Cannabis Grow

McClintock’s framework helps explain the multi-functionality of urban agriculture, its wide resonance in an era of widespread individual, social and ecological strain, and its interconnectedness with numerous social, cultural and environmental processes. However, his invocation of urban political ecology stops short of tracing the ideological and material flows involved in urban agriculture’s implementation in any given locality. Like any other socio-environmental space, community gardens arise from the confluence of certain physical elements that have cohered as a result of social processes, relations, ideas, interests, and practices. In turn, these spaces have symbolic and material impacts on the social systems of which they are part. The soil, water, seeds, and materials used for garden tools and infrastructure are brought together by people holding specific ideas and marshalling resources available to them in order to make urban nature. At the same time, certain physical elements must be absent from the space for it to continue as a garden; the gardeners must labor against ecological forces to limit the growth of life forms they don’t wish to cultivate , and they may come up against political-economic forces seeking to grow capital by re-forming the space with entirely different physical elements. The lens of urban political ecology can help unpack the interconnected social and ecological relations that come to bear on the creation and preservation or loss of urban agricultural sites and other urban socio-environments.

While urban political ecology draws attention to uneven outcomes produced by power relations, however, cannabis dryer much of the political analysis reaches abstract conclusions about the governance of space under the influence of capital. Traditional urban political economy provides a more concrete framework for understanding the actors involved in urban land use contestation, and political ecology can be further enhanced with attention to the specific organizations through which power flows as social relations, ideas, and practices reshape socio-environmental conditions.While community gardens can provide social, nutritional, aesthetic, and potentially economic benefits to participants and nearby residents, they occur within and are unlikely to resolve large-scale disparities in neighborhood characteristics. Residential racial segregation, and the food-system and environmental inequalities that have arisen alongside it, can be seen in part as a result of the political-economic logic governing urban development. This logic, employed with consistency by powerful actors in most North American cities, tends to drive land-use decisions and policy in a way that leaves urban agriculture sites highly vulnerable. In a dynamic process, power differentials manifest through competition to take the form of built-environment winners and losers across space. Logan and Molotch’s urban growth machine thesis explains this disparity by emphasizing that different localities are constantly competing against one another to attract capital, intensify land use, and thereby grow the economy. Because resources are limited, it is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. What is more, the growth machine logic is occurring at multiple scales: between different neighborhoods within cities, between cities and the surrounding suburbs, between different cities, and between regions or larger territories as well.

Local growth coalitions—made up of politicians, businessmen, developers, small property owners, and other real estate interests—work together to structure their locality in a way that will attract capital investment and increase the area’s overall “exchange value” and in so doing promote property value appreciation . The most successful growth coalitions win buy-in from higher levels of government, new construction projects, greater commercial activity, more intense residential development, and the benefits of rising property values that accrue to growth coalition members . Less successful growth coalitions may still attract capital, but in forms such as industrial activity, hazardous waste facilities, or other locally unwanted land uses with steeper health and economic downsides . Unsuccessful locales may lose out on investment altogether, and experience shrinkage rather than growth as economic opportunity dries up, properties are abandoned, and residents move away. Even when growth coalitions succeed, the benefits of increasing exchange value are not evenly distributed amongst those in a given locale. Despite ideological assurances that growth is good for everyone, urban development often comes at the expense of residents’ “use value,” with increased traffic, pollution, noise, strain on utilities, and aesthetic decline reducing residents’ quality of life. Growth coalition members work to manage the public narrative so that growth is widely seen as desirable, or at least inevitable . However, if community organizations anticipate the harm to their quality of life and mobilize to resist unwanted change, conflict can arise between local residents and the growth coalition and its growth entrepreneurs. Within a given locale, community residents opposing development usually organize their resistance in response to a particular threat, while a region’s growth coalitions tend to remain consistently organized due to members’ ongoing coordination and shared interests in growing the value of their properties.

Because pro-development groups are usually better resourced and more organized, they tend to prevail . But not always—sometimes communities are able to mount effective opposition to forms of development that they see as undesirable. Which communities can successfully oppose unwanted development represents further inequality in the terrain of land-use contestation. Those with greater access to financial and social capital are far more likely both to attract capital investment for desired forms of development and to mount effective opposition to development proposals they oppose . Thus, already disadvantaged communities are the most likely to either experience capital disinvestment and neighborhood blight, or to undergo steep declines in use value from LULUs as the growth machine drives on. Mirroring patterns in the urban food environment described above, the residential neighborhoods with the most blight, and those closest to LULUs, tend to be low-income Black or Latinx neighborhoods. Considering the challenges these neighborhoods often face— including limited access to affordable, healthy food; vacant and blighted land; slumping property values; poor air quality; and social problems such as crime and low collective efficacy—the potential benefits of community gardens are especially meaningful for residents in such areas. Indeed, many community gardens are started informally by residents seeking to address community needs and add use value to vacant land in low-income neighborhoods. Yet if these residents don’t own the property they garden on, it remains vulnerable to the gears of the growth machine. The dynamics of the urban growth machine have influenced land use in the United States for well over a century; in recent decades, urban governance and political economy more broadly have also been strongly shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism. Since the late 1970s, cannabis grow room neoliberal ideology has gained traction among political decision-makers across all levels of government. Standing in contrast to Keynesian economic theories about the role of government in stimulating and regulating the economy, neoliberal ideology posits that the main role of the government is to prop up free markets and otherwise get out of the private sector’s way . This has translated into accelerated privatization of public assets, more regressive tax codes, and the rescission of social services . Culturally, neoliberalism has taken shape in an ideological shift that emphasizes individual responsibility for one’s economic well being and health, a shift that has occurred alongside the structural fraying of the social safety net . The rhetoric extolling free markets and spotlighting the role of individuals in their own fate serves to distract from the ways that individuals are connected in society and “free” capitalist markets accumulate ever-greater wealth for a privileged few while burdening everyone else with the downsides of private profit-making . In the United States, city budgets have become more strained since neoliberal ideas gained political traction. Public spending cuts at the state and federal level have reduced capital flows from higher levels of government into city coffers, and cities have not been able to make up for the shortfalls through general taxation describe the dual processes of “roll-back” and “roll-out” neoliberalization: public systems of social service provision are dismantled, and their former functions are devolved onto private and third-sector organizations, which take on a larger share of the work to feed, house, educate, and otherwise care for citizens in times of need. The organizations that manage formal community gardens have been part of this roll-back and roll-out process.

Through the roll-back and roll-out of neoliberalization, urban governance arrangements are becoming restructured. Nonprofit human-service organizations have had to focus more on local service provision and engage less in advocating for policy that protects the rights of the poor . With less money being distributed from the federal and state governments to city agencies, local governments have had to scramble to find alternative funding sources. Public-private partnerships are often formed in this context, but their viability as a replacement for the aid offered by the prior welfare-state remains in question . In this newfound and neoliberal context, local nonprofit organizations often have greater control of resources than local elected officials . However, community organizations may not operate as defenders of “use-value” as the urban growth machine model suggests. Instead, community-based organizations may operate largely in the interest of their own survival and growth—even if they appear to organize local residents politically. To this end, community-based organizations that partner with local government may craft their clientele as a reliable constituency and trade votes for government service contracts . Alternatively, they may deploy technologies of participation that stall resident opposition rather than addressing it . Thus, in the neoliberal era, community organizations cannot be viewed simply as representatives of civic and therefore local resident interests; it is important to look more closely, investigating how such organizations engage in local politics—especially as it relates to whether and how they cultivate civic participation among their members. Urban agriculture organizations are no exception; community gardens in particular require the coordination of many individuals, whose participation may or may not extend into civic action. Lyson has developed the concept of “civic agriculture” to describe the strengthening of local food systems, and at the same time community social ties, through operations such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and community gardens. Food-based organizations with a justice orientation can act as places of learning in which participants gain civic skills and critical perspectives . Civic agriculture initiatives build conscientious alternatives to the corporate-dominated industrial food system , and community gardens can further orient participants to challenging development models that exploit their neighborhoods . However, Passidomo cautions that more research is needed to understand how and when such projects promote greater civic participation in disinvested communities specifically. This focus is especially important in light of the finding that many urban agriculture projects actually work to support existing socio-economic structures and the neoliberalization of cities: by promoting a neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility , bolstering narratives used to justify reduced city services , filling in gaps left by the roll-back of the social safety net , or helping to brand a city as “green” and “sustainable” in the global competition to attract tourists and wealthy residents . Simply put, some urban agriculture projects organize participants to challenge and change prevailing socio-economic structures, and others do not. Attending to these distinctions is important because community-based organizations can in fact do a great deal to increase civic participation among their members and clientele. Community-based organizations can use civic participation as a resource in their efforts to survive and succeed, both as a source of legitimacy and as a base of power from which to seek funding, contracts, or favorable policies . The outcomes of successful civic participation may benefit the organization, the individuals involved, or both. As urban agriculture organizations must establish legitimacy for their unconventional spaces, attract resources needed to maintain the sites, and win favorable land use policies, they may come to view the civic participation of their gardeners as a valuable resource. Many community gardens are located in low-income neighborhoods, and like other CBOs that provide services in these neighborhoods, they may stabilize their own operation by teaching neighborhood residents skills to interface better with bureaucracies. For instance, Marwell describes how some housing cooperatives teach low-income residents to manage meetings and interface with the city as well as the private sector, such as by paying taxes and collectively managing their utilities. In this way the organization’s overhead is reduced, some of the residents learn valuable skills, and the organization simultaneously builds its legitimacy as a site where residents learn such skills.

With the higher density of urban areas, demand for space can put pressure on any land use that isn’t maximizing a site’s potential. Of course, what is considered a site’s maximum potential is socially constructed; as predicted by the urban growth machine theory, land uses are largely determined by the alignment of interests among powerful growth entrepreneurs, investors, simple property owners, and local government regulations and regulators. However, when none of these parties takes a lead role in determining a site’s use, local residents often determine a use themselves for underutilized, interstitial spaces in order to fill a need or realize the potential most important to them; this is how many urban agriculture projects begin . In general, with or without institutional and landowner support, urban agriculture tends to proliferate in times and places where crises leave land underutilized and more people in need . Especially during a crisis, such as an economic crisis, war, pandemic, or local social instability, urban agriculture receives increased public attention as a potential solution to many of the problems that the crisis has brought on. This is because urban agriculture can provide numerous benefits—economically, nutritionally, environmentally, and socially—that vary with how the sites are structured and managed . While growing food in cities has many potential benefits, drying cannabis the notion that it can serve as a panacea to urban problems is misleading; because of physical and social constraints, no individual program or project can provide the full range of benefits that urban agriculture is commonly associated with .

