The Economics of Local Food Systems: A Toolkit to Guide Community Discussions, Assessments and Choices

Excerpts from the report: The goal of this Toolkit is to guide and enhance the capacity of local organizations to make more deliberate and credible measurements of local and regional economic activity and other ancillary benefits. The Toolkit is made up of seven modules that can be grouped into two stages of food system planning, assessment, and evaluation. The first set of modules (1-4) guides the preliminary stages of an impact assessment and includes framing the system, relevant economic activities and assessment process as well as collecting and analyzing relevant primary and secondary data. For those seeking a more robust economic impact assessment, the second set of modules (5-7) provides a more technical set of practices and discussion of how to use the information collected in stage one to conduct a more rigorous analysis