Our current agricultural systems face key challenges:

• Producing enough healthy/nutritious food to feed everyone
• Improving the health and working conditions of people involved in our food systems (e.g. farmers, migrant workers)
• Reducing negative impacts on the environment

In order to address these challenges, we need to transform our agri-food systems to be more sustainable.

The good news is: Solutions already exist. There are many places that are already farming sustainably. We call these places “bright spots”.

The goal of this project is to identify and learn from these bright spots. Because our agricultural systems are quite complex with environmental, economic, and social interactions, this project uses qualitative (i.e. doing interviews, running focus groups with local people, etc.) and quantitative (i.e. making maps, doing statistics based on census data, etc.) methods. The innovative part about this project is that we will be working across many scales (i.e. local, regional, national, global).

This project will generate knowledge of existing best practices and help us understand how and why these “bright spots” emerged. We will then see if these lessons can be applied to other contexts and help guide the development of sustainable agricultural systems.