Nevertheless, urban agriculture seems frequently to be rediscovered at the onset of any new crisis – such as economic disruption brought on by war, recession or inflation . Activists, residents and/or the media contribute to a surge of excitement around the many potential benefits—healthy food, social connection, education, equity and justice, urban beautification, green space, blight removal, and/or economic development—that they envision urban agriculture will bring. Indeed, urban agriculture can provide valuable means of addressing common social problems that arise in cities—particularly when implemented in the form of community gardening, a practice that has been widely celebrated in the discourse around urban agriculture in the United States since the 1970s. While the anonymity, impersonality, and inequity of urban life can become alienating, community gardens can provide a place where residents can connect with one another , bridging socioeconomic, racial and generational divides and/or developing a greater sense of self-sufficiency and agency . In cities, many low-income residents and people of color are burdened with insufficient access to affordable, nutritious food as a result of racial segregation and economic dislocation, but community gardens have shown the potential to increase food security and sovereignty for these communities . Furthermore, while most of the produce grown in community gardens is eaten by the gardeners and their families or donated to others for free, community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture can also spur local food retail, economic development, and employment in neighborhoods blighted by decades of disinvestment .

Additionally, community gardens and urban farms function as a type of urban green space that helps ameliorate geophysical and ecological problems common to urban landscapes, including storm water runoff, urban heat island effect, habitat loss, and poor air quality . With all of these documented benefits, it is no wonder that urban agriculture engenders much excitement during times of crisis. Heightened attention to urban agriculture during crisis has highlighted its paradoxical relationship with capitalism, too. At its core, urban agriculture holds the potential for producing and consuming outside the capitalist market system . Thus, urban agriculture can take on a “radical” character as a form of resistance and transformative practice . Yet urban agriculture can also serve as a “relief valve” that keeps a dysfunctional system just bearable enough, reducing suffering without solving the underlying issues, and thus propping up the dominant system rather than working against it . In this way, the paradox of urban agriculture today is similar to the broader problematic of civil-sector social service provision under roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism . Moreover, in some cases, as urban agriculture comes to be defined as a neighborhood amenity, it increases local property values . When this happens, urban agriculture ultimately puts low-income residents at risk of displacement, nullifying any benefits the spaces may have provided for them. Community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture hold significant potential as means to improve the lives of marginalized residents, but improvement is neither inherent nor guaranteed; there are contingencies in how urban agricultural practices are designed and implemented. Since urban agriculture goes against the typical uses of urban land, those advocating for community gardens and urban farms often face resistance from urban growth entrepreneurs and the city government officials who support them.

Schmelzkopf conceptualizes gardens as politically contested spaces, where multiple potential uses that would be social goods are pitted against each other. In 1995, Schmelzkopf predicted that urban gardens across the United States would continue to be challenged until gardeners could frame their efforts in ways that demonstrated the benefits of their work, or that asserted the right of residents to open spaces in their communities. Since that time, gardeners across the country have indeed worked to frame the value of their garden spaces in ways that legitimize their efforts and that increase the odds that they will retain control over them. As Schmelzkopf predicted, these arguments often do highlight the social and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, while others build a more rights-focused case for community access and control of urban lands. Urban agriculture advocates across the US have been contesting land in various ways, yet few studies of urban agriculture have focused on the land-tenure question and no prior research appears to use a comparative approach to analyzing these struggles. By examining how advocates for community gardens create and defend these spaces, and in particular how they engage in the social construction of urban agriculture’s value, we can learn a great deal not only about the benefits that urban agriculture can provide different communities, but also about the dynamics of legitimation and political-economic constraints involved when community-based organizations hybridize from service provision to social movement work. In the last 50 years, urban agriculture organizations in major US cities have come to oversee and formalize activities on vacant lots, over time building up the legitimacy required to attract the necessary resources for organizational maintenance. However, vacant lot use remains precarious, and when political and/or economic changes threaten the organization’s access to land, a new kind of legitimacy is required in order to recast urban agriculture as a permanent facet of the urban landscape rather than a temporary use of marginal land. These moments present a theoretically interesting situation in that CBOs are hybridizing to take on social movement work, and in the process are innovating legitimacy by introducing new narrative frames that can change perspective on their activities in order to shift public policy and mitigate the threat. Previous scholars have studied how organizations respond to challenges to their legitimacy, curing cannabis whether due to internal missteps or a change in the external environment . However, less consideration has been given to how existing organizations innovate new forms of legitimacy to buffer their activities against exogenous changes. A sociological perspective encourages us to ask: How do garden organizations legitimize urban agriculture? When vacant-lot gardens face development pressure, who mobilizes to preserve them? What strategies and framing processes do they use to mobilize in defense of threatened gardens? Why do these strategies succeed or fail, and what do they achieve in practice? Ultimately, who benefits from the creation and preservation of urban agricultural spaces? These questions require that we assess garden efforts by considering who is in charge, who will have access, and which of the gardens’ many potential functions are legitimated and thus prioritized. Investigating organizational dynamics is critical for understanding the impact that gardens may have on surrounding communities, since contradictions inherent to modern urban governance and resource allocation can yield garden programs that don’t ameliorate but reproduce inequality, prop up failing systems, or otherwise fall short of the benefits the gardens can produce .

In advocating for urban agriculture as a long-term land use, garden organizations participate in the ongoing renegotiation of both ideas of urban nature and the material ecological conditions in cities, which distribute the benefits and burdens unevenly among different social groups . Advocacy for urban agriculture is also similar to other efforts underway to transform urban life, such as calls for community policing, which attempt to relocate resources and decision-making for critical urban systems in potentially radical ways. In general, studying the distinct challenges that community-based service organizations face when they hybridize to take up social movement work is important because social movements are often the best way to overcome elite opposition and accomplish substantive transformation of any collective feature of social life.In order to better understand the strategies grass root activists and urban agriculture advocates use to secure long-term land access, I conducted a comparative historical analysis of three U.S. cities. In Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Seattle, well-established multi-site gardening organizations have engaged with city officials to win policies that secure land for community gardens. The strategies used to legitimize urban agriculture, the configurations of the programs themselves, and the wider political-economic context of each city vary significantly. Through a qualitative analysis of 55 interviews with key informants and archival material from each city , I show the relationships between legitimation strategies, program configurations and political-economic context as well as their impacts on local discourse and policy related to urban agriculture1. Employing spatial regression analysis to assess the spread of each program’s gardens across their respective cities, I also demonstrate the ways that movement strategies and organizational aspects of the community garden programs have impacted the outcomes achieved and populations served by each organization over time. For the remainder of this introduction, I provide background about each of the three cities, their major gardening programs, and the local policy victories that have helped to secure more land for urban agriculture, followed by a brief outline of the chapters in this dissertation. My research is a comparative historical analysis of the characteristics, preservation strategies, and outcomes achieved by community gardening programs in Seattle, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. All are large US cities , and all have been cited as exemplars for their thriving urban agriculture activities . The cities are also similar in that community gardeners in each locale have experienced at least one major development challenge and responded with political engagement that resulted in favorable policy changes. Further, all three cities have passed urban planning frameworks that incorporate urban agriculture. In each city, I gathered documents from the early 1970s to the present—decades in which community gardening has undergone several surges in both local and nationwide interest and attention—but my qualitative analysis focuses on specific periods during which gardeners overcame development threats and those in which gardens were written into the cities’ urban planning frameworks. Whereas much of the existing literature on urban agriculture is based on individual case studies of a single garden or program, my project builds new insights through comparative analysis. Examining the historical process of land use contestation in multiple cities in which urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term land use, I show that the process of securing land for urban agriculture varies considerably from case to case, yet some key similarities are evident—namely the perceived need for garden advocates to build an economic argument for the value of urban agriculture. While advocates in all three cities have been relatively successful in their efforts, I show that the different political and economic conditions in which land use contestation has unfolded and the strategies used to build urban agriculture’s legitimacy are related to important differences in the outcomes achieved . I selected Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle for comparison because these cities are diverse in geographic region, political and economic features, degree of site permanence achieved by garden advocates, and the characteristics of each city’s main urban agriculture organizations. The data I collected were then used to illuminate the strategies that garden advocates and organizations used during the process of developing and defending urban agricultural sites, the evolving public discourse around urban agriculture in each city, the internal considerations important to each organization as they built gardens and sought to defend them, and the historical development of gardens affiliated with each program.

The seedling will be ready for budding or grafting when it has grown to 24 to 30 inches tall.Budding and grafting are vegetative propagation techniques in which a single bud or stem of a desired plant is attached to a root stock plant. In budding, a single bud with its accompanying bark is used as the scion. In grafting, part of a stem or branch is used as the scion. One of the most important keys to successful budding and grafting is properly positioning the scion on the root stock. In order for the scion and root stock to grow together, the thin greenish plant layer just under the bark of the scion and root stock must be aligned so that they touch each other. If they do not touch each other, the bud or graft will fail. Within 10 to 15 days, a successful bud or graft forms a hard whitish tissue where the two cambium layers grow together. Always use sharp cutting or grafting instruments and make clean, even cuts. Options include a budding knife, a sharp kitchen knife, or a single-sided razor blade. Do not allow the cut surfaces of the scion or root stock to dry out: immerse cut scions in a pail of water, wrap them in plastic, or graft them immediately after cutting. Also, remove any leaves from scions after cutting to help keep the scions from losing water. Keep the scions in a cool place during the work. To make a T-bud, cannabis grow systems make a T-shaped cut on the root stock about 8 to 12 inches above the ground . The vertical part of the T should be about 1 inch long and the horizontal part about one-third of the distance around the root stock.

