New project in NE Ohio supported by the Fund For Our Economic Future

     Northeast Ohio has a significant opportunity to increase high-paying jobs, slow no-growth sprawl, bolster both rural and urban economies, and improve environmental stewardship by developing a new industry cluster based on agriculture, including food, energy and materials.
     Currently, the region is home to a large and growing, but disparate, array of regional agricultural assets. Yet the region is in an ideal position to capitalize on recent trends in the production of specialty crops and bioproducts, application of social networking technology to economic development, and strong demand for locally sourced food.
     The Agroecosystems Management Program, with significant leverage from an existing $2.26 million grant from the USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative (SCRI) to Casey Hoy and colleagues, has been awarded $250,000 by the Fund for Our Economic Future to accelerate the development of this industry cluster by developing a comprehensive inventory of agricultural resources in the region, a portfolio of at least ten business projects that can serve as an example to others, an online infrastructure to enable networking across the region, a region-wide Leadership Council, and a plan to build the cluster in the coming years.
     The project is the result of over a year of conversation between Fund staff, Fund members and partners committed to the Fund's Advance Northeast Ohio Plan to develop the project with AMP/OARDC and the Wayne Economic Development Council.
     AMP is currently networking with partners throughout the region as part of the USDA SCRI grant, through their social networking site localfoodsystems.org. Opportunities through the project are to: 1) enhance the region's agricultural resources and production capabilities; 2) transform the cluster from lower-valued commodity production into higher value specialty crop and bioproducts; and 3) accelerate the local food system movement in the region.
     Now a project like this may sound more like economic development than managing agroecosystems, but it is both. The project activities, both the social networking and the agricultural resource inventory research, are focused on empowering the abundant leadership in the region to build an economy based on local ownership and our natural and human resources, people and the land.
     Agroecosystems include both people and the land, and managing agroecosystems means finding ways for the social, and economic, and agricultural/natural ecosystems to function in harmony. That harmony between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of agriculture is the basis for the project, for sustainability, and for agroecosystems management.
     The overall approach has two phases. Phase 1 starts with engagement and assessment, the main foci of the current project.

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