This podcast is supported by VPLA. Victorian Planning Environmental Law Association. Welcome to the Planning Exchange where we interview built environment professionals who are doing interesting work beyond the ordinary. I'm Jess Noonan and I'm joined by my colleague Peter Jewell.
today we're speaking with Professor Alfonso Morales, an assistant professor Edna Ely Ledesma from the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin Madison, which is one of the 10 largest research institutions in the us. We'll be discussing with Alfonso and Edna today the role of public markets or farmers' markets as they're more colloquially known here in Australia and the benefits they provide to communities and aspiring businesses.
Welcome to Planning Exchange to both of you, and thank you for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you both, and it's not very often that we have two guests as part of our interview, so thank you. Just to begin a Alfonso ranching and farming is clearly in your blood. You come from a very long line of farming families. How has this shaped your research over time? I.
Oh my goodness. Yes, it has indeed. Direct farm to market work is not very common in my family. My family was big commodity crop producers, ranching shipping large numbers of cattle here and there. But we did a lot of our own, we did a lot of our own butchering of animals and whatnot, and we always went to farmer's markets, whether they were in Mexico, whenever from the ranch in, in, on the border of Texas, Mexico or in New Mexico where I grew up.
Now, of course, there were not very many farmer's markets then because grocery store retail had taken over. But we'll come back around to that side of the story in a little bit.
And Edna, you work closely with Alfonso and you are the director of the Kaufman Lab for the study and design of food systems and marketplaces. Can you tell us a little bit about this and your broader experience in this space?
Edna Ely-Ledesma: Yes. First of all, thank you so much for having me, and I'm really excited to talk a little bit about in this space because a lot of the reason for why I am in this research world and the line of work that I do is because I'm a huge follower and admirer of Alfonso. As an assistant professor, I actually joined the university having knocked on his door. Years ago I was researching Latino markets, flea markets, and swap meets along the US Mexico border.
Where I grew up and looking at the role of markets from a civic perspective as an urban designer, as someone that came in from an architecture background and trying to merge that with an understanding of physical space and planning. I found Alfonso's work through that, through my research and was really excited to collaborate with him. And one thing led to another and collaborations led to being a mentee, a colleague, and now co-directors. And eventually I became the director of the lab.
And a lot of the work that I do really is trying to not only elevate the role of market to centers of food systems and food sovereignty, but really from a civic perspective. Recognizing the role that markets have as democratic spaces for community development.
And so I think that our perspectives are quite unique in that Alfonso's background and my background come together to really understand beyond the scope of an economic place of exchange, how markets really contribute to community development and our food systems entirely.
This is a great topic. Alfonso tell our listeners from Farm to faculty, what just give us a very brief overview of how you made that transition or that, that evolution.
Oh my goodness, yes, Peter. That was a quite a thing. So I went to a small state college in New Mexico State University, and then I worked for a couple of years and found out that I. Graduate school was an option, was told why don't you go to graduate school? And I became a graduate student and then did more graduate training and steadily demonstrated my intellectual capacity. And then in the course of writing my dissertation, I became part of two very important things.
One was the Urban Family Life Project at the University of Chicago that was headed at the time by a guy named Bill Wilson, William Julius Wilson and the American Bar Foundation, which is the the legal research arm of the American Bar Association. And so I found I was interested, not so much in poverty law, but in the way that law shapes opportunities. And how it is people circumvent the law or how it is that they embrace the law sometimes paradoxically to achieve their household ambitions.
And so it was a, it was a meandering path, no question about it. I took longer than the typical graduate student. And but it was also one that was really very fertile with a lot of seeds were planted in my mind over the, those years and many of them thankfully have come to fruition. And of course what's particularly interesting from my perspective is how I was able to maintain a sense of the importance of. Community of the community's use of my work.
I've always been, one of the things that I think you'll find about Edna's work as well is that I'm very community oriented. I'm a good basic researcher. I can do good basic research, but applied research is real attractive to me. I really enjoy working directly with people and understanding their circumstances and how they how they can be supported in taking advantage of opportunities in front of them or ameliorating problems they have.
So if we take this sort of back to back to basics in terms of the importance of public and community markets, can we just talk to your views on why are they important and what role do they play in contemporary urban life? I.
Sure. You bet folks, listeners, have you ever thought about the roots of cosmopolitanism? What is Cosmopolitan? It's the universal polls. Where does that come from?
The agora, where does that three 4,000 years ago, and I've lectured about this, done some work on the history of markets and written about this history, and indeed the universal person is the person who goes to markets with their heads up, aware of what they have to around them to purchase if they're interested, but also interested in the magician over in the corner or the, or the choir that's practicing or the dogs, there's t-shirts I've seen that I come to markets for the dogs.
And of course that's a matter of regulation because not all markets permit animals. Okay. So there we circle back to law. But my, my, my interest in this really has to do with kind of an intellectual curiosity I have about social theory, which I won't rehearse, but also very much how we think about urban life and how important where the roots of cosmopolitanism are. And there in markets with intersecting trade routes over thousands of miles. And there you go.
