Florida State University’s Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center recently hosted a summit that brought together farmers, researchers, and emergency management leaders from across the Southeast to discuss the impact of disasters on food production and strategies for building resilience in food systems.
The event, titled “Rooted in Resilience: Farmers and Researchers Respond to Disasters and Disruptions,” gathered participants from Northwest Florida as well as from the broader Southeast and Appalachian regions. The summit focused on topics such as food production, system resilience, and emergency management.
Provost James Clark of FSU emphasized the university’s commitment to connecting research with practical applications. “This summit reflects something Florida State University believes deeply: that the most important work we do happens at the intersection of research and real lives,” Clark said. “At FSU, resilience is a priority across disciplines, including engineering, the social sciences, public policy, and environmental and biological sciences. It’s central to our work with communities who live with risk every day.”
The RIDER Center partnered with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering to organize this event. The National Science Foundation sponsored the summit.
Eren Ozguven, director of the RIDER Center and professor at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, highlighted ongoing challenges in building resilient food ecosystems. “Building resilience in our food ecosystems has many challenges,” Ozguven said. “With this inaugural event, RIDER takes the lead to focus on adapting to the challenges posed by natural disasters and other disruptions in the food ecosystems of the Southeast region.”
During presentations and panels, participants discussed incorporating lessons from urban agriculture into youth programs like 4-H, mutual aid efforts after disasters, effects of floods and microplastics on agriculture presented by Assistant Professor Jeffrey Farner, collaborations between farmers and researchers, among other topics.
Florentina Rodriguez from Agraria Farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio attended as a programs director. She described how collaboration between farmers enhances adoption of new practices. “We were finding that information wasn’t being readily adopted by farmers or gardeners when the folks who were coming in and doing the education were just institutional partners,” Rodriguez said. “We said ‘Hey, if you want this to really take off, you have to partner with farmer peer educators because they’re the ones who can say ‘I learned this at Central State and I have been practicing it on my farm and I know that it works.’ When it’s a farmer teaching a farmer, that trust just really accelerates the adoption rate.”
Rodriguez also noted that peer-to-peer knowledge sharing helps adapt general guidance into site-specific best practices. “We found that people often try to make efforts on a national scale or global scale, and that’s difficult when you start big and try to distill it down, because so much adaptation has to happen,” she said. “When you put different communities together to figure out what is a resilient strategy for each of them, you have resilient communities linked together, and then the whole region is resilient.”
On its second day, discussions shifted toward emergency management lessons drawn from both field experience and academic research. Panelists included Brian Bradshaw from Tallahassee Fire Department; Mark W. Horner from FSU’s Department of Geography; Christian Levings from Apalachee Regional Planning Council; along with Ozguven himself.
Levings explained that projects like vulnerability assessments help planners understand regional needs beyond county lines so they can respond effectively during natural disasters.
Horner pointed out that disaster response requires managers to handle changing variables quickly due to dynamic conditions caused by events like storms or flooding.
Ozguven remarked on student engagement with real-world data: “Our students love to work on data that can help connect research and practice in resilience.”
Another panel addressed how hurricanes or heavy rainfall affect agriculture as well as water quality—featuring Associate Professor Youneng Tang; researcher Xiuming Sun; Assistant Professor Ebrahim Ahmadisharaf; post-doctoral researcher Whitley Stewart.
Ahmadisharaf stressed collaboration with local communities: “The nonacademic piece is really important,” he said. “We need to know more about localized issues, such as what farmers are seeing or fish kills, to get a clearer picture. It is through collaboration with communities that we can extend our research impact.”
Stewart added that community involvement helps supplement scientific data collection after disasters: “Not everyone can get to the field or work with field-based science, so efforts like those can help tremendously,” she said.
For more details about RIDER Center’s initiatives supporting community resilience against natural disasters throughout Florida and beyond visit their website.
