So far I have identified over 70 local farms providing food to the Corvallis Farmer’s Market.  While many of the farms are far-flung, there is a definite clustering affect around the city of Corvallis.  This map shows the whole map, and keep in mind I am still collecting tiles because they are farm locations outside this area I cannot place yet.  The purple ellipse comes from the Directional Distribution tool, and it shows the area containing 68% of the local farms, or containing 1 standard deviation.  I traced the city limits for Corvallis, Albany and surrounding cities with a city limits shapefile in light blue.  Farms that sell at the local Farmer’s Market are represented by gold stars.  Note that the ellipse skews to the right of Corvallis, and is longer from the north to the south.  Essentially, the ellipse is following the contour of the Willamette Valley, which we would expect.

The purple cross is the mean center of distribution of local farms, which is also the center of the ellipse.  But the orange triangle is the median center of farm distribution.  The median center moves quite a bit towards Corvallis, implying that remote geographic outliers influence the mean, and that perhaps farms cluster more strongly around the city of Corvallis than the distribution ellipse and mean center suggest.

There remain more than two dozen farms on the Corvallis Farmer’s Market list that I have yet to add to the dataset.  After that, I would like to know the approximate acreage of each farm.  This would allow me to do a hotspot analysis around a specific question.  I have a theory that farms near Corvallis are likelier to be smaller, and that being near an urban development makes it more feasible to grow high quality produce on small acreage as a business model.  To put it another way, Corvallis acts like a market driver that spurs and creates local sustainable development nearby.  I could test for this using a hotspot analysis if I had an acreage estimation for each farm.

Identifying the location for each farm remains tedious, but each farm has a phone number associated with it, and many have an email address.  An initial email survey followed by phone calls could yield information about the size of each farm, how long it has been selling locally, and how much of its produce goes to local markets.

There is definitely error in the accuracy of the farm locations.  Google maps does a poor job of identifying the location of farm addresses, so I am sure some stars are nearby, but not on the right farm.  It is also hard to determine boundaries of ownership by visual assessment, and so a polygon shape file estimating farm areas would be even less accurate.  While I can use tax lot information for Benton County to determine farm area, Lynn County is much more difficult to access, and the farms are flung through many counties, so the process is time-consuming.  A combination of ground-truthing and surveying would be necessary to improve accuracy to a publishable level.  I have also not addressed farms selling to local groceries like the First Alternative, to local restaurants through wholesale distributors, or through CSAs, all significant contributors to the local food system.