Edna, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, general overview. Edna Ely-Ledesma: I think in general, we come from a very similar line of thought and I think in building on the concept of the agora for me, and I think for those of us that are trying to understand markets from an urban design perspective, it's about civicness. And I think fundamentally, as society we need to be incredibly comfortable with exposure to difference.
And what market provide to society is the ability to be confronted by difference, to be confronted by difference without the obligation of and monetary transaction. And that is critical to go to a place where you can, if you chose, so choose. Ex spend money, pay for some kind of good or service that you're gonna get out of that interaction.
But being able to just access a place without being charged, without being being asked to give something up and to have freedom and access to that space is what keeps societies functioning. And I know what's really critical of where we are today in the 21st century is that we're losing those spaces. And for us doing this work is really about elevating the need to make sure that cities continue to support spaces for that kind of interaction.
I know this is a fairly obvious question, but I think it's an important one to tease out just in terms of this discussion about, the role or the difference in role that public markets play compared to private retail spaces like malls or supermarkets and that sort of thing. So what do you think is the difference between those two?
Is it purely the, as you say, Edna, the the charging component between those two sort of spaces that, a mall, you generally will be spending money as opposed to a farmer's market where you can linger I guess for a little bit longer and enjoy the benefits that come from a community space. Edna Ely-Ledesma: I, I think we, I think in addition to that, there is the economic filter, but there's also the openness of it, right?
So when you, we think about we are, we have moved to the 21st century to back to that original understanding of civicness and so we have more open air malls, like malls are no longer what malls were had originally been conceived in the 20th century, in the seventies and sixties. But at the same time, the idea that there is a town center, right? That's where markets tend to be. Do we have a town center where anybody from the surrounding district could walk, bike?
This idea of multimodal accessibility that you could come upon a market without even realizing that is the urbanistic essence of a market that is. I think most, most pure, we see that perhaps more in larger cities or European cities and places in the global, north and south, but in places such as, in suburbia, at least in the American context, it might not be as easy to stumble upon a market.
So there is nuances about, is it a market because it's open to everybody or is it a market because you can just come upon it and not know it's there. From a private retail perspective, I. Yeah, I think the idea of Enclosure makes the limitations so that market more, there's a physical filter to accessibility, I think as well. From my perspective, the difference between what we would call a high street environment, which is, retail on two sides of a road.
Smaller shops, those sorts of environments as opposed to a market. The difference being that the high street environment has, the road has that disconnect for the community. You don't get that same sense of blending of people, blending of uses across the public space. And certainly that's something that is being pushed far more here in Australia about this idea of creating more connected spaces that are not disconnected by roads and those sorts of things.
But it's a very difficult thing to and it's obviously not always practical in every situation. But certainly I guess having the ability to close off roads to create those bigger public spaces for things like public markets on weekends, I think is a really good option for people to be considering.
If I can tag onto that, Jess, that is so absolutely. The case. The intentionality. It's a matter of being intentional. And in, in some jurisdictions, there's that intentionality can really can really bear fruit. Even here in the States, there are oftentimes in Denver for instance, there's a couple of markets in Denver that exist on public streets that take over the public right of way for six to eight hours a day.
Here in Madison, of course the na the US' largest producer only market exists and it is a site to behold, but interesting to the 20 to 30,000 people walking around the state Capital Square. But it's interesting to note that within that square there are only food producers from Wisconsin, and that is by state law. You cross the street and city law and regulation obtain completely different permitting processes. Now that's one part of that intentionality.
Another part is, and I'd like to echo what I think is an important point, estimate, there are what people call third spaces. The original book on this was written in the late nineties. It actually cited my. Dissertation research as an example of marketplaces as third places. And that's the important thing about that is I think what you're talking about, that moment of lingering right, Jess, that moment of relaxation and observation and looking around and saying, wow, what's new here?
What haven't I seen? Who might I run into? It's that pregnant moment where you have, you're not at home, you're not at work, you're in a third or liminal social space where interesting things can happen. They can happen everywhere, but gosh, you just don't know who you run into when you're at the market.
Alfonso, there's all types of different markets, and there's a couple of points, you make the point that the states United States is that experimentation because, as always said that 50 states, you've got 50 different experiments, and then within each state, as you say, there's all sorts of subsections. So there's a huge amount of experimentation. But you know what I find interesting about markets, and there's all types, all different types of markets as you say, but it's the people watching.
It's the experimentation. It's the ad hocness of it ling about, but it's also you get exposed to not the mainstream whatever the media or whatever is presented. Lots of diversity fair
Oh, absolutely. Fair and accurate. And it begs the question how did this how did this come about? A hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, there were different things operating faires as they were called in Europe in medieval Europe, in, in the Renaissance in Europe.
They were often at the held, at the behest of a local principality in order to enable exchange of luxury or status goods, and then also for other sorts of activity to, to take place and that, so in that situation, that's where you had interaction across classes. That was not always common, that was infrequent, even at best.
Then a hundred years ago you think about the reasons for markets to exist in many places here in the United States tagging onto European, uses, markets were intentionally created in order to help employ the underemployed, employ women and handicapped. And I'm citing here from a 1914 report on the creation of Chicago's Max, its official creation. It formalized a market that had been there for 50 years in Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.
