Food Solutions New England (FSNE) is a regional food systems learning-action network dedicated to advancing a sustainable New England food system. The FSNE network is organized around four interrelated activities:
A New England Food Vision, a bold vision that calls for our region to build the capacity to produce up to 70% of food that is produced in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner, that promotes health and is accessible by all New Englanders by 2060; New England state food planning initiatives; annual New England food summits and topical workshops; and related analysis, communication and visualization.
The UNH Sustainability Institute serves as the backbone organization for FSNE. Since its inception in 2006, FSNE has advanced its mission by linking a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and synergestic activities.
Thanks Jeff for getting this thread started.
I hold the idea of mutually dependent independence as one of my core personal values. Through collaboration we can each have greater capacity to support our selves. There are so many skills and great thinking going on outside of the university and corporate structure, that has yet to organize. I think that almost every farm is already a research farm, testing new ideas and incorporating last year's observations into this years plans - however, most of the research isn't formal, published OR shared, and that there is tremendous potential, through collaboration, to gain from all the observations, successes and failures and to develop tools and research methods that are inexpensive, adaptive,open and easily accessible all. I also think that this type of adaptive, distributed tool and research method development are necessary in order to move from the centralized extractive model of production to a biologically based adaptive and regenerative model. Agriculture has a very special relationship to the stewardship of the environmental commons, so it seems quite right that the knowledge to best manage and improve the most fundamental of natural resources would also be held in the public domain.
I am also excited about Farm Hack because, from its very start, it has collaboratively emerged as a product of its own users- just as a blacksmith forges his own tools.
I see the emerging collaborative platform as being critical for taking the next steps in many of my own future projects and I look forward to helping to create Farm Hack into a way of working that we can all use to document, develop, design and build tools and standards and share our successes and failures. I know that I get more back for every effort that I put in, and that is key to achieving more mutually dependent independence.