Farmers don’t choose alone. Buyers, gins, elevators, processors, lenders, crop insurance and Extension all shape what a farm can grow and sell. When these options widen, farms and the places around them have somewhere new to go. We trace how they open and close, with Georgia as our home base.
Levers for Georgia’s food system
In the Georgia Farm & Food Initiative’s listening sessions, farmers and food system leaders named what it would take to keep more Georgia-grown food in Georgia and keep the farms growing it in business. Seven priorities came up across regions:
- Farm viability and profitability: fair prices, reliable markets and the ability to make a living farming.
- Missing-middle infrastructure: cold storage, aggregation, processing and distribution sized for farms selling to local and regional markets.
- Reliable local and regional markets: institutional, wholesale, retail and direct buyers of Georgia-grown food.
- Capital that reaches the ground: flexible funding and fair lending.
- Trusted coordination and knowledge: shared directories, peer learning and fewer duplicated efforts.
- Farmer and farmworker voice: structured channels to state and federal decision-makers.
- Policy-ready evidence: data and research that show what works and how it can scale.
Our research follows these levers: where they are missing, what makes them work, and which policies could open new pathways for farms and the communities around them (Magliocca et al. 2025).
Publications
- Francois, J., Nelson, K., Burchfield, E., Rissing, A. (2025). Contexts of crop selection decisions shape changing agricultural landscape diversity in the United States. Agriculture and Human Values, 42, 2631-2649.
- Magliocca, N., Burchfield, E., et al. (2025). Leverage points to pathways for transformation of agri-food systems. Environmental Research: Food Systems, 2(3), 035007.
- Ribert, J., Nelson, K., Burchfield, E. (2024). Linking diversity–productivity conditions of farming systems with the well-being of agricultural communities. Sustainability, 16(16), 6826.
- Rissing, A., Burchfield, E. (2024). Crop diversification as landscape change: Using land systems science to understand agricultural trajectories in North Carolina. Regional Environmental Change, 24(1), 3.
- Schnur, S., Maki, C., Burchfield, E. (2024). “Farmers need the land”: Georgia’s agricultural future in the patchy Anthropocene. Journal of Rural Studies, 107, 103259.
- Burchfield, E., Schumacher, B., Spangler, K., Rissing, A. (2022). The state of US farm operator livelihoods. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
- Rissing, A., Burchfield, E., Spangler, K., Schumacher, B. (2023). Implications of US agricultural data practice for sustainable food systems research. Nature Food, 4, 213-217.