Improving the regional organization of food flow requires an understanding of system constraints. System transformation is necessary if the system is to include regional, independent wholesale food suppliers and to distribute food in an equitable and sustainable manner. Regional suppliers play a pivotal role in overall food system resilience, an emerging issue in wake of the numerous failures in conventional food supply chains exacerbated by COVID-19-related disruptions. Yet alternative supply chains that link local producers with towns and urban centers regionally, represent a small fraction of our nation's food suppliers. They struggle to compete with larger distribution networks that can supply products in-and out-of-season by global procurement. The upper Midwest harbors numerous local and regional food supply chains consisting of farms, processors, trucking companies, wholesalers and other firms that share a commitment to sustainability and local economic development. A constellation of challenges hamper their emergence, however, even as larger scale food supply chains flounder or fail to effectively serve communities. Informed by Donella Meadows's work on leverage points for systemic change, a collaborative, transdisciplinary and systems research effort examined conventional food supply networks and identified key opportunities for shifting food supply chain relationships. System concepts such as stock and flow, leverage points, and critical thresholds helped us to frame and identify challenges and opportunities in the current system. The second and third phase of our collaborative research effort occurred over 4 years (2013–2016) and involved twenty-six people in co-generation of knowledge as a loose-knit team. The team included farmers, supply chain practitioners, students, academic staff and faculty from multiple departments and colleges. Our primary method was to host public workshops with practitioner speakers and participants to identify dominant narratives and key concepts within discourses of different participants in distribution networks. The literature review was iterative, based on challenges, ideas and specific questions discussed at workshops. Our research exposed two meta-narratives shaping the supply chain: diversity and efficiency. In addition to these high-leverage narratives, we identified and examined five key operational thresholds in the Upper Midwest regional food system that could be leveraged to improve food flow in the region. Attention to these areas makes it possible for businesses to operate within environmental limits and develop social structures that can meet scale efficiencies necessary for economic success. We iteratively shared this co-produced knowledge with decision-makers via local food policy councils, local government, and national policy circles with the goal of supplying actionable information. This phased action research project created the environment necessary for a group of food system entrepreneurs to emerge and collaborate, poised to improve system resilience in anticipation of food system disruptions. It forms the basis for on-going research on food flow, regional resilience, and supply chain policy.

The Biden Administration is reviewing supply chains as part of its response to recent supply chain failures during COVID-19, and anticipated disrup­tions associated with climate change. This policy analysis discusses supply chain management, that is, the monitoring and continual improvement of materials flow and information flow to better manage risk. We are in an era of proprietary big data and digitized applications to make sense of it. Healthy food systems require policy to address unequal access to food systems data and informa­tion that occurs between businesses as well as between private businesses and government. Managing risk to a nation’s overall food system is an important government function that includes setting fair market rules and ensuring open infor­mation exchange in food supply chains. In this way, our government ensures equitable food and market access as new technologies and disruptions arise. This paper reviews these concepts consider­ing current policy actions of the Biden Administration.

The Internet of Food (IoF) is an emerging field in smart foodsheds, involving the creation of a knowledge graph (KG) about the environment, agriculture, food, diet, and health. However, the heterogeneity and size of the KG present challenges for downstream tasks, such as information retrieval and interactive exploration. To address those challenges, we propose an interactive knowledge and learning environment (IKLE) that integrates three programming and modeling languages to support multiple downstream tasks in the analysis pipeline. To make IKLE easier to use, we have developed algorithms to automate the generation of each language. In addition, we collaborated with domain experts to design and develop a dataflow visualization system, which embeds the automatic language generations into components and allows users to build their analysis pipeline by dragging and connecting components of interest. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of IKLE through three real-world case studies in smart foodsheds.

What are the roles and responsibilities of U.S. academia in global fora such as the United Nations Food Systems Summit? In an effort to be better global partners, the Inter-institutional Network for Food and Agricultural Sustainability (INFAS) accepted an invitation to participate in the UNFSS. INFAS then convened a debriefing for our members to hear from our colleagues about their experiences and any outcomes that may have emerged from the Food Systems Summit. The Food Systems Summit process was deeply flawed, resulting in confusion and power inequities, yet it stimulated coalition-building and reflection on how and why to participate in global food governance.

Understanding and measuring the resilience of food supply networks is a global imperative to tackle increasing food insecurity. However, the complexity of these networks, with their multidimensional interactions and decisions, presents significant challenges. This paper proposes FLEE-GNN, a novel Federated Learning System for Edge-Enhanced Graph Neural Network, designed to overcome these challenges and enhance the analysis of geospatial resilience of multicommodity food flow network, which is one type of spatial networks. FLEE-GNN addresses the limitations of current methodologies, such as entropy-based methods, in terms of generalizability, scalability, and data privacy. It combines the robustness and adaptability of graph neural networks with the privacy-conscious and decentralized aspects of federated learning on food supply network resilience analysis across geographical regions. This paper also discusses FLEE-GNN's innovative data generation techniques, experimental designs, and future directions for improvement. The results show the advancements of this approach to quantifying the resilience of multicommodity food flow networks, contributing to efforts towards ensuring global food security using AI methods. The developed FLEE-GNN has the potential to be applied in other spatial networks with spatially heterogeneous sub-network distributions.