Tag: supply chain

Fighting Back Against Hunger and Improving Food Access

“The world is at a critical juncture.”

That’s the headline of an article about the state of food security and nutrition in the world. In painstaking detail, the Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations uses the article to describe how the number of people affected by hunger globally increased in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It estimates that between 720 million and 811 million people faced hunger. If you go with the middle of the projected range — around 768 million — 118 million more people faced hunger in 2020 than in 2019. How does this happen and what’s being done about it?

The Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations says that unless bold actions are taken to accelerate progress, especially actions to address major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition and inequalities affecting access to food, hunger will not be eradicated by 2030, as the U.N. had hoped.

After remaining virtually unchanged from 2014 to 2019, the prevalence of undernourishment climbed to around 9.9 percent in 2020, from 8.4 percent a year earlier, the article says.

According to FoodBankNews.org, all of this activity is happening against a backdrop of heightened emphasis on nutrition from the USDA, which in mid-March released a report outlining its commitment to nutrition security (in addition to food security). The USDA noted the importance of nutrition in fighting diet-related disease, which is a leading cause of illness in the U.S., accounting for more than 600,000 deaths each year, or more than 40,000 each month.

Sadly, the pandemic continues to expose weaknesses in our food systems, especially when it comes to access. New farming practices, including controlled-environment agriculture, are increasingly being recognized as a potential solution to fill the gaps and avoid supply chain delays entirely. 

Strategically placing container farms in and around population centers could have a dramatic effect on providing a sustainable and secure source of nutrient-rich food. These farms can produce 200-300 pounds of fresh food weekly and help feed people in marginalized communities. They can also be used to help train the next generation of urban farmers and create jobs, providing ancillary benefits that can reverberate for years to come.

Farming Solutions for a Sustainable (and Less Scary) Future

Farming Solutions are needed – It seems every day you come across a news story that paints a very bleak future for traditional farming and the consumers who benefit from it.

We’ll briefly explore the many challenges facing the agricultural industry, but we’ll also posit some potential ways for farming operations large and small to adapt to changing times and conditions.

Shifting climate patterns are making it vastly more difficult to predict whether a crop will make it to harvest. Heat waves, hail storms, cold snaps and floods have become more pervasive and intense in recent years. Even crops that may not be directly affected by catastrophes, like the severe drought currently gripping the western portion of the U.S., are being indirectly impacted by residual factors, like smoke from wildfires.

We’re also facing other crippling issues without a foreseeable fix. Supply chains that support agriculture have been stretched to their limit since the beginning of the pandemic for a variety of reasons, including transportation availability, labor shortages, and associated delays affecting raw material sourcing. And the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer is further complicating matters for traditional farming operations and having an outsized impact on already-thin profit margins.

But what if there was a way to circumvent these issues using innovations in agtech? It sounds impossible, and while it comes with its own set of challenges, indoor growing, especially in urban areas, could be a big part of the answer going forward. 

Science and tech have come a long way in the last decade (hello, sensor technology!), allowing growers to do much more with much less in a smaller footprint. And hyperlocal farming means produce grows near the consumer, eliminating supply chain-related woes. Instead of spending the first half of its shelf life in transit, veggies get to the end user much quicker, resulting in less food waste. Local growing also reduces the need to burn fossil fuels to get food to its destination, and empowers communities to gain more control over their own food supply.

It’s hard to put a value on security and reliability, and we certainly won’t attempt to, but controlled-environment agriculture allows people to harvest large yields year-round without external variables getting in the way. There’s also no need for fertilizers or pesticides, which takes possible contamination of drinking water out of the equation. 

The practice is gaining momentum worldwide and already having an impact on sourcing for grocery chains, hotels, hospitals, restaurants and food banks. Likewise, farmers are embracing the technology because it provides a security blanket in uncertain times.

Tornado recovery driven by volunteers, sense of community

Scott and Melanie Walker have spent the last month helping neighbors recover from a deadly tornado that devastated Cambridge Shores, Kentucky, in December 2021.

Tornado recovery driven by volunteers, sense of community

tornado recovery - FarmBox Foods Donates

Tornado Recovery was needed – and Scott Walker was less than a mile away from his new home in Cambridge Shores, a community near Mayfield, Kentucky, when the local police turned him away.

If the officers hadn’t been there to block traffic coming into town, Scott would have been directly in the path of the deadly twister that passed through the night of Dec. 10. In fact, he’d already dodged three tornadoes in southern Illinois on his way there. 

Fate stepped in and saved him, and somehow, his house escaped with only minor damage, but many of his neighbors lost their homes. The devastation was almost incomprehensible. When emergency crews began clearing a path into affected areas, Scott was the 10th car in line, and was stunned by the scale of the damage.

Since then, Scott and his wife, Melanie, did what many others have done and joined an army of volunteers, which included those who’d lost everything, and pitched in where they could. When he returned to his hometown near Chicago, Scott rallied friends and family to donate goods. He brought down two full truckloads of supplies — toiletries, water, diapers, rakes, gloves, granola bars, flashlights, extension cords — and created a GoFundMe campaign for a new playground that literally hit its $4,000 goal as this video was being made. Henry Brothers Company, a general contractor in the Chicago area, donated an SUV full of supplies, and former students of the swim coach for the Lyons Township HS Aquatics program, and their parents, were instrumental in gathering relief supplies. Melanie has spent the last few weeks helping to distribute those supplies throughout the community.

Scott and Melanie, who purchased their home in Cambridge Shores in September, are just one example of the ongoing relief efforts in Kentucky and surrounding states, where 77 people were killed during the December rash of tornadoes. Even though they didn’t know their neighbors yet, Scott and Melanie quickly made friends with them, and they plan to be there for the long haul. 

“We love this place even more than when we bought our house because of how people are there for one another,” Scott said.

FarmBox Foods, a Colorado company for which his brothers serve as CEO and Chief Strategy Officer, donated a total of $750 toward the playground, and it’s hopeful that it can work with local, state and federal officials in the future on a solution for food security in disaster areas, which are often cut off from the food supply chain in the wake of a storm. FarmBox Foods builds automated farms inside shipping containers, and those container farms can provide a hyperlocal source of nutritious food. These mobile units and other innovations can help a community get back on its feet a little bit quicker, with healthy food to help power the long recovery ahead.

“It’s going to be a long process for our community. It’s been totally annihilated. Pictures can’t even tell the story,” he said. “We’re going to be here every step of the way.”