With an eye toward envisioning a Farm Bill that promotes health, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Jennifer Billig will provide an overview of the Farm Bill and its intersections with public health, including the kinds of farming and eating the bill currently supports.
Roni Neff, PhD of the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will enrich the discussion by sharing an innovative new web-based tool that allows visual analysis of Farm Bill spending. Using the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer, Neff will answer questions like, "What portion of the overall Farm Bill goes to fruits and vegetables, to commodity crops, or to industrial food animal production?" and "How big are some of the public health initiatives within the Farm Bill?", demonstrating graphically how the provisions and budgets within the bill tie into the nation's public health and environmental sustainability.
Beth Hoffman of Food+Tech Connect will also join us to share highlights from the Farm Bill Hackathon, an event held in early December that brought together policy experts with designers and developers to create more visually interesting representations of the Farm Bill.
