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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:08:48 +0000
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I am Ashoke Bose, Founder of Sustainable Energy & Agriculture Technology, LLC (SEAT), a private company located in Arizona, USA. We are involved in developing Near Zero Carbon (NZC) emission greenhouse technology and micro-greenhouses which should allow farming in a semi-controlled environment. Our project is located in Sahuarita, a rural community, which is approximately 20 miles north of Nogales at Arizona-Mexico border.
  
I find the information shared in this conference very interesting and thought provoking. I would like to share my opinion on food security in USA, a highly developed economy.

Role of supermarkets and online e-commerce platform:

In USA, consumers in urban as well as in rural communities buy basic food, vegetables, and fruits from supermarkets like Walmart, Target etc. Even the ranchers buy meat from the supermarket. I have seen very few farmers' markets in our communities. These supermarkets adopted centralized warehouses as distribution centers, and use "Just-in-Time" ordering system via Point of Sales (POS) to deliver goods daily to stores to reduce inventory cost and improve profit margin. For example, assume the shelf capacity of a certain brand of cereal is set at 20 boxes based on past sales data; the POS will keep track of how many boxes of that brand of cereal is sold on a specific day, and if the count reaches a threshold, say 18, then POS will place an order to the distribution center, and on next day the delivery will be made. This system reduces the inventory cost significantly. However, if there is no delivery truck for a couple of days for any reason, many shelves will be empty.

Based on my personal experience at Walmart, the distance between the central distribution center and a store could be as high as 300 miles. In rural community, like in Sahuarita, consumers may drive 25/30 miles to shop at a supermarket like Walmart. The distance between the producing farm and the central distribution center may vary significantly. For example, some of the produce are grown in Mexico; and some are grown in local farms within 50-70 miles of radius.     

In recent years, many consumers have adopted online services like Amazon.com (Amazon Fresh) for their daily food supply. These online service providers also use a centralized warehouse based distribution model. This centralized distribution model has two side effects: a) the distance between producing farms and actual consumers has increased; and b) the carbon footprint of consumed food/vegetables has gone up. 

Sources of food insecurity in a centralized distribution model:
In this centralized distribution model, the possible sources of food insecurity are the following:
1. Natural calamity - drought, flood, earthquake etc.
2. Logistic failure - major accident in the highway, interruption in gas supply, labor unrest etc
3. Infrastructure failure - electrical grid failure, network failure
4. Import failure - Political issues in the exporting countries
5. Terrorist attack in the food supply chain

Role of small farms in urban/rural communities in USA:

In the community supported farming, small farms should be located within the community that they serve. At SEAT, we have designed and built a pilot micro-greenhouse (20 ft X 12 ft) using wooden frame and corrugated plastic roof and walls are made of material which allows air flow but restricts direct sunlight. We are growing common vegetables like tomatoes, squash, bell pepper and water melon. This micro-greenhouse could be erected in the back yard of any house. The production capacity of a micro-greenhouse is sufficient to supply vegetables to a family consisting of two adults and two children. Further, it is possible to install three to five micro-greenhouses in the community owned land, and this cluster of micro-greenhouses could support a community of ten to twenty households. A more detailed description on the micro-greenhouse project is available from the Facebook link below.
 
We would like to envision the role of micro-greenhouses similar to that of micro-computers in early eighties when centralized computing powered by main frame computers dominated the computing market. In the computing industry, we have realized that a network of small computers could replace a main frame computer. The centralized warehouse based distribution system has a single point of failure. A network of small farms, powered by micro-greenhouses, could eliminate the single point of failure issue. Further, by bringing the producing farms closer to the actual consumers, we can reduce transportation cost and carbon footprint. We believe that technologically well designed urban/rural small farms may address some of the above issues as listed 1-5.

Mr. Ashoke Bose
Founder, Sustainable Energy & Agriculture Technology, LLC
5860 E Comsoft Place
Sahuarita, AZ 85629
USA
web: http://www.sustainable-energy-and-agriculture-technology.com 
Email: ashbose (at) sustainable-energy-and-agriculture-technology.com 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nearzerocarbon/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sustainable-energy-and-agriculture-technology?trk=top_nav_home
Phone: +1 520 878 3600

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/434322/ ].

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