Grow Well Consulting

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We are hiring! Looking for a Sustainability Analyst to join our team. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of working independently, collecting, and entering data, performing analytical and research tasks, collaborating, and communicating with others; and possess strong technical expertise, producing high quality datasets, dashboards, written reports, and PowerPoint presentations. Details on how to apply are in the post.

Food insecurity. Housing. Employment. Inflation. Wage growth. These issues are all connected – both in how they show up in the world and how they can be fixed. Public investment can help prevent houselessness, just as it can alleviate people going hungry. But instead of prioritizing food and shelter, we’re seeing sweeping and incredibly unconscionable cruelty by policy in the U.S. Read more from Alison Grantham, PhD. #foodsecurity #foodsystems #agriculture #inflation

You may be unknowingly buying tomatoes produced by forced labor. Despite a 2021 U.S. government ban due to the deplorable human rights abuses occurring in China's Xinjiang region, Forbes found that major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and Etsy might be selling canned tomatoes and pastes produced by Uyghur forced labor.  Without proper reporting and transparency, America’s consumers are inadvertently participating in a supply chain that is held up by slavery. #foodsystems #agriculture

The latest food insecurity rates in the U.S. are the worst they've been since the Great Recession. And they're poised to get much worse as politicians push forward SNAP and WIC rollbacks. Read more from Alison Grantham, PhD. #foodsecurity #foodsystems #agriculture #inflation

Thank you to Chef Bryan Flower, Associate Director of Food Systems Innovation at Northern Illinois University, for inviting Alison to speak at your Innovation Conversations series on April 1! Alison Grantham, PhD will be sharing how Grow Well supports organizations working to build a better food system through data-based decision making and the curvaceous professional path that brought her to this work! For more information and to attend, visit the link below. #climate #agriculture #sustainability #foodsystems

Going to Wisconsin in February? Sign us up! Alison Grantham, PhD is looking forward to visiting River Valley Ranch in Burlington, Wisconsin to learn more about their mushroom business. Though Alison and her partner, Alex Ireland, PhD's Radiant Mushroom farm is on hiatus at the moment, we love seeing all the amazing ways people are cultivating sustainable, delicious, and nutritious fungi. Photo: Chicken of the woods mushrooms from Alison’s backyard in September #climate #agriculture #sustainability #foodsystems

Lots of people say, “the food system is broken.” This is not a new or revolutionary statement to those of us in the food and agriculture space. The conversation usually stops there as we all nod our heads gravely. But it’s not that simple. Nor do I agree. The food system is NOT broken. Yes, the food system is abysmal and the way we talk about it isn’t much better… but it is a predictable result of how U.S. politicians decided to build and modify it. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as intended. Read more from Alison Grantham, PhD. #foodsecurity #foodsystems #agriculture #inflation

US lobbyists are pushing for soy-based biofuels in an effort to buttress demand since it’s grown on about 40% of harvested crop acres. The goal here is to shift liquid fuels from fossil to soy, which would expand acreage, eroding any climate benefit. If climate benefit is what we’re going for, there are plenty of other options that would be a better use of our tax dollars: high speed rail, mass, transit, and electrification, as well as converting those millions of acres of soybeans to oil crops like hazelnuts, pecans, or hickories. There are ways we could all win from the declining eminence of the American soybean, but not if we push back with policy-driven biofuel mandates to inflate market demand. #climate #agriculture #sustainability #foodsystems

“In 2022, households with adults employed full-time made up the largest share of food-insecure households at 55 percent, a share that has remained stable since 2017.” Read that again. Food insecurity doesn’t just happen. It’s a manufactured result of deliberate policy choices. Politicians built the system this way “to try to get people to be more desperate and take jobs that do not pay enough to cover the new costs of food and housing,” Alison Grantham [tag] writes. In the wake of the pandemic, politicians chose to slash SNAP benefits, which provide food assistance to millions of low-income Americans, and allow other pandemic-era household budget supports to lapse. It’s a manufactured failure. And it can be fixed if we want to fix it. #foodsystems #agriculture #sustainability #foodpolicy