University Place

Food Systems, Disruptions and Resilience

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for theDivision of Extension. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the WisconsinAlumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night by Zoom, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Michelle Miller. She was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, went to high school in Sun Prairie. Then she came to UW-Madison to study landscape architecture. She stayed for a master’s degree in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. And she’s now the Associate Director for the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Tonight, she’s gonna talk with us about food systems, especially in the era of COVID. Would you please join me in welcoming Michelle Miller to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

– Thanks, Tom, for the kind introduction, and thank you PublicTelevision for the invitation to share our work on University Place. This hour, I’ll be sharing work of thousands of people across our good state, farmers and food businesses, but also PTAs and school nutrition programs, tribal governments, Universityof Wisconsin Extension and people on campusesacross the state, nonprofits, and state government workers. Our research at the center is part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. And we work with these community partners on sustainable agriculture. We’re guided by a citizen advisory council, made up of farmers andothers who work in food. Since 1989, the center’s identified ways to build food system resilience. Our food system work is funded in part by the USDA, their Agricultural Marketing Service, the Transportation Services Division, and the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative. So today, I wanna sharewith you three ideas about food systems. The first is that thefood system is a network of businesses and relationships.

Second, food systems are regularly disrupted, and we can learn from those events to help us become more resilient. Building resilience improves the food system so it can bounce back after a disruption. We wanna build back better. So first of all, let’s talk about the food system as a system that operates at different scales. This graphic shows different ways we engage with food systems. All these scales are necessary for the functioning of our food system, and each is affected differently by disruption. When we look at the graphic a little closer, we can see that personalproduction of food is at the heart of the food system. We’re empowered by our efforts to garden and gather our own food. Hunting and fishing are a longtime Wisconsin tradition. These kinds of activities help us build an understanding of the world around us and how the seasons affect what food is available, things like that.

This spring, seeds were sold out as people took control and started gardening in the face of uncertainty around COVID. In the fall, canning supplieshave been in short supply, especially canning lids for those of you who like to put up a few tomatoes now and again. So in tier one of the food system, one step away from that tier zero of personal production, we have direct connection to farmers. Here we go to farmers markets, farm stands. We might subscribe to a community-supported agriculture farm or a CSA. And in those relationships, we understand what farmers are facing. We know about the drought in southeast Wisconsin or about the flood in the Driftless region. And those direct connections add a lot of value to our day-to-day lives and our understanding ofthe food that we are eating. Tier two is where local grocery stores and small food processors reside. Here, we get to know our local grocery store, we ask them for donations for events that we might be doing.

They support our community in many ways, not only by providing food and jobs for people in our communities. Consumers are part of the trust relationships through this point of the food system. At tier three, we’re looking at large volume aggregation and distribution of food. These tend to be national companies that distribute products in very large lots. They might take a 53-foot truck and fill it full of one product. And for the most part, these are bound for privatedistribution centers, where they service large institutions and big box grocery stores. Consumer trust is less of a part of the equation at this level. I think in many ways, we rely more on brands that we trust rather than look for trust in the company itself. Tier four is largely anonymous and consists ofbusinesses that take crops like corn and soybeans and break them down into food components like corn syrup and lecithin. So the food system is a network, and the network has a structure.

That structure is very complex. It is self-organized,adapts freely to whatever come what may,it’s shaped by market rules. Some of those rules are created at the federal government level, and other rules are basedon trust and transparency. Really relationship rules. The formal federal rules were overhauled during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, to better serve citizensduring the Great Depression and the disruption thatcame from that event. If we zoom in on that graphic, we can see how beautifully complex the system is, how food is tradedbetween states. For instance, if you can look at the. . . It’s like a green yellowish line running between Georgia and Florida.

That arc represents food that moves from Georgia to Florida to go out on the seaport, out through the seaports. Wisconsin has the 14th-highest trade volume of the 50 states. Illinois is number one andWashington, D. C. is last. This research also identified Wisconsin as a key node in the network. If the Wisconsin food system is disrupted, it will have a strongeffect on the food system in other states. And like any structure, it has weak points. So let’s think about food geographically. Where is it grown? The olive green areas on this slide, on this map of the U. S. are called the Fruitful Rim. And these areas are where most of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are grown. Mexico is really part of this region, but it isn’tincluded in this map. So just remember howimportant Mexico also is. Wisconsin is part of the Northern Crescent region along the Great Lakes. We used to grow a much wider variety of fruits and vegetables than we do now. So this is a map that USDA creates, showing how refrigerated trucks transportation gives us information about where food is coming from in real time. This particular chart is for September 2020, and we can see most of the food is originating from Mexico and California. Those top bars show how many thousands of pounds move from Salinas-Watsonville in California, the Mexico crossings through Texas.

