A Local Food System for Saskatoon: Envisioning Prosperous Rural Communities and Food-secure Cities on the Canadian Prairies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perhaps nowhere in the world is the unsustainability of our current agricultural system more obvious than on the Canadian Prairies. Based not upon the ecological capacity of the land or the well-being of those who care for it, but upon industrial economies of scale and mass production, this fossil fuel driven system is not only causing environmental and cultural destruction which threatens the very ability of the ecosystem to continue producing food in a future of diminished fossil fuel resources, but as many recent studies have shown, the abundance of cheap grain being delivered by the system is doing more to increase hunger and human health problems around the world than to help alleviate them. \n \nFortunately, as more and more of us realize this and many other fallacies (e.g. that industrially produced food is safe, healthy and nutritious) being told by global agribusiness today, an alternative is emerging. By reconnecting with each other directly through things like CSAs and farmers’ markets, producers and consumers around the world are making viable systems of production that are not only environmentally sound and culturally rewarding, but since they limit a community’s dependence on globally traded commodities, also contribute to the building of an overall food system which is far healthier as well as far more equitable than the global industrial one we have today. \n \nThrough the development of a local food system (comprised of small-scale natural-systems-based production, rural processing and support centers, neighbourhood farmers’ markets, and community support facilities) involving one urban and one rural community - between which there is a critical reciprocal relationship - this thesis investigates the scale of system required to feed a Prairie city of 200,000, and what the implications of this would be to both the food security of urban communities, as well as the economic and social vitality of surrounding rural communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".