Farm to school encourages healthy lifestyles in children and helps support local economies. The Wisconsin Farm to School Toolkits for school nutrition directors and producers can help you create a successful farm to school program in your community.

Wisconsin is seeing a renewed interest in planting cover crops to prevent soil erosion, retain or add nutrients, reduce pest pressures and accomplish other goals.

The national Agriculture of the Middle initiative has produced three sets of curricular resources on value-based food supply chains for university-level business and economics courses.

The Driftless Region Food and Farm Project is a coalition of farmers, consumers, institutions, agencies and organizations. Together, they aspire to meet the growing demand for local food by scaling up the production, aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing of food in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

From farmers’ markets to supermarkets, there is a spectrum of relationships between consumers and the businesses that grow, process, distribute and market their food. Small-scale, local food production is often contrasted with the anonymity of global, industrial food production, resulting in a black and white portrayal of local and global food systems. In reality, the food system is far more complex than local versus global and artisanal versus industrial.

Expanding the fruit and vegetable industry in the Upper Midwest could have a huge economic impact in the region. A new analysis from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, in collaboration with CIAS and other regional partners, estimated potential state and regional economic values associated with increased production of fresh fruit and vegetables in a six-state area.

Robust local and regional food systems offer social, environmental and economic benefits. Increasingly, wholesale buyers are demanding locally grown food and growers are looking for new regional markets. To develop informed business development strategies for Wisconsin farmers and other supply chain start-ups, the UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and UW-Extension Agricultural Innovation Center studied and documented eleven models of regional food aggregation and distribution.

There is growing consumer interest in dairy products from grass-fed cows. Consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental, health and taste benefits of eating dairy and other animal products from livestock fed using managed grazing. If this interest translates into demand, it may open new value-added markets for farmers who use managed grazing.

Eating locally is going mainstream. For years, committed eaters have gone out of their way to source local food from farmers’ markets, farms, roadside stands […]

For 20 years, CIAS has put the Wisconsin Idea to work. What does the future hold?
Now, more than ever, we need sustainable agriculture research and outreach that integrates social, environmental and economic knowledge. In the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, CIAS is helping to lead the way toward this future.