Food System Supply-chain Sustainability FoodS³

Most work aimed at increasing the sustainability of food systems focuses on the bookends of the systems — environmental and social impacts of high-input commercial agriculture on one end, and availability of and access to healthy, affordable calories on the other. Efforts to improve coordination across the food supply chain (producers, processors, distributors and retailers) are less well understood and occur with little insight into the overall system. Our FoodS³ model harmonizes economic, biophysical, and geographic data across the food supply chain to better assess the risks and opportunities associated with changing climate and growing demand.

Working with practitioners and stakeholders, FoodS³ is developing decision support tools to link upstream production and processing impacts to downstream product consumption. The project’s early work focused on mapping supply chains associated with feed crop production and processing as inputs for ethanol, beef, chicken, pork, and dairy production. The supply chain model links products with the farms that supplied the feed crops and calculates their environmental impacts – revealing a previously hidden relationship within the supply chain and identifying where opportunities may exist to make improvements.