Twist the knife gently to open flaps of bark. Avoid cutting through any buds on the bark of the root stock. On the scion , cut a selected bud beginning about 1 ⁄2 inch below the bud and ending about 3 ⁄4 to 1 inch beyond the bud. Make a horizontal cut about 3 ⁄4 inch above the bud down through the bark and into the wood. Gently remove the shield shaped piece for budding . Slip the budwood down into the T-shaped cut under the two flaps of bark until the horizontal cuts of the bud match up with the horizontal cut of the T. After inserting the budwood into the root stock, wrap the bud and root stock with budding rubber . Budding rubber is available from agricultural supply or hardware stores; if budding rubber is unavailable, use wide rubber bands, green tie tape, or stretchy tape. Leave the bud exposed while wrapping. Do not coat the area with grafting wax or sealant. If the budding is done in the fall, the buds should be healed in about 6 to 8 weeks; in the spring, healing should take about 3 to 4 weeks. After the bud has healed, unwrap it and cut off the remaining shoots or stock about 12 to 14 inches above the bud union. This will be the nurse branch, which helps protect the new bud union. After the budwood has grown a few new leaves, completely remove the nurse branch to about 1 ⁄8 inch above the bud union .The best grafting technique for small-diameter root stocks is whip grafting. Whip grafting should be done in the fall or spring. Although whip grafts use more scion wood than budding does, they allow the grafted plant to develop more rapidly. To make a whip graft , select as a scion hard and mature green wood. First make a long, sloping cut about 1 to 21 ⁄2 inches long on the root stock . Make a matching cut on the scion. Cut a “tongue” on both the scion and root stock by slicing downward into into the wood .

The tongues should allow the scion and root stock to lock together. Fit the scion to the root stock and secure with budding rubber . Apply grafting wax to seal the union. To prevent sunburn, new whip grafts should be protected from the sun until they heal. After the scion has begun to grow, remove any growth from the root stock. If necessary, support new shoots by staking.The best grafting technique for large-diameter trees or branches is bark grafting . To make a bark graft, first cut off the root stock just above a crotch where smaller branches sprout out. If possible, try to retain one branch of the original plant as a nurse branch. The nurse branch will provide the scion nutrition and support from wind .Cut vertical slits 21 ⁄2 to 31 ⁄2 inches long through the bark of the remaining freshly cut root stock stubs down to the wood. These slits should be spaced 3 to 5 inches apart. Cut the scions 5 to 6 inches long with 4 to 6 buds per scion . If scions are cut longer than this, they may dry out before healing. When cutting the scions, make a sloping cut about 3 inches long at the base of the scion. Using a grafting knife or other very sharp knife, lift the bark on one side of the slit. Insert the scion into the slit with the long-cut surface of the scion facing the wood of the root stock and push it down into the slit . Make sure that the scion fits snugly into the slits in the bark and that the cambiums are properly aligned. Secure citrus scions by nailing them in place with thin flathead nails or tying them with strong cord or tree tape. Secure avocado scions with plastic nursery tape. Coat all cut surfaces thoroughly, including the tops of the scions, with grafting wax or pruning paint. To protect the graft from sunburn, paint it with white interior water-based paint, either undiluted or mixed 50/50 with water. Paint the entire area around the graft union, including the scions, waxed areas, and the exposed trunk below the graft union. Inspect the grafts frequently and rewax them if they begin to crack or dry out. Once the scions begin to grow well, remove all but one scion per branch.

Early on, however, prune the scions that will be removed to reduce their vigor but do not prune the scion that will be kept. The one scion you keep will eventually become a main scaffold branch. Any nurse branches should also be removed after all the scions are growing well.During my first summer on the Tanaka Farm in western Washington State, I accompanied an indigenous Mexican picker, Abelino, to see a physician . His knee was injured while picking strawberries two days prior. It was Saturday and the only clinic open was a private urgent care clinic. After the initial physical examination, brief history-taking, and knee X-ray, the physician matter-of-factly suggested my friend do lighter work on the farm, ‘‘something sitting down, maybe at a desk.’’ Abelino responded with a quiet, respectful laugh. On Monday the next week, Abelino asked for lighter work at the farm office. The bilingual receptionist told him in a frustrated tone, ‘‘No, porque no’’ . Later that month, I accompanied Abelino to the busy clinic of a rehabilitation medicine physician for follow-up. This physician asked me to translate that Abelino ‘‘hurt his knee’’ because he had been ‘‘picking incorrectly’’ and did ‘‘not know how to bend over correctly.’’ Notably, in her rush, she had not asked Abelino any details about his work, ebb and flow tables including how he bent over. Years later, Abelino still tells me he has occasional knee pain and that ‘‘los medicos no saben nada’’ . This brief vignette focuses on what physicians and public health practitioners often characterize as risk behaviors—choice of job or poor body posture. The physicians involved in Abelino’s care consider these risk behaviors to be the genesis of his suffering. This focus keeps them inadvertently unaware of the macro-social structures that produce suffering. In this article, I propose the concept of structural vulnerability as an important counterpoint to the common individualistic focus on risk behavior in medicine and public health. This concept trains the gaze onto the social structures that produce and organize suffering into what public health denotes as health disparities. I flesh out the concept of structural vulnerability through a thick description of the complex hierarchy at work on the Tanaka berry farm in Washington State . This hierarchy produces vulnerability to suffering through differential demands, pressures, and bodily practices in work. I avoid the pitfalls of a simplistic, unidirectional understanding of structural violence by illustrating the ways in which macrostructures produce vulnerability on every level of the farm hierarchy. The concept of structural vulnerability directs blame and interventional attention away from the victims of suffering and toward the social structures producing and organizing their suffering.The Tanaka Farm is located in Skagit County, Washington, employing approximately 500 people during the picking season, May through November. During the winter and early spring, the farm employs approximately 80 workers. The farm is well known for strawberries, many from the ‘‘Northwest variety’’ cultivated by the founder of the family farm. The business is vertically integrated, from seed nursery to berry fields to processing plant, with almost all berries produced on the farm sold under larger labels. The farm consists of several thousand acres, much of the land visible west of Interstate-5. Most of the land consists of long rows of strawberry plants, although several fields are dedicated to raspberries, apples, and organic or ‘‘traditional’’ blueberries. At the base of a forested hill on the edge of the farm lies the largest migrant labor camp on the farm, housing approximately 250 workers and their families during the harvest .

Immediately above this camp are five large houses partially hidden by trees with floor-to-ceiling views of the valley. Two other labor camps are partially hidden behind the large, concrete processing plant and the farmheadquarters. The camp closest to the road houses 50 year-round employees and the other, a few hundred yards away, holds almost 100 workers and their families during the harvest. Diagonally across from these two labor camps and the processing plant are the houses of some of the Tanaka family. The one most visible from the main road is a semi-Jeffersonian, one-story, brick house with white pillars behind a white, wooden fence. The Tanaka Farm advertises itself as ‘‘a family business spanning four generations with over 85 years experience in the small fruit industry.’’ On a more subtle level, farm work is produced by a complex segregation, a conjugated oppression . In Bourgois’s analysis of a Central American banana plantation, ethnicity and class together produce an oppression phenomenologically and materially different than that produced by either alone. In contemporary US agriculture, the primary lines of power fall along categories of race, class, and citizenship. The complex of labor on the Tanaka Farm involves several hundred workers occupying distinct positions from owner to receptionist, crop manager to tractor driver, berry checker to berry picker . People on the farm often describe the hierarchy with vertical metaphors, speaking of those ‘‘above’’ or ‘‘below’’ them or of ‘‘overseeing.’’ Responsibilities, anxieties, privileges, and structural vulnerability differ from the top to the bottom of this hierarchy . In congruence with the vertical metaphors utilized by those on the farm, the remainder of this article will move ethnographically from those considered at the top to those considered at the bottom.This farm is owned and run by third-generation Japanese-Americans whose parents’ generation lost half their land during the internment in the 1940s. Their relatives, with hundreds of acres on Bainbridge Island, Washington, were interned suddenly and the government sold their land out from under them. Those in the Skagit Valley had time to entrust their farm to a white family, and thereby avoided the same fate. Today, the third generation of Tanaka brothers makes up the majority of farm executives. The others are Anglo-American professionals brought in from other agricultural companies. The following are abbreviated profiles of key farm executives, focusing on their anxieties. In these profiles, we see that the growers’ worries are focused on farm survival in a bleak landscape of competition with increasing corporate agribusiness, expanding urban boundaries, and economic globalization. These anxieties are founded in the reality of ongoing farm closures throughout the region.

The 13 farmers interviewed represent 13 individuals who oversee management and operations on their farms. These individuals were most often the primary owner and operator of the farm, and made key management decisions on their farm. To identify potential participants for this study, we first consulted the USDA Organic Integrity database and assembled a comprehensive list of all organic farms in the county . Next, with input from the local University of California Cooperative Extension Small and Organic Farms Advisor for Yolo County, we narrowed the list of potential farms by applying several criteria for this study: 1) organic operation on the same ground for a minimum of 5 years; 2) a minimum of 10 years of experience in organic farming; and 3) a focus on growing diversified fruit and vegetable crops. These requirements significantly reduced the pool of potential participants. In total, 16 farms were identified to fit the criteria of this study . These 16 farmers were contacted with a letter containing information about the study and its scope. To establish initial trust with farmers identified, we worked directly with the local UCCE advisor. Thirteen farmers responded and agreed to participate in the entirety of the study . Because this research is informed by a Farmer First approach—which emphasizes multiple ways of knowing and challenges the standard “information transfer” pipeline model that is often applied in research and extension contexts—farmers were viewed as experts and crucial partners in this research . As a result, cannabis grower supplies farmers were considered integral to field site selection, and were not asked to change their management or planting plans.

In addition to the Farmer First approach, we intentionally used a two-tiered interview process, in which we scheduled an initial field visit and then returned for an in-depth, semi-structured interview at a later date—after summer field sampling was complete. The overall purpose of the preliminary field visit was to help establish rapport and increase the amount and depth of knowledge farmers shared during the semi-structured interviews. The initial field visit typically lasted one hour and was completed with all 13 participants. Farmers were asked to walk through their farm and talk generally about their fields, their fertility programs, and their management approaches. The field interview also provided an opportunity for open dialogue with farmers regarding specific management practices and local knowledge . Because local knowledge is often tacit, the field component was beneficial to connect knowledge shared by each farmer to specific fields and specific practices. During the initial field visit, field sites were selected in direct collaboration with farmers. First, each farmer was individually asked to describe their understanding of soil health and soil fertility. Based on their response, farmers were then asked to select two field sites within their farm: 1) a field that the farmer considered to be exemplary in terms of their efforts towards building soil fertility ; and 2) a field the farmer considered to be a challenge in terms of their efforts towards maintaining soil fertility . Essentially, farmers were asked, “Can you think of a field that you would consider ‘least challenging’ in terms of building soil fertility on your farm?” and “Can you also think of a field that you would consider ‘most challenging’ in terms of building soil fertility on your farm?” . Farmers would often select several fields, and through back-and-forth dialogue with the field researcher, together would arrive at a final field selected for each category . Only fields with all summer vegetable row crops were selected for sampling.

