TY - JOUR
T1 - Excess competition among food hubs
AU - Cleary, Rebecca
AU - Goetz, Stephan J.
AU - McFadden, Dawn Thilmany
AU - Ge, Houtian
N1 - Funding Information:
Rebecca Cleary is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University. Stephan J. Goetz is the director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development and a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Dawn Thilmany McFadden is a professor and agribusiness extension economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University. Houtian Ge is a postdoctoral research associate in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Acknowledgments: The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from USDA/NIFA under Global Food Security Grant No. 2011-68004-30057 (Enhancing the Food Security of Underserved Populations in the Northeast U.S. through Sustainable Regional Food Systems Development) and the Agricultural Experiment Station of the Pennsylvania State University and Colorado State University. Both Rebecca Cleary and Houtian Ge were employed as postdocs at the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at the Pennsylvania State University when this work was initiated. We also thank Marc Bellemare, Alessandro Bonanno, John Halsted, and Dave Shideler for helpful comments on previous versions. Any opinions or errors are strictly those of the authors. Review coordinated by Darren Hudson.
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Food hubs offer a novel solution to connect small and mid-sized local farms, which individually lack the scale to profitably market their products. Because many food hubs rely on grants and philanthropy to provide services and are not necessarily profit-driven, markets may unintentionally oversaturate due to overinvestment. We use a firm-entry model to estimate the average U.S. county population necessary for one, two, and three food hubs to break even. Our findings suggest that policy makers and philanthropists need to consider the carrying capacity of the local food environment and population prior to supporting additional food hubs.
AB - Food hubs offer a novel solution to connect small and mid-sized local farms, which individually lack the scale to profitably market their products. Because many food hubs rely on grants and philanthropy to provide services and are not necessarily profit-driven, markets may unintentionally oversaturate due to overinvestment. We use a firm-entry model to estimate the average U.S. county population necessary for one, two, and three food hubs to break even. Our findings suggest that policy makers and philanthropists need to consider the carrying capacity of the local food environment and population prior to supporting additional food hubs.
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M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85067339256
SN - 1068-5502
VL - 44
SP - 141
EP - 163
JO - Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
JF - Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
IS - 1
ER -