Measuring stocks of community wealth and their association with food systems efforts in rural and urban places

Sustainable community development relies on cumulative investments in a broad range of capital assets, yet little research sets forth comprehensive measures of their stocks or the relationships of capital assets to community outcomes. Building off conceptual frameworks for wealth creation, we develop a comprehensive set of indicators associated with stocks of community-based wealth at the county level. Including such indicators when evaluating community outcomes addresses a missing-variables problem of prior efforts and allows one to control for and quantify the importance of community capital assets in concert with traditional modeling efforts. To illustrate their use, we evaluate the association between the percentage of farms selling through direct-to-consumer channels and community capital stocks for both metro and nonmetro counties, capturing direct and indirect spillovers. Our results demonstrate clear differences in the association of capital stocks and the percentage of farms’ direct-to-consumer channel adoption across counties classified as metro and nonmetro (and their adjacency to metro counties), suggesting that the success of food system interventions, policies, and strategies for local economic development may hinge on the preexisting levels of community capitals and/or the need for planners to develop them further.