For each site, farmers delineated specific management practices, including information about crop history and crop rotations, bed prepping if applicable, the number of tillage passes and depth of tillage, rate of additional N-based fertilizer inputs, and type of irrigation applied. Following field site selection, soil sampling was designed to capture indicators of soil fertility in the bulk soil at a single time point. Fields were sampled mid-season at peak vegetative growth when crop nitrogen demand was the highest. This sampling approach was intended to provide a snapshot of on-farm soil health and fertility. Because the farms involved generally grow a wide range of vegetable crops, we designed the study to have greater inference space than a single crop, even at the expense of adding variability. As such, we collected bulk soil samples that we did not expect to be strongly influenced by the particular crop present. Field sampling occurred over the course of four weeks in July 2019. To sample each site, a random 10m by 20m transect area was placed on the field across three rows of the same crop. Within the transect area, three composite samples each based on five sub-samples were collected approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth of 20cm using an auger . Sub-samples were composited on site and mixed thoroughly by hand for 5 minutes before being placed on ice and immediately transported back to the laboratory.Soil samples were preserved on ice until processed within several hours of field extraction. Each sample was sieved to 4mm and then either air dried, extracted with 0.5M K2SO4, or utilized to measure net mineralization and nitrification .

A batch of air-dried samples were measured for gravimetric water content , which was determined by drying fresh soils samples at 105oC for 48 hours. Moist soils were immediately extracted and analyzed colorimetrically for NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations using modified methods from Miranda et al. and Forster . Additional volume of extracted samples were subsequently frozen for future laboratory analyses. To determine soil textural class, another batch of air-dried samples were further sieved to 2mm and subsequently prepared for analysis using the “micropipette” method . Water holding capacity was determined using the funnel method, adapted from Geisseler et al. , where a jumbo cotton ball thoroughly wetted with deionized water was placed inside the base of a funnel with 100 g soil on top. Deionized water was added and allowed to imbibe into the soil until no water dripped from the funnel. The soil was allowed to drain overnight . A sub-sample of this soil was then weighed and dried for 48 hours at 105oC. The difference following draining and oven drying of a sub-sample was defined as 100% WHC. Additional air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground and then analyzed for total organic carbon , total soil nitrogen , soil protein, and pH at the Ohio State Soil Fertility Lab . The former two analyses were conducted using an elemental analyzer . Soil protein was determined using the autoclaved citrate extractable soil protein method outlined by Hurisso et al. . Remaining air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for POXC using the active carbon method described by Weil et al. , but with modifications as described by Culman et al. . In brief, 2.5g of air-dried soil was placed in a 50mL centrifuge tube with 20mL of 0.02 mol/L KMnO4 solution, shaken on a reciprocal shaker for exactly 2 minutes, dry racks for weed and then allowed to settle for 10 minutes. A 0.5mL aliquot of supernatant was added to a second centrifuge tube containing 49.5mL of water for a 1:100 dilution and analyzed at 550 nm. The amount of POXC was determined by the loss of permanganate due to C oxidation . After the initial field visit and following summer field sampling, all 13 farmers were contacted to participate in a follow up visit to their farm, which consisted of a semi-structured interview followed by a brief survey. The semi-structured interview is the most standard technique for gathering local knowledge . These in-depth interviews allowed us to ask the same questions of each farmer so that comparisons between interviews could be made. In person interviews were conducted in the winter, between December 2019 – February 2020; three interviews were conducted in December 2020. All interviews were recorded with permission from the farmer and lasted about 2 hours.

To develop interview questions for the semi-structured interviews , we established initial topics and thematic sections first. We consulted with two organic farmers to develop final interview questions. The final format of the semi-structured interviews was designed to encourage deep knowledge sharing. For example, the interview questions were structured such that questions revisited topics to allow interviewees to expand on and deepen their answer with each subsequent version of the question. Certain questions attempted to understand farmer perspectives from multiple angles and avoided scientific jargon or frameworks whenever possible. Most questions promoted open ended responses to elicit the full range of possible responses from farmers. We used an openended, qualitative approach that relies on in-depth and in-person interviews to study farmer knowledge . In the semi-structured interview, farmers were asked a range of questions that included: their personal background with farming and the history of their farm operation, their general farm management approaches, as well as soil management approaches specific to soil health and soil fertility, such as key nutrients in their consideration of soil fertility, and their thoughts on soil tests . A brief in-person survey that asked several key demographic questions was administered at the end of the semistructured interviews. Interviews were transcribed, reviewed for accuracy, and uploaded to NVivo 12, a software tool used to categorize and organize themes systematically based on research questions . Through structured analysis of the interview transcripts, key themes were identified and then a codebook was constructed to systematically categorize data related to soil health and soil fertility . We summarize these results in table form. To unpack differences between Fields A and Fields B across all farms, we applied a multi-step approach. We first conducted a preliminary, global comparison between Fields A and Fields B across all farms using a one-way analysis of variance to determine if Fields A were significantly different from Fields B for each indicator for soil fertility. Then, to develop a basis for further comparison of Fields A and Fields B, we considered potential links between management and soil fertility. To do so, we developed a gradient among the farms using a range of soil management practices detailed during the initial farm visit. These soil management practices were based on interview data from the initial farm visit, and were also emphasized by farmers as key practices linked to soil fertility. The practices used to inform the gradient included cover crop application, amount of tillage, crop rotation patterns, crop diversity, the use of integrated crop and livestock systems , and the amount of N-based fertilizer application. Cover crop frequency was determined using the average number of cover crop plantings per year, calculated as cover crop planting counts over the course of two growing years for each field site. To quantify crop rotation, a rotational complexity index was calculated for each site using the formula outlined by Socolar et al. . To calculate crop diversity, we focused on crop abundance, the total number of crops grown per year at the whole farm level was divided by the total acreage farmed. To determine ICLS, an index was created based on the number and type of animals utilized . Lastly, we calculated the amount of additional N-based fertilizer applied to each field . In order to group, visualize, and further explore links with indicators for soil fertility, all soil management variables were standardized , and then used in a principal components analysis using the factoextra package in R . In short, these independent management variables were used to create a composite of several management variables. Principal components with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 were retained. To establish the gradient in management, we plotted all 13 farms using the first two principal components, and ordered the farms based on spatial relationships that arose from this visualization using the nearest neighbor analysis . To further explore links between management and soil fertility, we used the results from the PCA to formalize a gradient in management across all farms, and then used this gradient as the basis for comparison between Field A and Field B across all indicators for soil fertility.

For instance, soil texture may play a mediating role in N cycling, where soils high in clay content may limit substrate availability as well as access to oxygen, which in turn, may restrict the efficiency of N cycling . In this sense, it is important to understand the role that soil edaphic characteristics play in order to identify the underlying baseline limits imposed by the soil itself. Equally important to consider is the role of soil management in mediating N cycling. Compared to controlled experiments, soil management regimes on working farms can be more complex and nonlinear in nature due to multiple interacting practices applied over the span of several years, and even multiple decades. To date, a handful of studies conducted on working farms have examined tradeoffs among different management systems , though few such studies examine the cumulative effects of multiple management practices across a gradient of working organic farms. However, understanding the cumulative effects of management practices is key to link soil management to N cycling on working farms . Likewise, it is important to examine the ways in which local soil edaphic characteristics may limit farmers’ ability to improve soil quality through management practices. Though underutilized in this context, the development of farm typologies presents a useful approach to quantitatively integrate the heterogeneity in management on working organic farms . Broadly, grow vertical typologies allow for the categorization of different types of organic agriculture and provide a way to synthesize the complexity of agricultural systems .

Previous studies that make use of farm typologies found that differences in total soil N across farms are largely defined by levels of soil organic matter.To address these questions, we conducted field research at 27 farm field sites in Yolo County, California, USA, and used four commonly available indicators of soil organic matter to classify farm field sites into farm types via k-means cluster analysis. Using farm typologies identified, we examined the extent to which soil texture and/or soil management practices influenced these measured soil indicators across all working organic farms, using Linear Discriminant Analysis and Variation Partitioning Analysis . We then determined the extent to which gross N cycling rates and other soil N indicators differed across these farm types. Lastly, we developed a linear mixed model to understand the key factors most useful for predicting potential gross N cycling rates along a continuous gradient, incorporating soil indicators, on-farm management practices, and soil texture data. Our study highlights the usefulness of soil indicators towards understanding plant-soil-microbe dynamics that underpin crop N availability on working organic farms. While we found measurable differences among farms based on soil organic matter, strongly influenced by soil texture and management, these differences did not translate for N cycling indicators measured here. Though N cycling is strongly linked to soil organic matter, indicators for soil organic matter are not strong predictors of N cycling rates. During the initial field visits in June 2019, two field sites were selected in collaboration with farmers on each participating farm; these sites represented fields in which farmers planned to grow summer vegetables. Therefore, only fields with all summer vegetable row crops were selected for sampling. At this time, farmers also discussed management practices applied for each field site, including information about crop history and rotations, bed prepping if applicable, tillage, organic fertilizer input, and irrigation . Because of the uniformity of long-term management at the field station , only one treatment was selected in collaboration with the Cropping Systems Manager—a tomato field in the organic corn-tomato-cover crop system.