And so that what's interesting is that social processes are happening. How we anchor onto them and how it is that government or other organizations see all a sudden a purpose that they hadn't foreseen and try and take advantage of it. There's an interesting thing. Here's an interesting thing, and that's where regulation often gets cobbled on to existing activities without really understanding the activity, which it circles back to one of Edna's opening points.
That's why we're out here shedding light on how people organize things and trying to make, help them understand that the way that they're organized makes sense. Let's be careful. But let's advise government to be careful before they mess around too much with what's going on.
And Edna Ely-Ledesma: I would add that the organizational structure, if we come down even to today at least in the context of the United States, so the type of market that you showcase or you highlight, like you mentioned this cosmopolitan of market varieties will make a significant difference. So is the market a nonprofit? Is the market state run is the market for profit.
And so the ethos the values, the objectives of that organization are gonna have some implications on the way the market are run or the market or the kind of reach the market begins to have. And we work with all kinds of markets because there is a role for each of those. But context matters.
So more from a broader perspective, as we start to talk about retail hierarchy and the role that markets play in that hierarchy do you see markets, and from what you're saying, it sounds like your view on this is that markets should be an embedded component within the retail hierarchy as opposed to probably what they currently are.
Certainly in Australia, which is a, an add-on or attack on to the retail hierarchy, where whereby they might be something that happens, once a month, once a fortnight, occasionally in some areas, like my area, it's once a week, but do you see it playing a more pivotal role in that retail hierarchy as opposed to the tack on.
Absolutely. And let me if I may, I'm, this might take a minute. Okay. 150 years ago, most retail there were traders that would pass through little towns and there were some storefronts. You had your tavern or your bar mercantile, a place where you could pick up your nails and hammers and whatnot. And then there were catalogs, Sears and Roebuck and Company. And slowly that retail landscape changed. And what made two things made an important change.
One, transportation modalities enabled moving food more quickly. And so we could aggregate it, we could process it, and we could move it. And another thing that happened was that refrigeration became available. Electricity, refrigeration and that enabled markets fairly large terminal markets where large amounts of products could move into smaller retail. And it made possible the smaller retail itself. So that's in about the 1920s or thirties in the United States.
And the, so at that point, the census, the US Census Bureau kept track of RS and street vendors as a census occupation category. They cared about it for counting who was employed, doing what, by 1940. That was no longer needed as a census occupation category because people were working in retail groceries and in effect markets disappeared. Farmers, the farmer's market, the street market, the pedler, the push cart vendor they were vanishing from the American urban landscape not long after that.
In 1968, in guess where, Berkeley, California in 1970, guess where? Madison, Wisconsin. We, you had a bunch of upper middle class folks who remembered what a tomato tasted like because they either worked on their parents or grandparents' place or whatever it happened to be, and they said, we wanna bring markets back. Now, of course the detailed version of that story is it's, there's a lot more to it. But to your point, Jess, that markets didn't have a place for 30 years or so.
Was just an interment. It was just this little, it was a little break in what normal life really was. And the creation, the move from big retail, Sears Roebuck down to Marshalls in the us primary, secondary, tertiary storefront retail settings. And into, through the mechanism of what are called railroad auctions into the street markets and swap meets and farmer's markets public markets of different kinds. That evolution simply reinforced the demand for other retail spaces.
And that reinforced the demand for fresh food. It reinforced the demand for accessibility. You didn't have to have a car to get there. Like you did in the suburban mall of the sixties, seventies and eighties. So they hope, hopefully that makes sense to everybody.
No it's a good overview. The historical perspective. We often lose that. We always think of the here and now, but it's great to look back. Ed I was gonna ask you just about that, circling back about the, what do markets contribute to food security and social equity in underserved neighborhoods. Can you talk to that? Edna Ely-Ledesma: Yeah. And I think building on the previous question, I think that what's really important as the role of markets in.
Sort of filling a gap for that regional hierarchy. I think regionalism is really important. And so specifically thinking about how markets can fill gaps across regions, that also connects back to your question about filling the gap in terms of food accessibility. In the United States, we're a country that has you know, great disparities in some communities that have a lot. And then we see the half nots.
And in those half nots often what is left out of those, out of the access to opportunities in cities is access to that infrastructure, access to mobility access to better education. And in, in the context of food is, access to healthier access points for retail environments. And so markets, because of their flexibility, because of their porosity and their temporality there are critical anchor points for filling those gaps quickly. It takes a lot of work.
I think thinking about, should markets happen every day, that would be amazing. But, just setting up the market itself requires infra social infrastructure. It requires, the capacity of an organization or a manager that can. Set up that, that entity and manage and run that entity. We do a lot of work across the US with market organizations that are essentially trying to do, what you ask is how can markets better do that work?
And a lot of the tools that we actually have in place are being able to essentially stretch the benefits that we currently have at market. So in the US we have a common model, which is our double up food box, for example.
If a family maybe has access to nutrition, incentive benefits through the national nutrition incentive, snap snap, EBT programs in the United States if there is a local run program that allows for those benefits to be brought to a market, and then they would say you spend $20 of your national nutrition incentive benefits, and then it gets doubled. So that means that you have a greater possibility of accessing. Fresh fruits and vegetables at the market than you would at your local retail center.
