Can Tompkins County feed itself?

What if we had to rely solely on local food sources here in Ithaca and Tompkins County?  Could we survive?

Not at the moment, but TCLocal, an organization preparing for a world without cheap energy, envisions a future where local food production could meet our needs.

In TCLocal's latest article, Karl North, formerly of Northland Sheep Dairy, writes:

"At the garden or farm scale we want to build in multifunctionality, where parts of the system serve more than one purpose. Plants and animals that provide food, for example, may also provide ecological services necessary for the health and productivity of the whole. Ecological services are the benefits arising from the functioning of the ecosystem, in contrast to purchased inputs. 

"At the level of the food system, where different elements of production, processing, and distribution can be designed as a cooperating whole, we need to build in complementarity as to what is produced, and services that are shared among the different types of production units to be described in this paper. Urban gardens may best serve the county food system by growing fresh produce, thus complementing rural farms that produce less perishable foods, for example.

"At the community level, we need to view the reorganization of the food system as affecting and affected by the reorganization of all other infrastructure and institutions impacted by reduced energy availability, e.g., industry, housing, markets, transportation, sanitation, information flow, knowledge production, etc. 

"Most important from a systems perspective, we need to regard far-reaching changes like those to be proposed here as experimental, and track for unintended consequences in time and space. This approach, known to ecologists and other systems thinkers as adaptive management, requires constant monitoring and replanning in the face of uncertainty about consequences.  

Read the rest at: http://tclocal.org/2009/07/visioning_county_food_producti.html