There are actually quite a few, I think there’s threeor four Mexico crossings through Texas. If you look way down near the bottom, you can see Wisconsin District. And the blue and the green bars under Wisconsin District indicate that we shippedpotatoes and onions during September. Now compare that to a few bars up, it’s the Michigan District. It’s quite a bit longer, you know, which indicates much more product coming from Michigan. And you can also seethat Michigan is shipping a lot of different products. They have a greater volume and a greater variety of products, including apples, watermelon, celery, tomatoes, all sorts of food thatwe could be growing in Wisconsin as well. Another way to think geographically about the food system is to look at where the markets are. This map of emerging megaregions gives us an idea of where population centers are and where they’re growing over the next 30 years. If you look carefully, you can see that we’re part of the Great Lakes megaregion.

And we’ve got a couple of big cities very close to us, Minneapolis and Chicago. . . Minneapolis/St. Paul and Chicago. Really, these two large markets are within a day’s delivery of most of Wisconsin, which makes it a very short regional haul to move product to those markets. Chicago really serves as the gateway to food that moves from west to east, and is home to the largest concentration of food warehousing. Another way to think offood system structure is to consider how supply chains work. Farmers produce food, shown on the graphic on the left. And that food then movesfrom fields to packing houses and processors whereit’s washed, cut, and otherwise prepared for sale.

The segment between the farmer and the processor is called the first mile. The processor then moves the food to wholesale buyers. That’s an over the road, longer haul generally. And it’s primarily large companies with private warehousing. In some cases, wholesale markets are places where numerous sellers and buyers can congregate and share services. These multi-tenant markets are common in large cities, but are also very commonin Europe and Asia, where they’re found in medium-sized cities as well. We once had markets throughout small cities in Wisconsin. This slide illustrates the structure of business relationships in the food system. We wanna know where distributors send their food, how different businesses are are supplied. After Hurricane Sandy, New York City commissioned a close look at the city’s food system.

We can learn a lot from looking at this study. Take a look at that first bar. These are regional distributors. They’re supplying 53% ofthe food that is retailed and consumed in New York. Of the different businessesthat they supply, bodegas and independentrestaurants and cafs are the most important. So they’re supplying a lot of the small, independent businesses that make up New York and make it the interesting city that it is. Supermarkets also are supplied by some of thoseregional suppliers. So they have regional food in their supermarkets, even if those supermarkets are national chains. If you look further down, you can see that national grocery distributors primarily distribute to the supermarkets, and those are supermarkets that they own. So those are somewhat closed supply chains.

It’s very difficultfor a local producer or a small food processor to get their product into those grocery distribution chains. And then we can see that the National Food Service supplies a lot of independent restaurants and cafs. So that’s kind of a pleasant surprise because it means that if you’ve got a local food product that you’ve created and you’d like to get it into restaurants and cafs, you can do so through a nationalfood service distributor, depending on how able you are to build a relationshipwith that distributor. So structures can fail in a number of ways, and weak spots become critical during a disruption. One kind of failure that food systems are vulnerable to is fracture. And this is in part becausewe’ve got food coming intended for consumption at home and food intended for consumption away from home. USDA tracks food sales for these two market channels. And we see that in1960, only 25% of food was eaten away from home. And by 2006, it was about equal, 50/50. That’s where on this graph, where the blue and the orange lines collide.

And then by 2018, about 56% of the food was eaten away from home. So when COVID hit, we had restaurants and schools close, and the food away from home dropped precipitously, while grocery store sales increased dramatically. The other thing we saw was that CSA memberships also increased. As consumers started thinking about, you know, “I might not be able to getfood from my grocery store “because of all the disruption in the supply chain. “So how do I access food?” They started home gardens and honed theircooking skills too. The companies that process, package, and deliver food to grocery stores are different than the companies that supply restaurants, schools, and other institutions. They package their food differently and they label it differently. And many of these things are by law. The president of the Wisconsin Cheese Association told me that it would take about a year and a lot of money to switch from food service to retail production of many,of cheese in Wisconsin. Some companies collaborated during the pandemic to relieve the situation.

