Exploring local food data

With the Georgia Organics conference happening last weekend in Athens and the winners of the Benwood Foundation's Food System Ideas Contest being announced soon, ChattaData has local food on its mind.

Go look at the local food data in the Food Atlas to get a sense of where we are "now". The graphic above is a heat map showing the number of farmers markets, with us having 1-5. (Color selection is a little off with a light cream color next to the grey, oh well.) The sources for this data can be found on the Documentation page. It shows that most of the local food data is from the 2007 Ag Census County data, some from the Census Bureau's Population Estimates, and 2009 Farm to School data compiled by the National Farm to School Network. (More info on their sources is mentioned on the page as well.)

Being someone who has been involved in the local food conversation for a while now, I feel that we have come along way since the 2007 Ag Census. So it will be interesting to see if our color, in the map above, gets a shade darker in the next Ag Census in 2012. I hope so.

Soon, we will take a look at other parts of the Food Atlas, It is a nice, easy tool to use. You can, of course, download a spreadsheet of the dataset for yourself and look at it that way or do something fun with it.