For us, we see those incentive programs and the work that is being run by the market organization as critical tools to changing access in a way that can be organic, but it's also community driven. In markets themselves, the food might be there, but maybe people don't realize that is where they can have access to that. So there's also a level of outreach and education that has to happen through markets.
Probably a good segue there, Edna. In terms of what makes a market successful, is there a correlation between things like transport, foot traffic the dwelling density surrounding a market, or are there other factors that make a market a success? Edna Ely-Ledesma: I think location is critical. That's certain. And we've looked at data around accessibility in terms of, how easy can a, an individual access the market through a personal vehicle via public transit?
Is the market actually located in a place that actually serves a population in need, or is it simply located there because they're able to make the money with a higher income population group? But it is a combination of all of those.
Alfonso can probably talk a little bit more about our artificial intelligence work and the work that we're pushing in trying to essentially do predictive models that begin to say, especially when we're thinking about in the 21st century, the amount of, if natural disasters and events that lead to the need to access food quickly, we think about the role of markets as critical pieces of infrastructure for making a difference in changing the gap within
the built environment because they're so transient and so malleable that they could easily be seeing as as we saw in the pandemic markets are essen essential workers markets are essential. That was the branding that the National Farmer's Market Coalition in the US was using, because yes, they are ccra, they're important civic centers, but they're also critical to our survival. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the Foss? Alfonso?
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Hi. There's so many different things that are possible here. So let me start, let me do one, one quick response and that is successful markets. Are built from successful relationships. And so those relationships fostering positive pro-social, interesting interactions between community and market are important and good market management talent does that. But market managers don't do it in a vacuum.
They, we happen to have tools that create reports, the farm to fax.org webpage that create reports that enable market managers. We do the heavy lifting for them. We show them how to do robust social research without a lot of fuss and create metrics and information that enable them to then report to their stakeholders about why their stakeholders made the smart investment in moving that market forward. Now the corollary to that is that it's not just academics.
Jurisdictions have to decide to put some. So to invest in this and different cities around the US and actually elsewhere, Barcelona, Spain is a fantastic example. The 27 big public markets in as part of a city collective. New York City has the green market system of 50 farmer's markets as well as many other markets. The city of Chicago intentionally has 24 markets in low income places.
And our contribution to that was through a lot of the work we did here in central Wisconsin, it made the state rethink one of their roles and add a role to, to be a food access farmer's market coordinating person who we, who Edna was on the phone with yesterday, I guess Kelly Hammond. So the professional roles are super important in a successful market. That's that organizational institutional scaffolding. Then now the supply of food, of healthy food isn't, is both rural and urban.
There are hungry folks everywhere and, pardon me. And so the supply of food for those in demand in rural or urban places can be met with markets and frequently is, and intentionally so through these in the US in anyways, through these double dollars programs or other incentive programs. And those have a variety of ways to be advertised and people take advantage of 'em in a variety of ways.
The I think it's important when we think about public health and food security, that we also think about farmer health and productive lands, productive landscapes, and so healthy soil helps make healthy food. And so when we can link across that supply chain from production, from soils all the way through to consumers, we're gonna be enhancing health in a lot of different ways. Biodynamically, economically, socially. Now, I don't know. At the risk of talking too long, let's see.
Jess, if you wanna tag onto this, you repeat. We do have this new tool that we're developing that will enable population predictions of food insecurity and ways to, and so shall I address that?
Yes. Yes. We we might, we will, we'll get onto that and we'll have links on our webpage to all the tools that you're mentioning and all your work. I, I wanted to ask just a more sort of macro question before we get into the tools and things, and that is I was at the South Melbourne market, which is in a very affluent part in the capital city, and it's got a fantastic vibe and it's the hustle and bustle. Tourists are there, people are there. And I was thinking, this is such a good experience.
What about the new estates, the new communities that are being built on the outer fringe and can, is there planning for those new areas to allow for space in the master plans for community markets? Now, can, is that something that you, I. Encourage work on that transporting or allowing in the whole planning of new estates that there is a space that can be used for that. Because a lot of the space in new estates is controlled over to you. I can add Edna Ely-Ledesma: a little bit.
I'll just say in the context of my, this weekend I was just actually doing a market tour to market in Sonoma County in California. And I think thinking about. Our, within the US context, often we are dealing with infrastructure that is already built. We're not building more, but we're thinking about infill in, in, in terms of how to make sure that you're at a place that has critical mass.
And so the, those markets, while the ideal model would be we're gonna plan a new community, yes, let's ensure that community has a town center or some kind of civic center or a place where that market might be planned and pre-programmed. But the reality is we're often adding the market, after the fact.
And it markets as Jess was describing, they happen on a high street, on a main street they might happen in a parking lot in Sonoma we were talking about bringing a market back to the old fairgrounds where they would have, that annual. The annual events and community events for the county. And so it is really more about recognizing the role that the market plays and then where is there open space or opportunity, whether it's a parking lot or an actual town center where that can begin to happen.
