Foodsheds: the mashup

Here’s new mashup based on the relocalisation, food security and foodshed analysis we recently worked on with Transition Movement founder Rob Hopkins. If you haven’t seen it, have a look at our earlier post summarising this work, or download the project paper.

We’ve visualised the composite foodshed for Totnes and Dartington, and you can also choose to view the equivalents for neighbouring towns Marldon, South Brent and Stoke Gabriel – just click the corresponding radio buttons.

Zoom in and you can start to see the foodsheds broken down into their constituent zones, based on fairly coarse land type classifications from Defra (the key is below the map).

Based on this, as we point out in the paper, South Brent has to go almost as far as Totnes before it finds the nearest land suitable to grow fruit and vegetables, and conversely land surrounding South Brent would be earmarked for sheep production for Totnes. Much finer-scale land data would no doubt identify smaller pockets of land which would belie basic findings of this kind, and obtaining some is a key objective of the next phase of this analysis.

A quick word on map generalisation too: you get an excellent view of the foodsheds if you select an aerial photography map base, but at finer scales you’ll also find that the polygons occasionally overlap, they generalise field boundaries and in places even imply that housing estates would be bulldozed to grow vegetables. Just be aware that this is in the nature of map generalisation, not a comment on housing estates.

Use the pan and zoom controls to view your chosen area.