And one of the first really big efforts, collaborative efforts was between US Foods, a food service company that worked with CNS Wholesale to move food service product into the retail channel. Dairy farmers I work with observed that Wisconsin is heavily dependent on milk, on processing milk into cheese for food away from home. Potato growers have a more balanced market portfolio, but expect that growers in other states may compete with them in the near future. This fall of 2020 into the winter for retail markets. The food system is a network of businesses, and that network has a structure, and that structure can buckle. Processing plants are the pinch point in the food system. Here, food from farms is washed, cut, and sometimes cooked and packaged for retail and food service sale. The food system buckled at this pinch point at the processor level, when restaurants and institutions closed and workers fell ill. The CDC was tracking a lot of this, and this graphic describes what happened at a South Dakota meat processing plant early in the pandemic. Workplace safetyreally suffered.

People needed more physical distance to stay safe within the plant. If the plant spaced workers out, they were unable to process the same volume of food. If the plants didn’t, the workers fell ill and were unable to work anyway. So then there was a shortage of workers either way they went. As plant capacity fell, farmers were left with animals that were destined for market and nowhere to be processed. They were forced to euthanize animals. They were also forced to dump milk in the case of cheese plants. So this. . . problem with the pandemic happened at all sorts of different processing plants; it wasn’t just meat processing. But that was where we first started to see the problem. It also became a workplace safety issue in Europe, as well as the United States in all kinds of food processing plants. As the CDC noted in this graphic of theirs, people of color aredisproportionately affected by the pandemic. To be able to address persistent structural inequities in food, we require that we must pay attention to ways that women, people of color, rural communities, and the poor are disproportionately affected. So the structure of the food system can also fail asit warps over time. And this structural failure we’ve seen first in the graphic I showed you about the food away from home and the food at home. We could see from 1960 to basically 2020, the shift in whether or not people ate food at home or away from home. And that shift really has caused some problems. It basically fractured.

So another kind of warp that we’ve seen is in concentration of the food system. In 2016, four grocery companies accounted for almost 45%of the grocery sales. They were Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize. Concentration in the grocery industry makes it difficult for independent grocery stores, those that often serve rural Wisconsin communities, to compete fairly. An example would be Copps Family Food Stores in Wisconsin. Some of you may remember Copps. In 2000, they sold to Roundy’s, and then shortly later, by 2015, Kroger bought Roundy’s. And all of those stores that used to be owned by a Wisconsin familyare now part of one of the largest grocerychains in the country. This makes it very difficult, if you’ve got a local product, to sell into that store. Concentration in food supply chains creates efficiency, but it also reduces diversity and makes the overall food system less resilient.

When 20 companies control more than 65% of the grocery sales, our community-based food businesses suffer. This isn’t just happening with grocery stores. Concentration is happening at all points in our food system. While it may seem like we have a lot of choice, in reality, our food is under the control of just a few companies. Phil Howard from Michigan State put out a wonderful book called Concentration and Power in the Food System. And in it, he documentshow the structure of different businesses has changed over time. In this graphic, we can see all those little blue dots. Those were all independent companies at one time. But slowly, they were acquired by much larger companies. And even the large companies have been acquired by even larger companies.

An example, toward thebottom right of the graphic, you can see Corteva. And Corteva actuallyis the parent company of Dow and DuPont. It used to be Dow and DuPontwere completely independent, and now even they’ve been bought up. So we can learn a lot from past food system disruptions. And one of thekey pieces is that disruptions have a lot of different characteristics. Basically, either we know about them, they’re planned, or they’re predictable, or they happen rapidly, or they happen abruptly. And events can also vary from local to global in scale. So the less predictable, larger the disruption, the harder it is for a system to bounce back. Some examples.

