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Trade-offs between resilience, sustainability and cost in the US agri-food transportation infrastructure

Nature Food volume 6, pages 401–409 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Agricultural and food supply chains in the United States are essential for both global and local food security, yet the transportation of agri-food commodities has received little attention despite being an essential feature for connecting production to consumption. Here we map the US agri-food distribution onto real-world highways, railways and waterways and also quantify the trade-offs between cost, path redundancy and carbon emissions of agri-food transit across transportation modes. Highways show the greatest path redundancy; relative to waterways, highways also cost 3 orders of magnitude more and emit 60 times more carbon. On the contrary, waterways show the lowest cost and emission levels, but path redundancy against transportation disturbances is 80% lower than for highways. Railways offer a middle ground on path redundancy, carbon emission and cost concerns compared to highways and waterways. Our findings can inform efforts to balance affordability, resilience and sustainability in agri-food transportation.

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Fig. 1: Base maps of transportation modes.
Fig. 2: Our scope of our agri-food re-distribution within the United States.
Fig. 3: Breakdown of empirical agri-food flows data.
Fig. 4: Heat maps of total agri-food mass flux (kg) across transportation modes by flow type at FAF scale.
Fig. 5: Agri-food flows by mode and flow type.
Fig. 6: Trade-off between efficiency, resilience and sustainability by transportation mode.

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Data availability

All data sources are listed in the Methods section of the paper and are freely available online. FAF-scale food flows data are collected from https://faf.ornl.gov/faf5/Default.aspx. The spatially located shapefiles of US highways, railways and waterways are collected from https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/7547.

Code availability

Code for mapping the agri-food movement onto real-world transportation infrastructure and analysing the trade-off between efficiency, resilience and sustainability among the transportation modes in this study is developed in QGIS version 3.28.2 and RStudio version 4.0.2. All code will be made available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

This work is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation grant numbers CBET-1844773 (‘CAREER: A National Strategy for a Resilient Food Supply Chain’), DEB-1924309 (‘CNH2-L: Feedbacks between Urban Food Security and Rural Agricultural Systems’), BCS-2032065 (‘RAPID: Spatial Resilience of Food Production, Supply Chains, and Security to COVID-19’) and CBET-2115405 (‘SRS RN: Multiscale RECIPES (Resilient, Equitable, and Circular Innovations with Partnership and Education Synergies) for Sustainable Food Systems’). This research was also supported by the US Department of Agriculture (‘Building resilience to shocks and disruptions: Creating sustainable and equitable local and regional food systems in the US Midwest region and beyond’; grant number 2023-68012-39076). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Grainger College of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Deniz Berfin Karakoc & Megan Konar

  2. School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Deniz Berfin Karakoc

Authors
  1. Deniz Berfin Karakoc
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  2. Megan Konar
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Contributions

D.B.K. and M.K. conceptualized the project. D.B.K. and M.K. developed the methodology. D.B.K. curated the data, conducted the formal analysis and investigation, and generated the data visualizations. D.B.K. and M.K. wrote the original draft of the paper and edited it according to reviewer comments. M.K. supervised the project.

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Correspondence to Megan Konar.

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Nature Food thanks Catherine Brinkley, Kilian Kuhla and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–18, Tables 1 and 2, Results, Discussion, Methods and references.

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Karakoc, D.B., Konar, M. Trade-offs between resilience, sustainability and cost in the US agri-food transportation infrastructure. Nat Food 6, 401–409 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01128-9

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