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Cyberdevelopment & CSA



Hello all...I'm new to the list, but only because I just learned of its existance.  I'd like to offer this as an introduction to ICRA.

FORWARDED RESPONSE TO A MESSAGE on the NE FOOD List titled:  "How Long Can You Dog-Paddle?"

Many people in the western hemisphere are worried that this fall's warm temperatures may be evidence of global warming.  However, here's another point of view and an invitation to act.

Look at the world's weather and you will find that Russia is in a deep freeze.  So maybe the artic jet stream is tilted a little off axis bringing cold weather to the opposite side of the globe.  While I believe that we need to seriously address the issue of greenhouse gasses, predictions of a decade of doom, I feel, are alarmist strategies.  

I think I understand why this tactic is used, however, as politicians and policy leaders think only in terms of their window of leadership (term of office).  Vision is often penalized because the path to that vision is not an easy one.  The results are not immediate but the hardships associated with these policies are.  Furthermore, with less than 15% of congressional districts being comprised by a majority of rural residents, we in rural regions are victim of the "politics of suburbia" (Chuck Fluharty - Director of RuPRI, Rural Policy Research Institute http://www.rupri.org ).  

What are rural regions going to do?  Protest or strategize.  Think clearly and solve the riddle.

Let's put forward-thinking people on a project to design a strategy for development that accounts for issues that are critical to us all:
[1] safety of our food supply (alternative food systems and other CSA strategies, see the work of Bill Heffernan Univ of Missouri)
[2] retained role for the family farmer (some predict that farmers will be reduced to heavy machine operators on the payroll of - or under contract to - one of several grain processors left or one of the big five R&D agrichemical companies http://www.recap.com)
[3] sustainable development strategies (industrial product manufacturing clusters, etc)
[4] systematic migration of people (rural population trends, see Daryl Hobbs http://www.oseda.missouri.edu)
[5] penturbian rural development land use planning (websearch on "Jack Lessinger" or "penturbia")
[6] location independent workers (telecommuting support centers -- rather than move the people to the jobs, let's move the jobs to the people and let them live closer to their work station http://www.denverpost.com  [Dec 8 "Summit tackles tech worker gap"])

I am one of those forward thinking people, and I have been working on a development stategy that will be used in the information age to complement the existing industrial development model of planned industrial parks as sites for recruited companies.  I co-founded an organization called ICRA (Initiative for a Competitive Rural America) which created and is employing cyberdevelopment strategies.  This model has drawn the attention of rural development policy leaders and has led me to begin the formal study of this strategy as a doctoral student in Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  

I would like to recruit like-minded people who believe that we can change:
[1] the way traditional land use planning is taught (subdivisions, strip retail, shopping centers, rings around the city)
[2] the policies of development incentives that make the conversion of an acre of farmland to an acre of industrial land so profitable to tax supported entities (in Missouri this conversion results in a pre-tax abatement revenue increase of 2400%)
[3] the mindset of companies in thinking that their knowledge workers have to be in the office or that all of their employees have to be in the same town
[4] the thinking of rural community leaders to understand that the consolidation of the agribiochemical and grain processing industries is already underway, and that without organized cooperative strategies, the future may be already beyond their control 

Give me your thoughts.  I have rural communities that have already participated in testing the cyberdevelopment model.  I would like to learn about the efforts of others, and how I might become involved (if I can help).  My intent is to create an economic incentive to pursue the virtue of organizations associated with NE FOOD, MESA, CSA-L, etc.  Your strategies can be part of a comprehensive and politically marketable change in the way developers think about the future.

Thanks for your time in reading this material.

Terry Harris
Initiative for a Competitive Rural America
1608 SE Long Place
Lee's Summit, MO  64063

icra@qni.com
(816)525-8150