Our Approach
Build Farmers and Markets Together.
AFI helps communities turn scattered local-food assets into a working system. We develop farmers and markets together, then coordinate the production, aggregation, infrastructure, partnerships, and information needed to keep that system functioning.
The Core Idea
A Farm Is Not a Food System.
Communities often have many of the right ingredients already: people who want to farm, land, schools and institutions interested in local food, food-access organizations, funders, and community leadership. What is often missing is a way to connect those pieces so that growers can build viable businesses and buyers can purchase local food reliably.
AFI begins with both sides of that equation. What do farmers need in order to succeed? What do buyers need in order to buy locally? The work is to build the system between the answers.
How AFI Works
Connecting Strengths.Unlocking Potential.
Understand the Local System
Identify existing growers, land, buyers, organizations, infrastructure, funding, and barriers before deciding what to build.
Develop Farmers
Recruit, train, and support growers in production, planning, business practices, and the realities of operating a viable small farm.
Coordinate Production
Plan crops and harvests around real demand, then coordinate independent growers so their combined supply can be more consistent and useful to buyers.
Grow Markets
Build lasting pathways to schools, food-access organizations, institutions, markets, and other buyers while organizing the logistics and partnerships that make purchasing work.
Measurement and information connect every part of AFI's approach. As local networks grow, operating and market insights help improve production planning, aggregation, buyer coordination, and future decisions. MIDAS will support this work by turning what AFI learns into better-informed decisions as the model grows.
The Microfarm
Small by Design. Stronger Together.
AFI uses small, intensively managed commercial farms as the basic production unit because they can be manageable for an individual grower or small team and can fit into many community settings. But the point is not simply to make farms smaller.
The point is to let individual farms remain locally rooted while sharing parts of the system that are difficult to build alone: production planning, aggregation, market development, buyer relationships, training, and selected infrastructure. A network can create reliability and market reach without requiring every farmer to become a large operation.
This model — the Microfarm Community Food Development System (MCFDS) — was developed through years of Ohio State University research and is exclusively licensed to AFI by the Ohio State Innovation Foundation. That gives AFI's approach a formal research and IP foundation, not just field experience.
beyond the farm
What Makes Local Farming Work.
Farmer Development
Production skills, business planning, coaching, and peer learning.
Market Alignment
Crop choices, timing, quality, food-safety expectations, packaging, and volume connected to buyer needs.
Aggregation & Logistics
Ways to combine, handle, and move product from several independent growers.
Community Capacity
Partners, funding, land, infrastructure, and leadership organized around a durable operating model.
See AFI Results
Explore the outcomes we've achieved with communities putting this approach into practice.