Since the farms involved in this study generally grew a wide range of vegetable crops, we designed soil sampling to have greater inference space than a single crop, even at the expense of adding variability. Sampling was therefore designed to capture indicators of nitrogen cycling rates and nitrogen pools in the bulk soil at a single time point. Fields were sampled mid-season near peak vegetative growth when crop nitrogen demand is the highest. Using the planting date and anticipated harvest date for each crop, peak vegetative growth was estimated and used to determine timing of sampling. We collected bulk soil samples that we did not expect to be strongly influenced by the particular crop present. This sampling approach provided a snapshot of on-farm nitrogen cycling. Field sampling occurred over the course of four weeks in July 2019. To sample each site, a random 10m by 20m transect area was placed on the field site across three rows of the same crop, away from field edges. Within the transect area, three composite samples each based on 5 sub-samples were collected approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth of 20cm using an auger . Subsamples were composited on site, and mixed thoroughly by hand for 5 minutes before being placed on ice and immediately transported back to the laboratory. To determine bulk density , we hammered a steel bulk density core sampler approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth 20cm below the soil surface and recorded the dry weight of this volume to calculate BD; we sampled three replicates per site and averaged these values to calculate final BD measurements for each site. Soil samples were preserved on ice until processed within several hours of field extraction. Each sample was sieved to 4mm and then either air dried, extracted with 0.5M K2SO4, or utilized to measure net and gross N mineralization and nitrification . Gravimetric water content was determined by drying fresh soils samples at 105oC for 48 hrs. Moist soils were immediately extracted and analyzed colorimetrically for NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations using modified methods from Miranda et al. and Forster . Additional volume of extracted samples were subsequently frozen for future laboratory analyses. To determine soil textural class, air dried samples were sieved to 2mm and subsequently prepared for analysis using the “micropipette” method . Water holding capacity was determined using the funnel method, adapted from Geisseler et al. , where a jumbo cotton ball thoroughly wetted with deionized water was placed inside the base of a funnel with 100g soil on top. The soil was allowed to drain overnight . A sub-sample of this soil was then weighed and dried for 48 hours at 105oC. The difference following draining and oven drying of a sub-sample was defined as 100% WHC. Air dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for total soil N and total organic C using an elemental analyzer at the Ohio State Soil Fertility Lab ; additional soil data including pH and soil protein were also measured at this lab. Soil protein was determined using the autoclaved citrate extractable soil protein method outlined by Hurisso et al. . Additional air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for POXC using the active carbon method described by Weil et al. , but with modifications as described by Culman et al. .

In brief, 2.5g of air-dried soil was placed in a 50mL centrifuge tube with 20mL of 0.02 mol/L KMnO4 solution, vertical grow systems shaken on a reciprocal shaker for exactly 2 minutes, and then allowed to settle for 10 minutes. A 0.5-mL aliquot of supernatant was added to a second centrifuge tube containing 49.5mL of water for a 1:100 dilution and analyzed at 550 nm. The amount of POXC was determined by the loss of permanganate due to C oxidation .To measure gross N mineralization and nitrification in soil samples, we applied an isotope pool dilution approach, adapted from Braun et al. . This method is based on three underlying assumptions listed by Kirkham & Bartholomew : 1) microorganisms in soil do not discriminate between 15N and 14N; 2) rates of processes measured remain constant over the incubation period; and 3) 15N assimilated during the incubation period is not remineralized. To prepare soil samples for IPD, we adjusted soils to approximately 40% WHC prior to incubation with deionized water. Next, four sets of 40g of fresh soil per sub-sample were weighed into specimen cups and covered with parafilm. Based on initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations determined above, a maximum of 20% of the initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations was added as either 15N-NH4 + or 15N-NO3 – tracer solution at 10 atom%; the tracer solution also raised each sub-sample soil water content to 60% WHC. This approach increased the production pool as little as possible while also ensuring sufficient enrichment of the NH4 + and NO3 – pools with 15N-NH4 + and 15N-NO3, respectively, to facilitate high measurement precision . Due to significant variability of initial NH4 + and NO3 – pool sizes in each soil sample, differing amounts of tracer solution were added to each sample set evenly across the soil surface. To begin the incubation, each of the four sub-samples received the tracer solution via evenly distributed circular drops from a micropipette. The specimen cups were placed in a dark incubation chamber at 20oC. After four hours , two sub-sample incubations were stopped by extraction with 0.5M K2SO4 as above for initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations. Filters were pre-rinsed with 0.5 M K2SO4 and deionized water and dried in a drying oven at 60°C to avoid the variable NH4 + contamination from the filter paper. Soil extracts were frozen at -20°C until further isotopic analysis. Similarly after 24 hrs , two sub-sample incubations were stopped by extraction as previously detailed, and subsequently frozen at -20°C. At a later date, filtered extracts were defrosted, homogenized, and analyzed for isotopic composition of NH4 + and NO3 – in order to calculate gross production and consumption rates for N mineralization and nitrification. We prepared extracts for isotope ratio mass spectrometry using a microdiffusion approach based on Lachouani et al. . Briefly, to determine NH4 + pools, 10mL aliquots of samples were diffused with 100mg magnesium oxide into Teflon coated acid traps for 48 hours on an orbital shaker. The traps were subsequently dried, spiked with 20μg NH4+ -N at natural abundance to achieve optimal detection, and subjected to EA-IRMS for 15N:14N analysis of NH4 + . Similarly, to determine NO3 – pools, 10mL aliquots of samples were diffused with 100mg magnesium oxide into Teflon coated acid traps for 48 hours on an orbital shaker. After 48 hours, acid traps were removed and discarded, and then each sample diffused again with 50mg Devarda’s alloy into Teflon coated acid trap for 48 hours on an orbital shaker. These traps were dried and subjected to EA-IRMS for 15N:14N analysis of NO3 + . Twelve dried samples with very low spiked with 20μg NH4+ -N at natural abundance to achieve optimal detection.In addition to the soil biogeochemical variables described above, farmers were also interviewed to determine specific soil management practices on their farms. Farmers were asked to describe the number of tillage passes they performed per field per season; the total number of crops per acre that the farm produced during one calendar year at the whole farm level; the degree to which the farm utilized integrated crop and livestock systems on the farm; crop rotational complexity for each field; and the frequency of cover crop plantings for each field. To calculate the frequency of tillage, we tallied the total number of tillage passes per season for each field. To calculate crop abundance, the total number of crops grown per year at the whole farm level was divided by the total acreage farmed. To capture the use of ICLS, we created an index based on the number of and type of animals utilized. Specifically, the index was calculated by first adding the number of animals used in rotation on farm for each animal type and then dividing by the total number of acres for each farm. These raw values were then normalized, creating an index range from 0 to 1 . Lastly, to quantify crop rotational complexity, a rotational complexity index was calculated for each site using the formula outlined by Socolar et al. . Cover crop frequency was determined using the average number of cover crop plantings per year, calculated as cover crop planting counts over the course of two growing years for each field site.

The Cerén farmers tolerated and possibly even encouraged the growth of wild and weedy species within their maize fields. All of the weedy species recovered from these fields have known uses nutritionally, medicinally, or for other purposes where they were incorporated into ceremonial activities or valued as a decoration . Amaranthus, Crotalaria, and Portulaca are all significant contributors towards Mesoamerican diets today and are often intentionally integrated into milpa agroecosystems . Kekchi villagers in Belize only remove weeds if a particularly dangerous variety has encroached, such as those with thorns or spines . The Kekchi Maya do not view weeds as a threat to their crops and consider their constant removal to be futile. Weeds can be useful additions whether fertilizing the soil, increasing moisture, or serving as a foodstuff. In fact, milpa agricultural systems in Mesoamerica commonly incorporate weedy species that are considered nutritious and edible, what is called quelites . Ethnobotanical records show that the majority of species procured for medicinal purposes are collected from disturbed habitats, such as agricultural fields, where weeds are predominant . Nine of the wild and weedy species within the Cerén fields have known medicinal applications to present day Mesoamerican groups . Amaranth was the second most ubiquitous herb within the fields, hydroponic rack occurring in all operations excavated except for Op. AN, and is an important edible green and grain throughout Mesoamerica .

The overwhelming amount of Spilanthes acmella achenes recovered could have been used as an herb or spice to flavor daily meals. The S. acmella achenes were so abundant that their distribution within agricultural contexts can reveal how the herb is significantly more prevalent within the fields closest to the households , suggesting that the farmers encouraged its growth. This follows Killion’s assessment that mono-cropped agricultural fields may have been farther from domestic structures, whereas multicropped or polyculture fields would have been located closer to where people lived. Alternatively, farmers may be more tolerant of weeds during the final stage of a cultivation cycle, as the maize crop is ready to be harvested . Many of the maize stalks recovered here via plaster casts were bent over so that they can dry within the fields , as if the agriculturalists were just about to collect that season’s harvest. The bent stalks prevent moisture from entering the fruits since water can no longer be taken up through the stem and rain can no longer enter the cobs as easily either. The apparent abundance of wild and weedy species within Cerén’s milpas provides further evidence that these fields were at the end of their growing season and perhaps the weedy herbs were simply not an issue that required manual removal. Many milpa agroecosystems burn the entire field in order to prepare the landscape for the next planting cycle, thus managing any weed populations that had become overgrown. Relatedly, it has been documented that the Lakandon Maya take ashes from piles of collected weeds and leftover crop residue and spread them throughout their fields to provide organic matter as a fertilizer . Since the soil samples collected for flotation in this study were taken from the interior of the agricultural ridges, it is unlikely that these herbs were only present from burned organic matter spread throughout the area.

If this was the case, the distribution of the weedy species would be more irregular, rather than the pattern of weedy seeds being more prevalent in fields closer to the village structures . It is more probable that their existence in the flotation samples is due to their growth within the fields. These weeds’ strong presence in the fields suggests that they could have held a positive relationship with the villagers and were part of a complex agricultural system; at the very least the weedy species were tolerated within the fields. Recent excavations at the site encountered a roadway feature, a sacbe, leading south out of the village, likely beginning near the village plaza . ‘Sacbe’ is the Maya term for a white road; sacbeob were typically constructed using a white material such as plaster. In the case of Cerén, the causeway was covered with a layer of Tierra Blanca Joven, a white volcanic ash derived from Ilopango, and was about 2 m in width and elevated an average of 20 cm above the ground surface . The earthen sacbe found traveling through the maize agricultural fields could be interpreted as a boundary marker between agricultural plots. During the 2013 excavations, more than one maize field was often present within each operation, separated by the causeway . When the paleoethnobotanical remains recovered from the agricultural fields on either side of the causeway are compared, management practices differ between the western and eastern milpas. The western fields reveal a larger percentage of weedy species per sample than the eastern fields . Yet, the eastern fields exhibit a more diverse assemblage of weedy species compared to the western fields. This distinction could indicate varying levels of attention to weed removal in terms of time and intensity. This variation suggests that different individuals or households practiced varying agricultural management strategies, perhaps even distinct timings for planting, and that the earthen sacbe served as a boundary marker within the fields.