Refrigerated trucks reallydisrupted our food system. They are an example of aplanned global disruption. Before these trucks and the federal highway system were in place, our food system was regionally reliant. After, the food system changed to a national and now global system. In transportation, the technological disruption on the horizon is an electric freight and regional haul. Is this an opportunity for Wisconsin? Or is this disruption going to cause more difficulties? Another kind of disruption are natural disruptions such as hurricanes. They’re an example of a rapid regional event. In some ways, they are predictable, so that these coastal regions develop response plans that they can put into motion when a storm is on the horizon. We have disaster management specialists in universities, state and local governments that prepare and respond tothese regional disruptions. I get to be part of a five-state research team looking at COVID disruption. The University of Florida is part of the team, and they have deep experience with managing regional disruptions to systems.

Fire, flood, and drought are local and regional disruptions. They are predictable or sometimes rapid. We have systems in place to respond to these and adjust to these disruptions, as long as they don’t happen too often. However, COVID is different. COVID is a transformational systems shock. Paul Bingham, an economist, says that COVID is the biggest shockseen since World War II. Many public health expertspredicted this disruption, but for most of us, it wasa rapidly developing crisis. Another global disruption,climate change, is coming on much more slowly. It was predicted decades ago. COVID is an opportunity for us to invest in what really matters, what’s really important to us, to transform our systems and make them more resilient for coming disruptions.

So regional experts have advice for dealing with disruption. First of all, they suggest that immediately after the disruption, that we focus on immediate needs first. We respond quickly and adapt. And I think we’ve done a really great job of doing that here in Wisconsin. I have the pleasure of working with Joel Kuenhold, he’s the chair of our citizen advisory committee. He rapidly adapted on his farm, putting in physical distancing, he sewed his own masks for workers, and he started doing wellness checks for people. Joel is also farmers marketmanager in Stevens Point. He required masks and instituted physical distancing between vendors. Like much of the food system, physical distancing requires more space or fewer workers. Wisconsin school districts kicked into high gear, recognizing that familiesdepend on school lunch programs.

Farm to school programscontinue to help link food from Wisconsin farms to school districts across the state. So this slide is from a Texas pantry, food pantry. But Texas’s emergency food system faced many of the same issues as we have in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has three emergency food warehouses or food banks that servemore than 1,000 pantries across the state. They rely on federal food assistance, private donations, and volunteers to serve Wisconsin’s hungry. The need for food increased rapidly as people lost jobs. Many of these people were already living paycheck to paycheck in jobs with little security. Restaurant jobs, hotel jobs, personal care. Many of these jobs may not have even had health insurance. Restaurant, or emergency food is critical in the short term, but is not a long-term solution to economic recessionand hunger.

Supporting andbuilding businesses is an important part of improving resilience. And it is a more of a long-term solution. I’ll also note that food banks saw a dwindling of donations, both food and monetary donations as a result of COVID. And a really big problem was a decrease in volunteer hours. I was surprised to learn that most of the people who make the food pantries happen across our state are volunteers. And many of those volunteers, probably the most of the volunteers are elderly. Under COVID, this became a really big issue because as we all know, the elderly are more vulnerable to the worst of COVID. And so these elderly volunteers were encouraged to stay home. But that also meant that it was much more difficult to get food to the hungry. Experts in regional disruption point to two areas of concern: communications and operations.

Under communications,a really big issue pertaining to food systemsis the rural internet access. Internet access is very important in food communications during the pandemic. Many parts of rural Wisconsin are still without adequate internet access. And this has made it difficult for them to participate in online markets. Operations issues like how to keep the workforce safe and healthy, packaging requirements for retail sale, distribution driver needs were all immediately apparent during the beginningdays of COVID. For instance, drivers who are doing those cross haul, those cross the country hauls from California to Chicago had nowhere to eator take a break. All those facilities were closed or were overused. It was hard to find overnight parking for truckers before the pandemic, but even worse after. Longer-term operational issues for food system disruptions are things like shortage in warehousing, especially refrigerated warehousing and regional warehouses. Another long-term operational issue is the economic hardship farmers face due to oversupply and unfair market rules.

We quickly learned how important food system workers are. These essential workers were short in food retail, processing, and on farms. Very large farms such as those on the West coast relied on seasonal workers from Mexico. These workers could get visas to come to the United States and work on farms, but wereunable to cross at the border. This was also an issue in Europe. Farms were chartering jets to bring workers in illegally or calling for youth volunteers to pick high-value crops like strawberries. Meat plants and cheese plants were also short on workers. So another thing we can learn from past food system disruptions is that systems’ change can accelerate. The food system was changing before the pandemic, but change accelerated after the disruption. Online food sales skyrocketed as people followed stay-at-home orders and restaurants and workplaces closed.

