability, and survival. Oakland: University of California Press.
Konefal, J., and M. Hatanaka. 2014. Producing and consuming food: Justice and sustainability in a globalized world? In Twenty lessons in environmental sociology, eds. K. A. Gould, and T. L. Lewis, 2nd ed., 191–208. New York: Oxford University Press.
La Londe, B. J., and J. M. Masters. 1994. Emerging logistics strategies: Blueprints for the next century. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 24 (7): 35–47.
Lang, J. 2016. What’s so controversial about genetically modified food? London: Reaktion Books.
Low, S. A., A. Adalja, E. Beaulieu, N. Key, S. Martinez, A. Melton, A. Perez, K. Ralston, H. Stewart, S. Suttles, S. Vogel, and B. B. R. Jablonski. 2015. Trends in U.S. local and regional food systems, AP-068. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
Marsden, T., J. Banks, and G. Bristo. 2000. Food supply chain approaches: Exploring their role in rural development. Sociologia Ruralis 2 (1): 15–22.
Martinez, S., M. Hand, M. Da Pra, S. Pollack, K. Ralston, T. Smith, S. Vogel, S. Clark, L. Lohr, S. Low, and C. Newman. 2010. Local food systems: Concepts, impacts, and issues. USDA ERS report #97.
Mount, P. 2012. Growing local food: Scale and local food systems governance. Agriculture and Human Values 29 (1): 107–121.
Nestle, M. 2007. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Revised ed. Berkley: University of California Press.
Peters, C. J., N. L. Bills, J. L. Wilkins, and G. W. Fick. 2008. Foodshed analysis and its relevance to sustainability. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 24 (1): 1–7.
Pirog, R., T. van Pelt, K. Enshayan, and E. Cook. 2001. Food, fuel, and freeways: An Iowa perspective on how far food travels. Ames: Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Stephenson, G., and L. Lev. 2004. Common support for local agriculture in two contrasting Oregon communities. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 19 (4): 210–217.
Thorsøe, M., and C. Kjeldsen. 2016. The constitution of trust: Function, configuration, and generation of trust in alternative food networks. Sociologia Ruralis 56 (2): 157–175.
Trivette, S. A. 2012. Close to home: The drive for local food. Journal of Agriculture, Food System, and Community Development 3 (1): 161–180.
Trivette, S. A. 2015. How Local is local? Determining the boundaries of local food in practice. Agriculture and Human Values 32 (3): 475–490.
Trivette, S. A. 2017. Invoices on scraps of paper: Trust and reciprocity in local food systems. Agriculture and Human Values 34 (3): 529–542.
Wasserman, S., and K. Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and application. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements
Ryan Acton provided indispensable assistance in compiling this database. I am also grateful to Amanda Wintersieck, Ryan Edwards, Shannon McCarragher, Jeremy Strickler, Fang Yu Hu, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful feedback and comments in preparing this manuscript. Thanks also go to Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture and all the farm and retailer participants in western Massachusetts who participated in the broader research project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Trivette, S.A. The importance of food retailers: applying network analysis techniques to the study of local food systems. Agric Hum Values 36, 77–90 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9885-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9885-1