Even if you think about the nuances of the market, it would be, then once you have a locality, what would be the actual spatial I. Layout that would best suit that particular location. And the market manager plays a huge role. We had a conversation this weekend with one of the managers who she was on year three and she said, this is year three and for year three, I'm gonna reorient the market to do X, Y, Z because I'm more interested in how the periphery can keep people, in this plaza.
Whereas the years before, she was trying more of a linear model. And I think that thinking about not a missed opportunity, as long as you have open space, as long as you have good partners, so you're gonna be, setting up a market across the street from other retail. Is that retail gonna be comfortable with the idea of competition? We know competition is actually a good thing. So having people there, the foot traffic is gonna bring people to your business as well.
So it's about the sort of the common understanding that, the more we have, the better. And so yes, let's design to integrate markets into new cities, but markets can really happen anywhere.
I think one of the trends that we're seeing here, particularly where I'm located as well, is that markets are invariably being set up in public school grounds and that sort of thing because, these are public spaces and I'm talking about state government owned land here. So not private schools, but public schools. It's public land that's ordinarily cordoned off after hours for security safety reasons, presumably.
But, there's no real reason why that land should be, I. Closed off to the public at all times. It should be open and I quite like the idea of using those sorts of spaces for public markets because it's inviting the community back into those spaces. And I think the benefit that it provides is that generally they're very well located. They're known to the community, therefore, you are attracting really. All walks of life. But you've also got access to thing.
And for context, I've got two young children, but you've also got access to playgrounds within the market space. So it's all very integrated. It creates a really inclusive environment in that sense. And it's fenced off so I can keep my children somewhat contained, which is also very helpful. But, so I just think whilst I, I totally agree, Pete, that, our greenfield spaces in particular should be adaptable. They should be designed to accommodate these spaces.
And I think for the most part, that is part of the decision making processes when designing those spaces these days. But I also think we can look more broadly to things like schools. There's a bunch of other public infrastructure that I think we can be utilizing to set up more farmer's markets.
Can I tag back, tag onto that? Okay. I tell you what, this is absolutely accurate. And the reason why is the multi-functionality of markets and that multi-functionality and that fungibility, that ability to conform to existing uses is very important. However, I think Pete, it's important to also point out that the new places need to be thought of in planning terms.
Now, my articles on zoning practice on markets point some of this out, as does the trend in the US for the last 20 years of food system planning. So town planning food has been a stranger to town planners all over the world, and only in the last few decades has this become very salient again, just as it was 120 years ago. Accommodating immigrants, employing people job skills accommodate, acculturating folks.
So there was a variety of good reasons for them a hundred and plus years ago in the US anyways, and likewise today. However, to your point, if they're not on the radar for your town planning group or the regional planners, then we're gonna be in trouble. There are some excellent examples of both city as well as regional plants that incorporate food explicitly in its various guises.
In turn in, in the, across these various practices, including markets something Jess to tag onto our lab is fortunate to host the school garden network. Can you imagine that school hosting a market and having a garden at the same time? What a wonderful opportunity for the students to demonstrate the science that they're learning, right? As well as the maybe even they'll sell a little groceries,
depending. Yeah. That was gonna be my next kind of question to you is what are the opportunities that it does present from a, and maybe side hustle's not the correct word if we're talking about young children, but, opportunities for things like the lemonade stand or the 10-year-old child that's. Violin prodigy getting up and performing with the violin.
There are all of those opportunities that I think come from a more traditional type farmer's market as opposed to, what you were talking about before, Pete, like the South Melbourne market which is a far more structured and formalized
market. Jess, I was at the Queenscliff market last weekend and I was speaking to the cordial seller. He makes cordial specialty cordials and Edna. Alfonso, I love the hustle. I love that entrepreneurial spirit. Can you talk to how that helps a lot of a lot of people may be not from affluent backgrounds, how they can get into the business?
Wow, that's a great question, Pete. I'm looking forward to Edna because my understanding of this is similar to hers, but I. Older, so my my, my best example was when I was a vendor at Chicago's Maxwell Street Market. I was not an affluent graduate student. And I had a girlfriend at Stanford. I was a student at Northwestern, she was at Stanford, and we committed to seeing each other. And so every three weeks I had enough money from selling stuff at the market that I flew to San Francisco.
Okay. So that's saying nothing because so many of the folks I worked with, so many of the families for women in immigrant households to pick up some autonomy from having their own income from households working together to go from the market into storefronts. There are folks in Chicago that I can take you to right now. Started at Maxwell Street Market immigrants African, central American, Mexican u us African Americans.
There, there were there so many folks, and culturally, oh my goodness, Carl Sandberg's poetry the Chicago Blues were born at Maxwell Street Market. The variety of ways of experiencing socioeconomic mobility are as many as the kinds of activities that can happen in a multifunctional place like a market. Now you're gonna get to hear about why I was so excited when Edna decided to join our faculty. Edna Ely-Ledesma: And I'll say, spoiler alert, he married that girl.