E-commerce is expectedto become the new normal. Independent grocers were pressured into creating online ordering, curbside pickup, and home delivery to compete with Amazon and other big retailers. These big retailers were already offering new services, albeit on a limited basis before the pandemic. This has been a very expensive proposition for grocers. These additional costs may account for in part, the increase in grocery prices. USDA tells us that comparing August 2019 to August 2020, food prices were 4. 1% higher overall. Another thing we can learn from past disruptions is that the more prolonged the disruption, the more the changes will persist. We’re looking at a new normal. In April 2020, Nielsen predicted that as COVID wore on, therewould be a polarization of purchasing patterns.

Some consumers would be insulated from the downturn, while many others would have to restrain their spending habits because of unemployment or other COVID-19 related challenges. And this sobering statistic. I had a chance to catch a webinar with supply chain expert Anne Strauss-Wieder, who braved Hurricane Sandy and brought that part of the country back to life after that major regional disruption. She said that 60% of local businesses fail during regional disruptions. And that’s a regional disruption, not even a global disruption like we are currently in. Our small businessesare extremely vulnerable to permanent closure. McKinsey projected that as many as 36% of businesses could close permanently, just from the first four months of the pandemic. And as the pandemic soldiers on, we’re looking at masks and physical distancing, at least through agood part of 2021. We can expect this to just really devastate our small businesses, unless we do something about it. This graphic shows some of the sectors that are most at risk,and the top risk, top sector at risk is accommodations and food services.

So almost 50% are likelyto have a negative effect. And probably, I’d say thatit looks like about 45% are likely to have a large negative effect just from the first four months of COVID. Other areas of note, the arts, entertainment, and recreation piece is really food-related in many ways. A lot of farmers that I know have wedding barns,for instance. Those are going unused. There are the food festivals and all sorts of things that are related to our food culture here in Wisconsin. Those are all shut down. We’re also looking at transportation,warehousing, retail, and wholesale trade as being small businesses in those areas having, being largely negatively affected by COVID. So let’s talk about building back better. Resilience is theability to bounce back and transform a system.

I use the term Build Back Better because it has important history to understand. Japan has had its share of disasters: typhoons, earthquakes, wars. In 2015, they coined this phrase, Build Back Better, for the UnitedNations Conference on disaster risk reduction. Disaster is a trigger for improvement. Their top three approaches are to focus on infrastructure, revitalizing the economy, and restoring cultureand the environment that may have been negatively affected from whatever the disaster is. The good news here is that Wisconsin has more food system resilience than many other parts of the United States. We have a strong farm economy and processing sector. We have state-inspected meat plants and USDA plants, large and small cheese processing, packing houses for fresh fruit and vegetables, canning companies. We have cities andtowns of many sizes and many independent businesses. But we need to uphold and support that resilience.

We need to Build Back Better. Our state government is aware that Resilient Wisconsin is worth investing in. The current programreally emphasizes the importance of communication and connectedness. Another lesson learned from other disasters has been to nurture collaboration between businesses. I’ve featured Wisconsin Dells Maurer’s Markets. Some of you may be familiar with that market. And you can see that little IGA symbol there. That stands for Independent Grocers Association, started back in 1926. So independent grocers came together and started to work together and collaborate to build theircommunity businesses. That’s the kind of collaboration we need to see more of.

Early in the pandemic, we have some examples of how collaboration really kicked in. The State Department of Agriculture and the Wisconsin PorkProducers worked together to have a state-inspected meat plant process hogs that were turned away from the USDA plant due to COVID. Another example is the Hunger Task Force Food Bank in Milwaukee worked with the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association to move cheese destined for now nonexistent food service markets to food banks for distribution. We know how to collaborate and work together in Wisconsin. We need more like that. This is Sarah Elliot, Dane County Farmers’ Market Manager. She responded very quickly and built on existing collaboration at the farmers market to automate ordering and payment for local food. This made it possible for farmers to safely sell products at this huge farmers market. To celebrate Farm to School Month each year, our center organizes the Great Lakes Great Apple Crunch. Here, students in Juneau County bite into local apples to celebrate Wisconsin bounty.

