Written by Josie Reeve
Dr. Ely-Ledesma, thank you for joining me today. We are here to discuss the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Kaufman Lab here at UW-Madison, and the role you have played in this lab during your time here as the director. You have an extensive breadth of interests and research expertise, with focuses on city design, planning, markets, public spaces, hybrid space, incrementalism, and human geography.
The Kaufman Lab was started in 2014 with the goal of furthering development of local and regional food systems around the world. You joined the lab in 2019, following postdoctoral work you did at the University of Texas-Austin. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to the Kaufman Lab and the work the lab was doing at the time?
The reason I moved here in 2019 and chose to join the Department of Planning and Architecture here at UW-Madison is because I had so much respect for the work of Alfonso Morales, the founder of the lab. He was someone I had looked up to for many years as I was rising as a scholar and a student. Writing my dissertation, a lot of my work was an evolution of work he had started in the 80s and 90s, which was beginning to ask more and more questions about marketplaces. Although my work at the time was not focused specifically on farmers markets, I had touched on issues of food equity and food access. When I was offered the opportunity to come to Wisconsin, I couldn’t say no. Part of this was the knowledge that there was this group of academics that were pushing this work through the Kaufman Lab. When I arrived here, the lab was about five years old, and it felt very young and exciting.
A major focus of the Kaufman Lab is food systems, and particularly local community based food systems centered around farmers markets. What are changes you have seen in this area during your time working with the lab? What are developments you would like to see in the years to come, that you hope the Kaufman Lab will be a part of?
When I arrived, I knew that there was a group of students who were meeting weekly in the lab. I was invited to come into the lab and absorb what was going on, with the knowledge that I would be taking over as director of the lab in the near future. I saw potential as it was a time when the lab and Alfonso were finishing out some grants that had come in at a very early stage. There was a lot of strategizing around where the lab was and where I wanted to take it in the future. The first couple of years after I joined, we were not bringing in grants. Finally, in 2021-2022, we brought in four grants. So it hit us all at once; I started and then a year-and-a-half later we were completely saturated with the possibility of a lot of new directions. The types of projects that came in were focused on bringing EBT/SNAP to marketplaces, addressing issues of equity and inclusion, and wider distribution networks in terms of shopping online at a farmers market. That felt very exciting because this work centered around equity was now a little more robust. Moving forward, in this third phase of where we are today, the Climate Smart Project grant came through. The research team came up with the Ecosystems Services (ESS) tool. So there has been a shift, in that the lab and our work which specifically focused on markets, is now incorporating farmers into the conversation. There is also the work related to mapping and integration of our data through publically available data. That to me is super exciting.
Farm2Facts is a major toolkit that the Kaufman Lab has produced that facilitates data collection for farmers, local food vendors and market managers. The Kaufman Lab recently launched a new version of this toolkit, Farm2Fact 2.0, which expands the capabilities of this application. How did the creation of this tool fit into the goals and objectives of the Kaufman Lab, and what ways have you seen it serve the communities this Lab serves?
2.0 is achieving a number of things. Fundamentally, it is a tool that allows for a more streamlined user experience, for a farmer or market manager. This is seen in the design, how we are displaying and collecting data; all of this a great improvement from the previous tool. In terms of what is coming in the future, we are thinking strategically about how we onboard and educate partners, both farmers and farmers markets, and showing their capacity with this tool. We are revamping our YouTube, putting together a Google Classroom for farmers to be able to learn things more intentionally and in smaller bits. In the context of the integration of mapping, I think that with the combination of what farmers map, along with what markets map, that’s incredibly powerful. These are tools that cost a lot of money, and we, as an institution that is housed under a university, we can champion that from a research and educational perspective. We are not making money. Instead, we are connecting a high-cost element to a nonprofit, to a community and to a small agricultural farmer. To me, that is pretty powerful.
You’ve touched on one of the new projects the lab is currently working on, the Southern Piedmont Climate Smart Project. This project partners with small-scale farmers in the Southern Piedmont area of the United States, as well as market managers and vendors. The goal of this research is to learn more about marketing climate-smart produce, or food that is produced with the best interests of climate and people in mind. It seems to me the work of the Kaufman lab was previously more focused on work surrounding food equity and marketplaces, and this project is making a pivot into environmental work. How do you think the Kaufman Lab fits into this work, and what are you excited about in the next three years of this partnership?
In its conception, the three goals of the lab were always to measure the social, economic, and environment impact of markets. I would say environmental impact had always been a lower “e” and now it’s become an upper “E”. The work is so much more elevated, and we have more indicators to define what we mean by that. For a market being able to see, for example, that most farmers are traveling 50 miles or 2 miles, that’s a big ecological indicator. We can further translate that into greater data points. With the ESS tool, we can begin elevating our focus on the ecological benefits of markets and small-scale farming.
You have stated that one of your research interests lies in the development of a “smart, green and just 21st century city”. Is there anything else you would like to discuss about the work the Kaufman Lab facilitates, that you feel best exemplifies these traits?
My hope is that in ten years, if I read this interview, I will be able to think “how funny that we weren’t even thinking about this at the time”. I think that it is important that research is constantly growing and evolving, and we are reactive to the times. Alfonso and the Kaufman lab built this tool to support the decision-making process for market managers. We don’t know what kinds of problems we are going to be facing in the future, what kinds of narratives we will want to tell. Hopefully the tool will be able to help us with that. Things might change, we’ll see. I’m trained as an architect, I’m a designer. We were just in a meeting yesterday with a partner, and they were saying they hope one day Farm2Facts will be able to help them design a better market. That’s something that could be in our horizon, we could be able to accomplish that in ten years. I just hope that the work continues.