Oh the Edna Ely-Ledesma: thank the market that, that's one of the So romantic, Jess. So that's what we want on planning exchange. We love those Don stories. Don't
get many romantic love stories. This is nice. Oh, come
on Jess. This love is every, we want, we wanna promote love on this show. But anyway, and please tell us about that low entry opportunity. Low entry Edna Ely-Ledesma: point. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think that in the context of. Trying to start a business. Yes. The entrepreneurial spirit is an important element to accessing and opening and starting a business in a place where you're paying a lower fee than you would in a storefront. Often vendors, they have other jobs.
They have their typical nine to five, but they're trying something new. And so the idea of piloting, testing and getting this off the ground so much of our economy today, it's the gig economy. Even I, we, and I see it in our students. We have students that have. Three, four jobs. I'm like, how do you do this? There are so many facets of our lives that are incredibly complicated, and that includes like the building of your professionalism.
It, whether you're in an academic institution or whether you're out, at a market trying to figure out your identity and your place in the world, the markets allow for people to be able to test those ideas and pilot them.
And I think, in, in my earlier work when I was doing my dissertation and looking at Latino markets, for me that was an important attraction to elevating the voice of the immigrant community because for so many of these immigrants that were coming to the us, the markets were an important starting point for survival. An important starting point for being able to have that secondary income, especially for women to be able to help their. Their partner or to support their family.
And then also I think one particular aspect that we don't talk about often in our work is also thinking about our aging population. For, from a vendor perspective, elderly vendors are doing this because they might be on a fixed income, but many of them, they're also doing this because not only are they trying to add to their their economic. Pockets, but they're also doing this because this is where they get access to social capital.
This is where they go every weekend to be able to maintain relationships, to see society. And so that, to me, that entrepreneurial spirit of survival is also really critical. Thinking about how markets support the most marginalized is why markets matter because they help, the communities that are trying to survive, but also those that are trying to still, hold onto a place in society. And often those are the elderly.
And I think, adding onto that as well is the importance of social connection for those marginalized communities or those vulnerable communities, I should say. And even I think the benefits that come from, small, a small amount of movement, walking. A hundred meters down the road, perhaps from where they live, to their local shop, or sorry, to their local farmer's market as opposed to driving up to the shop.
You can't underestimate the benefit that comes from those small actions and small movements.
That's, it's so true. And those, so those small movements repeated regularly aggregate into intergenerational mobility. To just tag onto this, so many of the vendors that I worked with early in my career worked not because they wanted to buy a Mercedes, they worked so that they would have their children in a better school, in a private school, maybe in Chicago, where they were pretty affordable, a Catholic school versus public schools that were relatively speaking pretty mu pretty rough.
In many of the neighborhoods that they lived in. And so that intergenerational mobility. I remember when I moved here to Madison, one of the first people I came across was the daughter of a vendor I knew in Chicago. She had done her PhD in Ag Economics and was working for Oscar Meyer here in Madison. She was a vendor herself selling dolls at Maxwell Street Market in the, and she looked at me, she was 12. Right? And I couldn't believe it. I said, oh my gosh, Guadalupe.
Wow. And, but that is not the exception. That is not at all an exceptional story among these folks. These, the, it just. Reminds us that populating the whole ecology of retail space, just to your point, populating the whole ecology of retail opportunities will enable so many more other people to experiment and oftentimes find success and intergenerational success.
Yeah, absolutely. It's very important. Now we touched really briefly before on some of the tools and the software that you've developed through your research. So I'm conscious we've covered a lot here, but we probably need to talk a little bit about what you have actually come up with. 'cause I think it's gonna be really beneficial for our listeners. Edna, is that your area?
Edna Ely-Ledesma: I can, yeah, I can give a the sort of the overview of how this, this work began and it was operationalized and it was really the work of Alfonso. And I've carried it on, and I think I've seen in the last five years, I've had the privilege of elevating the work. Un unfortunately because of the pandemic, a lot of the work that we have done has really been at the forefront of trying to remediate gaps in equity within food systems. And it we've had the honor to do that work.
But the sort of the primary driver of what we do within the Kaufman Lab is we operationalize a tool, which is called Farm to Fax. And Farm to fax is essentially what I like to describe as a farmer's market census. It was developed through A-U-S-D-A AFRI grant to help markets be able to quantify the economic, social, and environmental impact of their work.
If a market applies to federal funding in the United States to say, we're gonna be developing X, y, Z programming, the federal government requires them to be able to. Operationalize and quantify that impact.
And so the tools that were developed through that Africa grant essentially quantify all of the indicators that USDA is asking markets to say, Hey, you did this particular program, you now demonstrate, how many more vendors you have, how many more dollars are coming into the market, the type and variety of products that are being sold, et cetera, et cetera. And looking at the multiplying effect of that.
Through a number of tools such as vendor applications customer surveys, customer counts, and the sort of the list of tools that we use are expansive. We have grown the tool over the last 10 years. It started in 20 19, 20 14, and the last 10 years, the tool has expanded. We recently released a 2.0 version and the tool has evolved to support different needs of markets in the last three years.
We also developed an ecosystem services tool that begins to look at how to quantify the environmental impact of agricultural practices for small scale agriculture. At the core of what we do is we offer tools for markets to be empowered to make decisions for themselves, make decisions that help the government make decisions about their role in society. But the tool itself, for us, the most important aspect of it, it's about storytelling.