It’s one way to increase collaboration between school purchasing agents and local farmers every year. During the pandemic, the event will be held online. Another key lesson about Building Back Better is to invest in system infrastructure. Although Wisconsin’s food system is relatively resilient, we are missing critical business to business infrastructure for food wholesaling. We may also want to shift some of our reliance on processing for food away from home to the higher value retail market channel, such as dairy farmers observed. Large metro areas host terminal markets to move food to and from many businesses and improve the flow of food. We don’t have a terminalmarket in Wisconsin anymore, although we used to when food was regionally marketed. Chicago does have a terminal market, but it’s not very active and it’s very difficult to get product into it. So the city of Madison commissioned a terminal market business plan to create a spot market for refrigerated products that would bolster independent supply chains in south central Wisconsin. This would allow small and mid-sized farms to sell retail through both farmers markets and wholesale through the multi-tenant terminal market.

On this slide, you can seehow that kind of plays out. We’ve got large farms on the left. They’ve got their own big box logistics and they sell to their big store and their multiple chain stores. But for small and medium-sized farms, they have farmers marketto sell retail, direct to consumer, but we’re missing that terminal market that can really feed product, local product into distributors, restaurants, retailers, and institutions. Building collaboration between those independent businesses is something that’s missing in our state. Another lesson about Building Back Better is to look for opportunities to upgrade, automate, and reconfigure. High-density warehousing,big data logistics, RFID tags. All those things are innovations that large companies are able to take advantage of, but smaller independent businesses cannot. If however, if food businesses collaborate, they can invest in automation, blockchain, and other upgrades to food distribution. An example is Organic Valley.

Organic Valley is a cooperative in Wisconsin, a dairy cooperative in Wisconsin that serves hundreds of organic dairy farmers across the state. Together, those farmers were able to invest in state-of-the-art automated cold storage warehousing to improve efficiency. Another rule of thumb for Building Back Better is to reduce single points of failure by increasing diversity. Businesses of all kinds are thinking about this right now. Each region in the U. S. needs to think of ways to source food from multiple regions rather than relying on a couple of regions, such as Mexico and the West coast. Regional sourcing rather than global sourcing of all products, not just food, is on the minds of many, many supply chain managers today. This was discussed some before COVID, but adoption is accelerating. So we often think of diversity in agriculture at the field scale, like is shown in this photograph, where we’ve got multiple crops growing in rows next to each other.

But diversity creates resilience at multiple scales and in multiple aspects of the food system. Diversity at the landscape scale would suggest thatWisconsin could grow more fruits and vegetables than it currently does, like we saw with Michigan. How can we help fruit and vegetable farmers access markets if they were to grow more food for wholesale? Can we help dairy farmers access more profitable markets for specialty cheeses and yogurt? What about meat processing? How can we help those state-inspected local meat lockers? So the real question then becomes, how do we support diversity in businesses so that independent food businesses thrive? So that food businesses emerge from communities to serve those communities? How do we lessen the dependence on food pantries and grow our local economies? So in summary, we just went throughthree different areas: Build Back Better, recognizing that disruption is predictable and we can learn from those events, and the food system is a network of businesses and relationships. This is really an opportunity to transform our food system to be better than ever. To do so, we need to do some soul-searching and think about some very specific questions. What is most important to us? How do we pool our resources to transform theWisconsin economy into a resilient food system for the 21st century? We know we are gonna be facing more disruptions in the future; how can we prepare for that? That is the challenge before us. How do we increase diversity, upgrade infrastructure, and nurture collaboration? We can learn from past disruptions. How do we support local businesses? How do we shape the new normal? What changes are accelerating, and is that good for resilience? How do we improve communications and food system operations? Should our early responses dictate long-term strategies? We know that the food system is a network with a structure. How has that structure suffered? Is it likely to fracture, buckle, or warp again? How are the different businesses connected? And how do market rules promote or undermine the way it functions? Ultimately, building trust between businesses will increase the resilience of our state’s food system. We know that relationships hold food systems together, and that trust energizes those relationships.

The bottom line, food is how we care for one another. Thank you to the thousands of Wisconsinites who are working together to transform our food system into an equitable, resilient, and robust network for the 21st century.