For every one dollar increase in (local) agricultural sales, personal income rose by 22 cents over the course of five years.
The motto ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ has long been a guiding tenet of the sustainable food movement. But does acting locally really make a difference and if so, what kind of difference? That’s just what a team of economists set out to explore in the study Linkages Between Community-Focused Agriculture, Farm Sales, and Regional Growth, published in Economic Development Quarterly (2014). Their results revealed that yes, direct farm-to-customer-sales in the form of farmer’s markets and farm visits do make a difference – but what kind of difference depends where the farms are located and on how well local communities have built up an supply chain to support this kind of local buying.