The Living Library hosts 34 emblematic good practice case studies, known as ‘beacons’. Users can search the library to find real world examples of short food chains, civic food initiatives and public procurement initiatives. They can search thematically, according to different ‘spotlight’ topics such as ‘innovative governance’ or ‘equity and accessibility’.
Our knowledge-based suite of activities to support small-scale farmers and improve their capacity to connect with consumers included an ‘International Knowledge Exchange’ (IKE) bringing together all the consortium partners and many of our beacons to share knowledge and experience.
We also ran 11 multi-actor dialogue (MAD) events involving almost 600 people to enable small-scale farmers and food businesses, civic food networks and state actors and to jointly produce local roadmaps for activities supporting the development of collaborative, short agri-food chains. Seven training events, (3 national and 4 European), reaching around 550 participants were organized.
At the national events the topics included: strategies to manage small and medium-sized farms in a way that allows producers to have fair earnings, different approaches to marketing and sales, including online shops, farm shops, farmers markets, cooperatives, box schemes and Community Supported Agriculture schemes across different farm systems, and smart innovation relating to online ordering, logistics and distribution.
The European training events covered value chain development and consumer driven opportunities in alternative grain economies, understanding costs and margins in short food supply chains, smart innovation for small-scale producers assessing markets in the public sector and farm-to-fork procurement. The materials from the European training events are freely available on our Territorial Food Systems Hub. To further support capacity building we ran a peer-to-peer coaching and mentoring.
The project also contributed to 3 consumer events: a bread festival in Georgia; a land skills fair in UK and a public symposium on CSAs in Germany. We also developed a novel methodology to measure economic and non-economic costs and margins for different actors in the value chain. Analysis showed that, by participating in collaborative short food chains, producers can achieve more stable and direct relationships with consumers. Whilst they often command higher prices for their products, they also have additional costs to cover, such as labour, transport/logistics, processing and marketing. Another key output is our comprehensive farm-to-fork toolkit. It offers practical legal advice to public procurers and stakeholders interested in connecting public food procurement with small-scale farmers and SMEs.
The toolkit provides insights into making tender processes more accessible to SMEs and farmers, covering topics ranging from legal considerations for tenders below thresholds to criteria for tenders above thresholds, and innovative approaches like ‘Dynamic Food Procurement.’ The document has been published on our Territorial Food Systems Hub and on the ICLEI CityFood program website. Finally, we employed a range of communication tools including 5 short videos showcasing different themes in collaborative short food supply chains, 1 public procurement animation, 4 articles in specialised practitioner magazines, 5 policy briefings, 25 practice abstracts, 1 academic journal paper (with more forthcoming), and at least 14 international policy engagement events.
