Laura Davis

Background

About Laura Davis

Food, we can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. Serving as a Nutrition Sensitive Food Security Volunteer in the Peace Corps personally taught me what hunger felt like but also showed me what malnutrition looked like. Food insecurity will continuously come with cultural, environmental and personal challenges as innovators continue to solve the problem. My Agribusiness and applied Economics degree demonstrated the importance of sustainable food systems through large scales of logistics and technologies. Still, most of the world relies on small scale agriculture to provide direct nutritious foods to rural communities. Small scale agriculture for me is about providing produce direct to the consumer to utilize the most nutritious and tasty part of the fruit or vegetables’ lifecycle. My sister and I practice this every summer with Two Sisters’ Tomatoes. We make it our goal to practice organic agriculture through market gardening to provide nutritious vegetables. We strive to eliminate food waste by partnering with local food banks, indigenous tribes and churches to create opportunities for produce to be consumed. In my role as a program analyst for USDA Food & Nutrition Services, I plan to learn from the leadership and governance to focus on putting healthy food on America’s plate. This will provide me with a unique opportunity to use my Bachelors in Agriculture Sciences and my Masters in Public Administration to share my experiences with a larger audience. I have felt hunger and I understand the hard work it takes to grow food. After all, everyone needs food and nobody deserves to be hungry.