The electronic logging device (ELD) final rule was passed in 2015 and implemented in phases over the course of four years. The mandate required that most commercial motor vehicles be fitted with an ELD by December 2019. The primary purpose of the transportation safety policy is to better enforce existing hours-of-service (HOS) regulations. HOS rules seek to limit the amount of driving time commercial drivers are on the road each day to avoid fatigued driving that may cause accidents and fatalities. Prior to the ELD mandate, commercial long-haul drivers cited that they regularly violated daily and weekly HOS rules when paper driving logs could be easily manipulated. Using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) on traffic fatalities, we run two sets of difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the introduction of the ELD mandate: one predicting the change in fatal truck accidents as well as fatalities and injuries in these accidents and one showing the possible aggressive driving mechanisms (e.g., speeding, drunk driving) behind the main effects. Our first model finds that the ELD mandate led to an increase in fatal truck accidents by 8 %, an increase in truck fatalities by 11 %, and an increase in the number of surviving passengers with severe injuries experienced by 17 %. Our second model finds that fatal crashes with aggressive driving behaviors by truck drivers increased by 12 % in the post period, supporting the first model's results. Additionally, and as placebo exercises, we find no change in the average fatality and injury rates once we modify the timing of the policy (post-ELD period to the years before the phased-in compliance of 2017), the presence of outliers or the composition of the treated group.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s Food Traceability Rule requires agri-food supply chain stakeholders (stakeholders)–including farmers, fishers, retail workers, and others–to maintain detailed tracking records beginning in January 2026. Through this Rule, the FDA envisions a "New Era of Tech-Enabled Traceability," in which standardized, harmonized tracking data serve as a foundational public health infrastructure, enabling more rapid identification and removal of potentially contaminated food and ultimately reducing the risk of foodborne illness. Despite this promising vision, we observe that the Rule reconfigures agri-food stakeholders into data laborers by mandating stringent data collection, formatting, and reporting requirements. In this paper, we examine the tensions and burdens that arise from such reconfiguration. Leveraging Data Feminism as an orientation to attend to how data-driven policy implementation disproportionately burdens smaller, under-resourced stakeholders who lack the infrastructural and financial capacity to comply, we analyze 1,198 public comments submitted to Regulations.gov in response to the proposed Rule. Our qualitative document analysis reveals three key tensions: (1) the individual labor, financial, and educational burdens stakeholders experience as they are reconfigured into data workers; (2) moments where data tracking becomes infeasible due to infrastructural limitations, cultural contexts, and situated production practices; and (3) instances where the Rule's intended flexibility instead introduces confusion and burden due to its ambiguity.

No-till management is often recognized for its environmental and economic benefits, but its potential to reduce climate warming is still uncertain. Beyond ongoing debate over its effects on soil carbon storage, no-till also leaves plant residue on the surface, which can reflect more sunlight. This increase in surface reflectivity, called albedo, may help mitigate climate change by reducing the energy absorbed by the land. Here, we assessed this climate benefit of no-till across the U.S. Corn Belt using conservation survey records, county-level tillage data, and satellite observations. We found that no-till increased land surface brightness during the dormant season, reducing absorbed solar energy by an estimated 50 grams of CO2 equivalent per square meter per year. Regionally, this could add up to 24 teragrams of CO2 equivalent per year in potential climate benefits. Areas with low adoption, especially those with dark, carbon-rich soils, offer the greatest opportunity for further mitigation.

We examine the role of charitable food assistance during periods of economic distress by looking at donations to a large Midwestern food bank. We explore the determinants of in-kind food provisions and financial donations during the COVID-19 pandemic and find that both types of assistance dramatically increased at the onset of the pandemic. However, these increases were not persistent. We argue that this is evidence that the charitable food system serves a critical role in facilitating the transmission of federal provisions and charitable donations to households in need during times of crisis.

Our study investigates the application process for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and barriers to successful SNAP participation among potentially eligible households. We know that only 84 percent of eligible individuals in the United States participated in SNAP prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our objective is to understand continued barriers to SNAP participation among eligible applicants by analyzing Indiana households that have formally engaged in the SNAP application process. We examine census-tract-level data from Indiana's administrator of SNAP benefits, Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA), in combination with census-tract-level socioeconomic data from 2017 to 2019. We use existing methodologies in micro- and macro-level socioeconomic analysis of SNAP participation to examine not only the terminal participation rate (approved applications) but also the dynamics of the application process that starts with a larger pool of applicants (submitted applications) and may end with a non-participation case status (denied applications). Our linear and quantile regression analyses also seek to understand these socioeconomic factors as predictors of the response distribution of SNAP case status across communities with different rates of application submissions and denials. Our analysis of Indiana SNAP applications supports anecdotal findings that one of the most difficult hurdles in the application process is timely navigation of the paperwork and interview requirements with evidence of increased time in the application process for communities with high SNAP denial rates. We also find that broader socioeconomic trends in a community are associated with application submission rates while applicants' personal circumstances better predict denial rates.

Transportation accounts for only 11% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the life cycle of food but dominates food system conversations. We use national data from the 2017 Commodity Flow Survey to explore the tension between transportation, environmental, and agri-food policies to understand the potential impact of the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate on agri-food transportation. We estimate the change in transportation time and energy use resulting from the ELD mandate's efforts to better enforce existing transportation regulations. Our analysis finds that there will likely be an increase in resulting GHG emissions, which may alter the sustainability of on-road agri-food transportation.