Perhaps the varying presence of weedy species between the eastern and western fields is also indicative of varying perceptions of what a “weed” is to the different farmers tending these fields. Since the western fields exhibits a more limited set of weedy species, the agriculturalists tending this space may have had a more limited set of weedy species that they considered to be of value. The weedy species in the western fields are more limited to those that would have been used as nutritional herbs and foodstuffs, whereas the eastern fields’ more diverse weed assemblage includes more species that have known medicinal applications. Sheets and Dixon characterize this milpa area as the intermediate agricultural zone at Cerén, which exhibits irregular fallowed areas and a great variability in cultivation strategies. Each household likely devoted varying amounts of time toward gardening and management of their fields, with weed removal taking place secondary to other tasks, if at all. The distribution of the most abundant herbaceous species in the assemblage, S. acmella , across the maize agricultural fields reveals a lower abundance of these achenes within the fields closer to the village center. Around roughly 40 m south of the village plaza , the maize agricultural fields begin to exhibit significantly lower counts of herbaceous species within the flotation samples. The species is still quite prevalent in this area, but only amounts to at most half of the quantity of achenes recovered from field contexts closest to the main village. This stark contrast could be indicative of a possible boundary within the milpa where different farmers were responsible for managing the fields to the north and south of Op. AI. Perhaps the farmer who managed the milpa closest to the plaza was more tolerant of wild and weedy plants compared to the one who managed the area farther away from the village. Variation in management of agricultural fields is also visible within the manioc fields south of the village. While the composition of the manioc beds differs greatly from both the home gardens and the milpas in that it was apparently monocultural, each manioc field was managed by individual cultivators and families, vertical growing system as evidenced by land use lines encountered in 2009 excavations . The land use lines were also aligned 30° east of north, just as the structures and milpas were. The community shares this dominant organizational scheme related to the importance of water coming from the river. Land was still subdivided into distinct plots with clear access by individual cultivators and households. Also found within the agricultural field excavations were quite large carbonized wood fragments from fallen branches in the middle of the maize fields, identified through anthracological analysis. The ancient Maya did not necessarily clear their land of all existing plants in order to grow their crops , so the practice of leaving some trees still standing in the middle of the fields should not be a surprise. We see at least two examples of large branches found within the agricultural fields, Terminalia buceras C. Wright, better known as the bullet tree , and Clusia sp., or what is known as matapalo .

These branches suggest that forest taxa were not completely eradicated in ancient Mesoamerican agricultural systems. T. buceras is considered a hard, durable wood so it is commonly used in construction, additionally tannin can be extracted from the bark . The black bark is used medicinally to treat skin eruptions . The wood charcoal from the T. buceras was located within Operation Y , located among the agricultural fields at Cerén and adjacent to a possible boundary marker between two maize fields. This marker was an eroded furrow that was not cultivated. Small eroded furrows throughout the milpas suggest a delineation of farming duties between the various households. This eroded surco could have possibly separated a northern from a southern section of the maize agricultural field. Since large quantities of T. buceras charcoal were recovered from this location, it is possible that the tree once stood near this location and could have also served as a boundary marker. The matapalo branches were recovered from Operation AD, again an agricultural context, and it lies just east of where the rubber tree branch fragments were found. The charred remains were recovered in a stratum of ash that would have been deposited after the Cerén inhabitants evacuated the village . Because of this, we know that these charred remains are part of a tree that remained standing until the very hot tephra [composing Unit 4] landed, with larger particles hotter than 575 °C . This species is known to have been used by Mesoamericans medicinally with the latex used to treat toothaches and the wood also has been used for construction and as a fuel source. The relationship between maize agricultural fields and forest systems is critical. Forest ecosystems attract many pollinators, so incorporating them within close proximity to agriculture, perhaps on the margins, can be extremely beneficial. Additionally, the accumulation of plant litter on forest floors can serve as fertilizer for agricultural systems and tree root systems can help prevent erosion . Ethnographic work in the Sierra Tarahumara shows that over seventy percent of food resources for communities in that region comes from forest ecosystems , so their incorporation into agricultural systems makes sense. Therefore, the indication of trees cultivated within the milpas at Cerén suggests that the ancient farmers valued the contributions of forest ecosystems within agriculture. Cerén’s agricultural fields were dynamic and incorporated a variety of species that were likely encouraged to grow and utilized for a variety of reasons, not just for food. It is possible that trees served as landmarks to differentiate land ownership and serve as a division between field plots.Farming is inherently knowledge intensive. This knowledge base is multi-faceted and context specific, and often informed by scientists, researchers, policymakers, government, extension agents as well as by farmers. While farmer knowledge is a critical component of this knowledge base, in the United States farmer knowledge has been widely underappreciated . Long considered “informal” knowledge, farmer knowledge is generally not regarded as scientifically valid and therefore infrequently recorded, whether formally or informally . Since the 1950s, due to an increase in knowledge standardization within production agriculture combined with widespread deskilling among farmers and farmworkers, farmer knowledge has become increasingly undervalued . However, farmers who practice alternative agriculture often amass an incredible wealth and depth of knowledge that integrates multiple ways of knowing and reflects diverse knowledge systems for thinking about evidence; perhaps most importantly, farmer knowledge is based in practice . If current trends in consolidation of land ownership, chemical-based intensification of agriculture, and standardization of farmer knowledge continue, local farmer knowledge may be endangered or permanently lost . Before this occurs, it is essential that we elevate the critical role of farmer knowledge and: 1) understand the key features of farmer knowledge; 2) understand the substance of farmer knowledge; and 3) systematically document farmer knowledge in specific local contexts.

Over this time the deportees’ own understanding of their situation also changed. While at first most considered their experience a personal one, beginning in the 70s there was an increasing recognition among Jews of the collective aspect of the genocide. In her text, Kofman struggles with the ambiguities of public and private identity, and with the seeming paradox of being both Jewish and French.The Spanish Civil War, fought between Republicans and Nationalist rebels from 1936 to 1939, left Spain exhausted, broke and bitter. While the two sides had neither the energy nor the resources to keep fighting, the war continued in some senses many years after its official end. Years after Franco’s Nationalist victory, there were still pockets of resistance in the form of the maquis, guerrilla fighters still living in hiding . Leftist leaders and intellectuals were in exile in Europe and Latin America, especially Mexico. After peace was declared, the victors continued to punish the losers with forced labor camps, imprisonment and executions. Exhumations of Nationalist soldiers and frequent memorial rallies held by the fascists continued to spark violence against the erstwhile Republicans, while the famine years created by Franco’s policy of economic independence also affected the former Republicans more acutely . In fact, Spain’s economic situation was actually worse in the years after the war than during. Rodoreda’s protagonist in El carrer de les Camèlies goes hungry in the postwar years, reflecting a reality for a large portion of Spain’s population. She also becomes a prostitute after her first lover, with whom she lived, is put in prison and then killed after the authorities learn, or claim to learn, that “durant la guerra havia estat d’un comité [republicà]” . [“he’d been on a [Republican] committee during the war” ] Prostitution was a common occupation for single or widowed women, especially Republican war widows, indoor grow trays who could not claim a pension . The Spanish population during the Franco years was ruled by fear. “The continually reinforced message,” writes Antonio Sánchez, “was that Franco and his regime meant peace, while liberal democracy meant chaos and death.

It followed therefore that for Spaniards to enjoy peace, they had to give up freedom, to which they were unsuited” . “Franco’s peace” meant that the population exchanged certain freedoms for the promise that the Civil War would not be repeated. During this time, there was a general feeling in the population that no good could come of talking about politics, or even thinking about it. Sometimes, in the text, the narrator is unable to give an explanation of why something might have happened, giving the impression of a universe in which things happen for no apparent reason. In real life during this time, people could not or chose not to talk about the real reasons for things like the famine, giving a similar impression of a universe in which cause and effect have an uneasy relationship. Memorialization of the Civil War began while Franco was still in power. In 1959 Franco finished construction on the Valle de los Caídos , a monument ostensibly constructed to heal the rift between Republicans and Nationalists after the civil war. Located near the Escorial palace outside of Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos includes a basilica topped with the largest cross in the world. In the surrounding valley, 40,000 mostly Nationalist soldiers are buried. Inside the Basilica are the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera, the President of the Falange party executed by the Republicans in 1936. Yet, built partially with forced labor by Republican political prisoners and dominated by massive religious icons, the Valle de los Caídos appears more as a monument to fascist victory than to national healing.2 Today, Spain is deliberating what to do with the Valle de los Caídos. Some wish to incorporate a museum that explains the Franco years and the history of the monument. Artist Leo Bassi has satirically suggested converting the site to “Francolandia” following the model of Disneyland .

Still others, notably those in the conservative Partido popular, wish to leave the site as it is. Rodoreda published El Carrer de las Camèlies in 1966, seven years after work was finished on the Valle de los Caídos. Franco was still in power and would be for another 9 years. In many ways, the war still had not ended. While the country was faring better economically, this success, combined with Franco’s anticommunist stance, made his regime more palatable to powers like the US and Britain, and Spain was attracting tourists . It seemed as though the world had decided to overlook Franco’s oppression if the country were safe, anticommunist and economically and politically stable. Reflecting this time of hopeless stasis, Rodoreda’s protagonist is continually looking backwards, unable to move forward in her life. By the 1960s, however, economic liberalization and the cultural changes brought by Spanish migration to other European countries did begin to loosen Franco’s grip on Spanish culture. Yet even after his death in 1975 it was a number of years before Spain could start a society-wide conversation about the civil war. A “pacto de silencio” [pact of silence] between political parties after Franco died, intended to help the country avoid another civil war, made a national conversation about the past impossible, while also leaving statues and other images of the Francoist regime intact. Tellingly, the first history of the civil war was written by an Englishman, Hugh Thomas3. Spain is still taking first steps toward memorializing the civil war and postwar periods, as well as toward thinking through how and what to memorialize. In 2007 Spain passed the Law of Historical Memory, a law even whose name is problematic that, on the one hand, offers support to those who want to identify those buried in mass graves and, on the other, also calls for the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings . Memory, it seems, also involves a measure of forgetting. The country is currently in the throes of a “memory boom”—a national hunger for information, testimony and memorials—that France experienced in the early 1970s and, at the same time, is grappling with how to treat the tangible monuments of Francoist rule.