It's, can you tell a story of impact by simply documenting what you are already doing? And in addition to that, capture why this market matters to your community. And for us, that's so important because these stories of the markets often get undertold and under documented. So the tools that we offer help them tell that story.
If I may, real briefly, Edna and I were having lunch with a colleague a couple of months ago, and another academic here on campus who's relatively new to research in this field. And he said. Guess what I think. Do you know what the main reason people go to markets? Ed and I looked at each other to have fun. He said, how did you know? And we said of course, the decision support system tells, provides important decision making information.
However, the stories that we tell, that we can tell the, through the various modalities that we have to tell them to convey the experience. Oh my goodness. There's no substitute for it.
It sounds like it's leading edge software and allows capture of data about, this whole, I won't call it an industry, but this sector. And so you mentioned Ed and I just, aside from my being vacant but who is, how easy is it to use and who uses it? Edna Ely-Ledesma: I personally think it's quite easy, but you're asking the product developer.
But I think it is, and I think in conversations, what we love about the tool is actually co-developed with market managers and farmers and market managers as they use a tool. They come to us with input on how to improve the user experience. That's where 2.0 came to be. So the tool is offered in multiple languages to English and Spanish. It also and for in Wisconsin we have a large monk farmer population as well. And so we, we offer the tool in Mong as well. And the tool is.
We train the market managers, often market managers wear lots of hats. So the market managers usually recruit either a volunteer crew or they have staff that would do the surveys. And we have methodology around when the surveys would need to happen. But we do that training, we have a YouTube channel that they have access to and can reference. And then, we offer member services as well in terms of sort of customer support.
But they do the work on the ground that we apply a citizen scientist approach that, they're the principal investigative investigators of their research. We're just here to help them from a technical perspective to get that work off the ground.
And if I might, I'll just tag on this is also operating on multiple scales and time horizons. Periodicities. So from a town planning perspective, the local market's important to that neighborhood, but the system of markets that might be supported by a nonprofit organization or by a city that, that system of markets, our tool enables the them to look at all the markets at once.
And then if the province, if New South Wales says, okay, we wanna look at all the markets in all of New South we can, our tool enables that to happen as well. So the, and then over time, and so from a scientific perspective, this is called a longitudinal panel database. And in the social sciences, that's the gold standard.
It's keeping records and viewing it over time and comparing places that, that, that sounds great. We thank Victorian Planning Reports, our very first supporter. If you want the A to Z of planning decisions in Victoria and excellent editorials, please get yourself a subscription to the VPRs. Details on our website. We would like to thank Elison Properties, a terrific sponsor of the podcast, great people, great properties. Details on our website. And what are you, what's the next thing?
Can you tease our listeners a bit with what's on the horizon?
Yeah, sure thing. I'm excited to be the lab, so I'm the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation, AI CI grant, artificial Intelligence, cyber Infrastructure Award. It's called Icicle and I won't tell you the name of the acronym. Oh, wow. What the heck. Intelligence, cyber infrastructure in computational learning environments. And our use cases, mouthful, there's a mouthful for you. Our use cases are Smart Food Sheds, digital Agriculture and Wildlife Ecology.
And voila, the F two F platform touches all three of those because ecosystem services, riparian areas that farmers preserve to create pollinator habitats, that's important. So that as part of that institute, the F two F data, our Farm to Fax data has helped create a privacy preserving sandbox that will enable folks to keep private their data, but bring it into relationship with other data, public data or other data.
And I'm excited about that, but what I was happy about that obviously, but I became even happier whenever we had the opportunity to think about. A very, the two here, let me say it this way. The Wisconsin team that's on this grant is working on food systems at three levels, at the macro level with national food chains at the regional level, working with Native Nations, indigenous communities and private farm and private food hubs and nonprofit organizations to ensure regional food security.
And then at the local level, this is where I really hope that we would be able to create something. And we have, and on our tool right now it's called the feast. Is this tool, it's the Food Equity Access Simulation Technology. And what it is an agent-based model that enables a decision maker, it's another decision support system. It enables a decision maker like Pete's the decision maker in a nonprofit food related organization.
And he wants to know the consequences of closing a grocery store in that jurisdiction. So he goes to the model he runs the model and looks at the food scores and the food access scores for everybody in the census database. And then he closes the grocery store and he sees what happens with the local to low food access people versus high food access people. Or Pete says I have a mobile market. I have outfit, a school bus with as a mobile market to take food.
What would be the consequences of me locating it in this jurisdiction three days a week at this address? At this exact address. And so you set that up in there. Run the model, and there we go. Now, the former you can do right now for in Columbus, Ohio, because that's the home of Icicle. So it's not set up for Madison, but the latter part we're working on this summer.
So the functionality of this, again, it comes from a stakeholder group of interested professionals in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Ohio. And they're informing us of the features that they want and like Farm to Fax. This will be a cost recovery service. We will charge the amount of money it takes to create an instance for a particular place. Unlike Farm To Facts, which has a Canadian version, farm to Facts, has a Canadian version.