SummaryBackgroundChildhood obesity is a growing worldwide epidemic that requires a biopsychosocial treatment approach to achieve a healthy lifestyle. This study on children in a weight management program examines the relationship between obesity, disease complications, and social determinants of health. We expect that children with higher degrees of obesity are more likely to live in areas lacking access to healthy food and have similar behavioural and socioeconomic characteristics.MethodsProgram participants were identified by neighbourhood food access status based on their home address. The prevalence of comorbidities in the participants was analyzed according to neighbourhood food accessibility. Multivariate regressions evaluated the association between participants' health outcomes and their sociodemographic and geographical characteristics.ResultsA total of 283 (98.3%) participants had a BMI ≥95th percentile for their age and sex and 68 (23.6%) lived in neighbourhoods with limited food access. Almost a third (Adj. R2 = 0.3302; p < 0.01) of the variability in study population's BMI was driven by sociodemographic factors, self‐reported eating and physical activity behaviours, and had a positive relationship with access to healthy food. Nonetheless, HbA1c had a negative relationship with access to healthy food given the limited variation in the sample of participants with HbA1c levels indicating diabetes.ConclusionChildren living in neighbourhoods with limited food access had higher BMIs than other program participants. Thus, it is critical to identify children with limited neighbourhood food accessibility and promote societal and legislative change to improve access to healthy food.

We ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, we made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI's emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.

We ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, we made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI's emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.

Climate change by its very nature epitomizes the necessity and usefulness of the global-to-local-to-global (GLG) paradigm. It is a global problem with the potential to affect local communities and ecosystems. Accumulation of local impacts and responses to climate change feeds back to regional and global systems creating feedback loops. Understanding these complex impacts and interactions is key to developing more resilient adaptation measures and designing more efficient mitigation policies. To this date, however, GLG interactions have not yet been an integrative part of the decision-support toolkit. The typical approach either traces the impacts of global action on the local level or estimates the implications of local policies at the global scale. The first approach misses cumulative feedback of local responses that can have regional, national or global impacts. In the second case, one undermines a global context of the local actions most likely misrepresenting the complexity of the local decision-making process. Potential interactions across scales are further complicated by the presence of cascading impacts, connected risks and tipping points. Capturing these dimensions is not always a straightforward task and often requires a departure from conventional modeling approaches. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches to modeling GLG interactions in the context of climate change. We further identify key limitations that drive the lack of GLG coupling cases and discuss what could be done to address these challenges.

We investigated the adequacy of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for Indiana households. Methods included focus groups, interviews, and a statewide survey of 652 households. SNAP benefit-level increases over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increased their adequacy overall yet were still inadequate for some households. As of June 2022, Indiana households reported their SNAP benefits lasting 13 days a month. The inadequacy of SNAP benefits reveals that some participating households still experience food insecurity, which has adverse public health implications.

The European Green Deal aims to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. The effort required to meet greenhouse gas emission targets or other sustainable development goals depends on the difference between baseline levels and policy targets. This paper provides a set of plausible world agricultural baseline scenarios through 2050 with a variety of agricultural indicators: food calories consumed, crop calories produced, average crop yields, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Growth of agricultural activity varies widely across world regions, from Europe with a relatively stable population to sub-Saharan Africa with rapidly growing populations and per-capita incomes.

The Electronic Logging Device Mandate was signed into law in 2012 with the hope that it would improve transportation safety by electronically monitoring commercial drivers. Agricultural transportation, however, was exempt from the mandate until 2019. We find that compliance with the mandate will increase shipment costs and transportation times for fresh produce.

Abstract Non-Technical Summary In this paper, we focus on the disruption that the current pandemic has created within the US industrial food system. We suggest that the pandemic has provided an opening for small producers. Attending to small-scale responses to the pandemic can guide policy and public investments towards a more just and sustainable future for food. Technical Summary Building on the IPES-Food Communique of April 2020, we examine the many ways in which the US industrial food system faltered during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Using Regime Theory as a guide, we suggest that such a catastrophic crisis may create significant opportunities for an emergent food regime. Drawing from our research and participant observation in the US Midwest, we examine changes in the food system occasioned by the pandemic that foreshadow a new food regime. We suggest several blockages and risks to this new regime and suggest policies that would make transition smoother to a more just and sustainable food system. Social Media Summary (120 characters) What will food be like after the pandemic? This new study outlines an alternative food system emerging in the American Midwest.

Speedy truck transportation is required to get products like fresh produce from the farm to the grocery store before it spoils. The Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Mandate from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration could significantly affect trucking costs for agricultural producers. This 6-page publication written by Tara Wade, Shellye Suttles, and Derek Farnsworth and published by the UF/IFAS Food and Resource Economics Departmentuses truck shipment data to analyze transportation costs and identifies potential future effects of the ELD Mandate.https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe1086

This article highlights the logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic for the U S food supply chain and reviews emergency support provided through the transportation sector given specific regulatory exemptions

This article highlights the logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic for the U.S. food supply chain and reviews emergency support provided through the transportation sector given specific regulatory exemptions.

First paragraph: It’s interesting—I’ve never felt like so much of an outsider as being an agricultural economist working on municipal food policy. And I’m a black woman in the United States. Prior to being the food policy and program coordinator for the City of Indianapolis, I was a research economist who studied local food systems, alternative energy, and climate change. Now, as a food policy practitioner, I have found that relevant aspects of classical macroeconomic theory often go ignored in muni­cipal food policy, particularly the concept of economic change over time. . . .