One of the difficulties of creating a monument to a historical moment like the occupation of Paris is how to account for the diverse experiences of those who lived through it, while at the same time creating something that expresses collective experience. The monument must both acknowledge the uniqueness of individual experience and invite or allow a visitor to access those experiences to the extent that he or she can. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Sarah Kofman struggles with the same dilemma. On the one hand, she seeks to avoid making her experience representative of collective experience, since to do so would fail to acknowledge the specificity of others’ individual experiences. On the other hand, a purely personal text would be inaccessible to the reader with whom she would like to share her memories. In expressing this second concern, I am already using a spatial metaphor: Kofman’s concern is with creating a textual space that allows the reader to enter, but that is, at the same time, her private space. Kofman does not write directly about the purpose of her narrative or her vision of it. Her structural and thematic emphasis on space and its permeability, however, vertical grow racks for sale make an edifice of her text. If a monument, in the modern sense of the word, is the combination of memory and space, then we may say that Kofman has written a monument in text. A major, if not the major, theme of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is the unstable distinction between the public and private realms. On every level of the text, from her depiction of her life on Rue Ordener and Rue Labat to the chapter organization, Kofman closely examines how identity—hers and the reader’s—is not simply a question of how a private “me” relates to the outside world. The structure of the chapters, Kofman’s use of intertextuality and the content of her memoir all work together to create an intersubjective space, a “home” with a door open to the reader. Rue Ordener Rue Labat chronicles Kofman’s experiences as a child during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Rue Ordener and Rue Labat are two streets in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, separated by Rue Marcadet. The 18th had a large population of Eastern European Jews at least since the first pogroms there in 1880. . According to a special census ordered by the German authorities of Jews in the occupied zone, by 1940 the 18th arrondissement had the second largest Jewish population in Paris. and Jarrassé. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman mentions none of this historical context. In this text, Rue Ordener and Rue Labat define spatial and temporal zones specific to Kofman’s experience. Rue Ordener is the spatial representation of her life with her family before the occupation, and, after her father’s arrest and deportation, a symbol of her mother’s influence. It is the zone of Judaism, family and private life. Before his arrest, Kofman’s life on Rue Ordener was conducted in Yiddish and revolved around the Jewish rituals led by her father, a rabbi. Rue Labat, where she and her mother flee to escape the Gestapo and French authorities who had already deported her father, defines the zone of “mémé”, a beautiful gentile woman who hides Kofman and her mother for the duration of the war4. There, life is no longer ordered by her father and the Jewish rituals he conducted. Instead, mémé’s Christian, French way of life structures Kofman’s experience. Rue Labat is the zone of Christianity and life in public: while her mother must hide in a back bedroom, Kofman can leave the apartment on Rue Labat as the supposed Christian daughter of mémé. Over the course of the war, mémé gains a larger and larger place in Kofman’s mind and heart. She showers her with love and attention, even sewing her new clothes. Mémé also introduces Kofman to Jewish thinkers like Freud and Bergson, and, more generally, to an academic and intellectual milieu she did not previously have access to. Despite all of the horrors of the war and occupation, Kofman remembers it partially as an idyll that allows mémé and her to enjoy one another’s company without interference . [Now I even dreaded the end of the war! ] After the liberation of Paris, Kofman returns to life with her mother and siblings and pines for mémé. Life with her mother during this time is difficult. Her mother beats her, withholds food and cuts the electricity at night to prevent her from studying, yet Kofman manages to go off to the university. The text ends with her reflections on mémé’s death. I mentioned above that we may conceive of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a meditation on the uneasy relationship between public and private. The sections of bombed-out buildings that appear in the text are emblematic of Kofman’s experience of the dissolution of the distinction between these realms. The next day we went out to see the damage. Almost all the nearby apartment buildings had been destroyed, and the sight of the ruins—only a few sections of wall still standing—made a great impression on me”] A single section of wall shows not just the exterior of the building, but also the interior dwelling. Without the roof and other walls, the private life of an individual or a family is on display, visible from the street. For Kofman in occupied Paris, many of the things that were previously private become public. Religion, for instance, is traditionally a private affair in France. After the revolution, French people became citoyens or citoyennes, shorn of religion and ethnicity in the eyes of the state. During the occupation, this normally private identity was literally brought into the public sphere, symbolized by the yellow stars sewn on Jews’ overcoats for appearance in public. The opposite also occurs in Kofman’s story: what was formerly public becomes private. Eating is a public act, and keeping kosher is an act of community with other Jews. In Kofman’s story, dietary rules become secret, private information. In order to survive, Kofman must not reveal her unwillingness to disobey those rules.

Potentially leachable soil nitrate levels were calculated for each field using nitrate concentrations from the top 15cm at the harvest sampling event, which occurred within the first three weeks of harvest. Though the plants continued to grow for the duration of the harvest, it is unlikely that nitrate from the top 15cm were used due to the soil’s low water content, and no precipitation or irrigation occurred for the duration of harvest. Bulk density in the top 15cm was assumed to be 1.2 g soil/cm3 as experimental bulk density was measured with 1m of soil and likely overestimated the bulk density at the surface of the soil.Soil sub-samples taken from 0-15cm and 30-60cm at midseason were set aside for DNA analysis. In addition to the experimental plots, samples were also taken from both depths at the nearest irrigated crop production areas and non-cultivated soils, such as hedgerows, field sides, etc. . Gloves were worn while taking these samples and the auger was cleaned thoroughly with a wire brush between each sample. Roots were also collected from one plant per plot and were dug out using a trowel from the top 15 cm of soil. These samples were stored on-site in an ice-filled cooler and transferred to a -80 degree C freezer immediately upon returning to the lab . Roots were later washed in PBS Buffer/Tween20 and ground using liquid N.Root DNA was extracted using a NucleoSpin Plant II kit . Soil DNA was extracted using a DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit . Two technical replicates were extracted for each sample for a total of 0.5g of soil and 0.2g of roots. All samples were sent to the University of Minnesota Genomics Center for sequencing using ITS2 primers.The ITS2 rRNA region was selected for amplification and fungal community analysis. This region has been successfully utilized in recent AMF community studies.

Though AMF-specific primers exist , we chose the more general ITS2 fungal primers for several key reasons. First, in the field, SSU primers detect more taxa in nonGlomeraceae families but give lower resolution in the Glomeraceae family. Because the four species in our inoculant are in the Glomeraceae family and this family is dominant in agricultural systems and clay soils, cannabis vertical farming we prioritized species resolution in Glomeraceae over other families. More broadly, the higher variability in the ITS2 region can lead to more unassigned taxa, but does not run as much of a risk that distinct taxa will be lumped together. Third, and of particular importance in our root samples, these primers are better able to select for fungal over plant material than other ITS primer options. Finally, ITS2 allowed us to also examine the broader fungal community in our samples, whereas SSU and LSU options are AMFspecific and cannot be used to characterize other fungi.Qiime2 was used for all bioinformatics. Reads without a primer were discarded, and primer/adapter sequences were trimmed off reads using cutadapt. Samples were denoised with DADA2, and taxonomy was assigned using the UNITE version 9 dynamic classifier for all eukaryotes. Taxa outside of the fungal kingdom were removed from all samples and SRS normalization was used to reduce each sample to 7190 reads. 7190 was chosen as a cutoff due to a natural break where no samples fell between 4000 and 7190 reads. Because depths below 4000 retained less than 90% of sample richness, 7190 was chosen, retaining over 95% of richness. The 22 samples out of 301 samples that fell below this cutoff were discarded. These samples included all 5 blanks, 3 samples from field 1A , 4 samples from field 1B , 2 samples from field 2 , 4 samples from field 3 , and 4 samples from field 4 .In addition to the variables of interest, each model had a random effect of field and block within field.

Yields were modeled using the total marketable fruit weight harvested from each plot at each harvest point, while BER was modeled using the proportion of fruits that were classified as non-marketable due to BER from each plot at each harvest point. Yield models and BER models treated weekly harvests as repeated measures, adding random effects of plot within block and harvest number. For hurdle models, random effects were treated as correlated between the conditional and hurdle portions of the model. Because PDW was measured at three time points, the initial PDW model treated the time points as a repeated measure and added a random effect of plot within block. However, given the nonlinear relationship between PDW and fruit quality described by farmers, further models used only PDW at the 6th harvest when fruit quality was at its peak and therefore did not include any repeated measures.The initial model for each outcome variable included plant spacing and PC1 for soil texture , along with PC1 for GWC and PCs 1 and 2 for nutrients at all four depths , as well as the interaction between texture and GWC. In this initial model, only one depth showed a statistically clear relationship with each outcome variable . To improve model interpretability, we then replaced the two PC’s from the depth of interest with the scaled transplant values of nitrate, ammonium and phosphate at that depth, also adding the ratio of nitrate to ammonium and an ammonium-squared term to allow for non-linearities in outcome response to nitrogen levels. Because all nutrient variables had variance inflation factors over 5 in this model , we dropped nutrient PC’s for each depth that was not of interest, leaving only the transplant nutrient values at the depth of interest in the model.