The Feast does not yet have a non-US version, and that will take out some work, but we're working on it. Honestly, because one of our partners in this work is the big international geospatial company, Esri, which stands for Environmental science Research Institute. So it's a business that does geographic information systems. However, they're really at the, their, the heart of the company is applied research.
Edna Ely-Ledesma: And I was just gonna say, I would be remiss if we didn't mention S3 'cause they've been an, a critical partner in our brainstorming about what's next.
And I think in the context of phar to facts, we, and our combination of thinking about you not only the power of a market, but also thinking about spatial analysis is bringing, from a planning perspective, bringing the power of spatial analysis to the farm to facts toolkit so that market managers can begin to see the role, not only the impact of the data they're collecting for that particular spot, but also as it relates to context. So that's stay tuned. That'll be next. We're working.
It sounds like you're the skunk works of public market tools. You know what the skunk works were, oh, sorry. They were the sort of, that's the deep thinking tech places that come up with all these new ideas, the skunk works. Because, 'cause the people in there, they're all nerds and they never wash and things like that. That's why they got that name. So I'm not suggesting you are like that at all. We're pretty stinky over here, Pete. No. Don't worry about it, buddy. I rode
my bike in today, so I'm not, I'm sweaty.
Now we've come to Culture Corner or Podcast Extra, something that you've watched, experienced, done, seen. It could be off topic that might be of interest to our listeners. Do you wanna go first, Edna? Edna Ely-Ledesma: I actually, I read the question and laughed because, there, there are a couple of ways I could take this, but I would, where I will go is very applicable to today.
I recently watched Conclave, the movie and and I sold Alfonso as both of us being practicing Catholics and I'm Hope that's okay to say on air. It's perfectly fine. We're very pro church. I'll speak for myself Jess. Anyway. Edna Ely-Ledesma: Just, just in terms of the phenomena of what, how that movie was able to capture the. The context and the complexity of power and infrastructure and in the Catholic society was I thought beautiful, beautifully done.
And then very applicable to what then the whole world's fascination around the new Pope which was elected today. So I was just about to say what timing. I just saw that,
yeah. Very exciting.
And Alfonso have you got something for our listeners?
Yeah, I think so. Again, like Edna, my mind went to a lot of different directions when you asked that question. That the, I think that the one that's most present to me is I'm about 15 books into a series by a British author about a a medieval it's, they're mysteries about a medieval monk named cad. And so what's fascinating about it is that frequently an actor in the novels is the marketplace is St. Peter's Fair. That happens four days a year and all the different commerce.
I had no idea when I started the books that would be the case. But it's interesting the role of physical places in people's lives and really how consistent that markets have been over the centuries. I had a PhD student, I've had PhD students from different countries and the, and one who studied markets with me from was from Indonesia and I'm trying to remember, Babo, Indonesia, and her dissertation was on markets in Indonesia. And I tell you what, you would just be familiar.
If you read your dissertation, you would say, how sensible is the history of these in this culture? How sensible, how what what a tight fit the marketplace had in the various other social institutions that it was part of. So Pete, Jess, it's been a real pleasure. Ah you haven't, you haven't heard?
No. We'll get to the end, but we've, we always look forward to Jess's podcast extra.
Shoot. Sorry
about
that.
I'm kicking myself 'cause I think it was probably six, 12 months or so ago, I actually recommended my local farmer's market as my podcast extra. So I am a bit annoyed that I've used up the most applicable one that I could have used today. My one today is actually alone Australia on SBS, which I'm sure you guys are aware of 'cause it was an American show originally. So I think they're at day 30 or thereabouts at the moment. And I don't know it's a very good way to just completely zone out.
Back to basics and I'm just in awe of these people that have managed to survive this long. And we were laughing my husband and I last night that I don't think. He in particular, I said, would not last 12 hours.
Jess, that's not the way you speak to your husband, Alfonso. This, I keep trying to educate her that this guy guys have a certain pride, but Jess doesn't understand these.
I reckon I could last about two days, may maybe three, I reckon I'd make. But yeah, he wouldn't last 12 hours. So we are just in awe of these people that are doing the most amazing things. What about you, Pete?
J Jess, I love everything Japan, and I particularly love everything Japanese rail and there's a new Netflix program. I don't like Netflix that much, but I do like bullet train explosion, which is a thrill. I set on the hin canen, the bullet train. It's incredible. So you've been wonderful guests and we could talk for hours. And thank you for enlightening us about this subject. Jess, any, anything finally to say to our wonderful guests?
It's been an excellent discussion and I think we, we spoke about at the start of this that we probably wouldn't get through even a quarter of what we thought we might because we'd go off on a tangent, which is what we did. But I think it's been a really fruitful discussion and certainly one that will be relevant to a lot of our listeners. So thank you very much for your time and expertise and passion on the topic.
A and Alfonso, have you ever come to our our country? I know it's a long way from the States, but you would be great to catch up.
Oh, it would be delight. I would be so delighted. I'm sure. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you both so much. This has really been a pleasant experience and I look forward to sharing the podcast with our colleagues here in the States. I'm sure the folks will be interested. Thank you.
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