February 2013-2014, CIAS teamed up with USDA-Agricultural Marketing Service’s transportation division to offer the meeting and report “Networking Across the Supply Chain: Transportation Innovations for Local and Regional Food Systems“. More than 100 participants – the majority of whom had business interests in this topic – participated and shared their expertise on food transportation. The meeting details can be found here.

June 2014 USDA-AMS and UW-CIAS released a report that describes what happened at this meeting and our best thinking to date on some of the fundamental questions facing the local food movement. Emergent strategies include the need to:

• strengthen regional supply chains by helping like-minded businesses find one another, and provide a venue for business communication and supply chain governance;
• improve logistics at the region level, recognizing that LTL freight requires terminal markets that can de-aggregate products and TL freight, especially around metro regions, may benefit from innovative infrastructure investments; and
• investigate multi-modal and dual purpose approaches to increase efficiencies

CIAS and USDA-AMS transportation division released our report in 2014: Networking Across the Supply Chain http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/AgTransportation. In 2014 and 2015 CIAS shared this information at a variety of national and regional meetings and started to form some ideas for necessary infrastructure improvements. Listen to the transportation session on How Great Cities Are Fed podcast http://heritageradionetwork.org/podcast/how-great-cities-are-fed-episode-6-transpiration/