All nutrient VIF values were below 5 in the resulting model. Reported models were run using unscaled nutrient values for ease of interpretation. Transplant nutrient levels were used rather than midseason/harvest both because they are the most relevant to farmer management and because their interpretation is more clear than later time points, when low levels can either indicate lower initial nutrient levels, or that plants have more thoroughly depleted those nutrients.Two fungal community descriptors were calculated for each soil depth and root fungal community: the Shannon index and the count of OTUs in the class Sordariomycetes, which was identified as an indicator of dry farm soils . Counts were scaled, and both community descriptors were added to the final model described in the “Variable selection” section to determine the impact of fungal community structure while controlling for water, nutrients, and texture. Because the metrics between roots and the two depths of soil fungal communities were highly correlated, three separate models were run: one with both fungal community metrics from 0-15cm, one with metrics from 30-60 cm, and one with root community metrics.After preliminary modeling with principal components , cannabis drying rack we determined that nutrients at 60-100cm had a statistically meaningful influence on yields and PDW, while nutrients at 30-60cm showed an influence on BER. We then regressed inoculation and nutrient levels from these depths of interest against each harvest outcome variable–yields, proportion BER and percent dry weight–while controlling for other soil and field characteristics , as well as random effects; see Table 6 and “model structure” above. We also added two fungal metrics to each model . Sordariomycetes counts at 30-60cm, a signature of dry farmed soils, showed a clear relationship with fruit quality, after controlling for all variables in Table 6 . Full results for each model can be found in the supplement. Where indicated, significant and positive coefficients in the hurdle portions of models signify that the outcome is more likely to be zero. Specifically, BER was less likely to occur in plots with higher ammonium levels , and Sordariomycetes counts were associated with plots where no marketable tomatoes were harvested on a given day .Of the AMF taxa that were identified to the species level in soils and roots, none was a species present in the inoculum. After removing samples that did not contain any AMF taxa, PERMANOVAs using Bray distances showed a statistically clear difference between community composition in inoculation vs. control roots but not bulk soils when stratifying by field and controlling for water, nutrients, and texture. No AMF taxa were significantly enriched in the inoculation or control condition. Taken together, these AMF community results suggest that the inoculum shifted the root fungal community at transplant and did not persist in bulk soils for the 9 weeks before DNA samples were taken.A PERMANOVA using Bray distances showed statistically clear differences in fungal community composition in irrigated, dry farm, and non-cultivated bulk soils as well as communities at 0-15cm and 30-60cm when stratifying by field and controlling for water, texture and their interaction, which also significantly differentiated between communities . Though dry farm, non-cultivated and irrigated soils each had more unique taxa than taxa shared with another location, dry farm and non-cultivated soils each had nearly twice as many unique taxa as taxa shared with a single other location, while irrigated soils had more taxa shared with dry farm soils than unique taxa . Abundance analysis showed that there were 466 taxa that significantly discriminated between the three soil locations. We then set the LDA threshold to 3.75 to highlight only the most stark differences, resulting in 13 discriminative taxa . All of the taxa identified as being enriched in dry farm soils were sub-taxa of Sordariomycetes, a fungal class that is highly variable in terms of morphology and function. We therefore identified Sordariomycetes as a dry farm indicator taxa, or a sort of dry farm “signature”.

We included the Sordariomycetes count in models as an indication of how much the soil had shifted towards a dry farm-influenced community . AMF taxa were notably absent as discriminative taxa and PERMANOVA did not show a difference in AMF community composition between the two depths, suggesting that AMF are not limited in their dispersal down to 60cm59.After identifying Sordariomycetes as an indicator taxa for dry farming, we further explored whether multiple years of dry farming enhance soils’ dry farm signature by comparing fields that had not received external water inputs for multiple years and those which had received regular external water inputs the summer prior to the study. The extent to which Sordariomycetes were enhanced was measured by the difference between counts in dry farm and irrigated soils in the study year . We found that fields that had not received regular external water inputs the previous year showed a significantly higher difference in Sordariomycetes counts between dry farm and irrigated soils , indicating that multiple years without irrigation enhance a soil’s dry farm signature.On-farm research across seven commercially managed dry farm fields allowed us to observe tomato, nutrient and soil fungal community dynamics in situ, opening a window into how dry farm systems function on working farms. Given the long-term specialized management that farmers have tailored to their dry farm practice and fields, this on-farm approach facilitated results that reflect this management paradigm across the region and are therefore broadly applicable to dry farm management choices and outcomes on the Central Coast of California.Marketable yields per plot surprisingly did not correlate with plant spacing, which runs counter to current common wisdom in extension publications. Because spacing ranged from 15-48 inches between plants , relatively consistent yields on a per-plant basis contributed to a wide range in yields on a per-area basis . As there are very few irrigated tomatoes in the Central Coast region due to its cool, moist climate, it is difficult to compare dry farm yields to what might be found in an irrigated system in the same region. However, in 2015 , the statewide average fresh market tomato harvest was 39 T/ha, a number that is surprisingly on par with the average dry farm yield in this study . Because there is a clear trade off between yield and fruit quality–the highest yielding fields also had the lowest fruit quality, and increasing ammonium concentrations improve fruit quality while lowering yields–it may be difficult to increase yields above the state average while still charging consumers a premium for dry farm quality.

Amidst an increasingly industrialized food system, farmers and activists the world over have advocated and struggled to move agricultural production towards diversified farming systems. Agroecology–a form of agriculture based in small-scale, thought-intensive, diversified farming systems and the socio-political movements necessary to defend them and advocate for their wider adoption–has emerged as a combination of science, practice, and movement that can lead farming systems towards ecological, economic, and social sustainability. As climate, economic, and political injustices accelerate in the food system, transitions towards agroecology are increasingly urgent; however, these transitions have been slow to gain traction in dominant political and economic regimes. The current era of climate change is creating shocks that open windows for food systems transition, forcing farmers, researchers, and policy makers to consider new approaches to farming and food production. My own work has focused on water scarcity, which is perhaps the most salient climate shock in California where my home institution is located, and a key agricultural concern across the nation and globe. In California, the 2020–2022 drought caused the estimated loss of 15,000 jobs and $3 billion in agricultural output, vertical racking system and followed a similarly devastating drought in 2011- 2016, calling attention to an urgent need to address future water scarcity in the state. Meanwhile, 60% of US farms experienced drought in 2012, with extreme drought in the Midwestern US causing price spikes and yield declines, followed by extensive flooding in 2019.

In response, local, state, and national advocacy groups and policymakers have begun to call for and implement policy with the intention of making farm systems more resilient to water shortages. For example, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California now calls for groundwater basin water budgets to be balanced by 2042; however, there is considerable debate surrounding how to achieve such a goal. Given the complexities of the systems in which these policies operate, implementation can be difficult, and even the best-intended policies can act to either create or curtail opportunities for transitions towards agroecology. In my own work, I have seen climate-motivated policies in the US–in this case the bio-fuel mandate–lead farmers in the Midwest towards degradative soil practices, while farmers in California respond to water scarcity by growing the tastiest tomatoes chefs have ever encountered. As farmers navigate a complex web of physical, biological, political, and economic environments, they arrive at a wide array of outcomes that reflect both a unique local context and influences that act on entire regions and nations. Yet current economic and political structures have overwhelmingly led US farmers to make choices that have moved agricultural towards the input intensive, large-scale production that now defines the country’s dominant agriculture. First, what are the farming practices that actually improve farms’ capacity to adapt to water scarcity without jeopardizing farmer livelihoods?

And second, can policies support an agroecological transition towards these practices that does not allow their cooptation towards an industrial agriculture–and conversely, what policies are leading our country towards input-intensive industrialized systems even in the face of changing climates? These questions play out in many ways across different agricultural landscapes, and I do not begin to tackle them in their entirety. Instead this dissertation explores both of these questions in two distinct systems: large-scale corn-based rotations in the US Midwest, and tomato dry farming in small-scale, diversified operations on the northern edge of California’s Central Coast region. In my attempts to answer these questions, I have tried to use the tools at my disposal to center farmers and their experience, wisdom, and intimate knowledge of the lands they work. From participatory research, to farmer interviews, to simply trying to understand farmers as complex actors in complex systems, my work has led me to see farmers as adept scientists, and I hope to honor and complement their skills with a few of my own. Given farmers’ limited access to time and resources, I have used mapping, lab analyses, field data collection, and statistics to help farmers answer the questions they find most pressing and garner the policy support needed to let diversified farming systems thrive. I begin in my first chapter, Biophysical and policy factors predict simplified crop rotations in the US Midwest, by asking what policy and environmental factors push farmers towards diversifying vs. simplifying their crop rotations in the US Midwest. After the 2012 drought, there is more reason than ever to shift this historically homogenized, highly input intensive agricultural region towards more complex rotations, which promote soil health and stabilize yields in times of environmental stress including drought. However, while soil health benefits give farmers every reason to explore complex rotations, there has been a continued trend towards rotation simplification in the region over the past century.

I therefore explored how policy was reshaping this system, asking how top-down policy pressures combine with biophysical conditions to create fine-scale simplification patterns that threaten the quality and long-term productivity of the United States’ most fertile soils. Given the availability of public, spatially explicit data, I developed a novel indicator of crop rotational complexity and applied it to 1.5 million fields across the US Midwest, using bootstrapped linear mixed models to regress field-level rotational complexity against biophysical and policy-driven factors. The second and third chapters explore water resiliency in California, using tomato dry farming in the Central Coast region as a case study. Dry farming–a management system that relies on diversified farming practices to build soil water holding capacity and fertility–allows farmers to grow crops with little to no irrigation and has quickly garnered interest from farmers and policymakers as an alternative to the irrigation-intensive farming that is nearly ubiquitous in the rest of the state. While dry farming is an ancient practice with rich histories in many regions, perhaps most notably the Hopi people in Northeast Arizona, vegetable dry farming emerged more recently in California, with growers first marketing dry farm tomatoes as such in the Central Coast region in the early 1980’s. In a lineage that likely traces back to Italian and Spanish growers, dry farming on the Central Coast relies on winter rains to store water in soils that plants can then access throughout California’s rainfree summers, indoor grow facility allowing farmers to grow produce with little to no external water inputs. While this system holds great interest and promise for farmers in California, no peer-reviewed research has been published to date on vegetable dry farming in the state. In my second chapter, Deep nutrients and fungal communities support tomato fruit yield and quality in dry farm management systems, I collaborated with farmers to identify and answer key management questions in the dry farm community. This participatory-based process allowed me to build relationships with farmers and begin to coalesce a community of practice that farmers were excited to connect to. As advocacy groups begin to shine a light on dry farming as a potential key to California’s water resilient future, it felt crucial to engage with the farmers who champion this system to collectively come to a deeper understanding of how dry farming functions and the farming practices that can best support its success. Growers were primarily concerned with fruit yield and quality, with fruit quality being of particular interest due to the quality-based price premiums that farmers rely on when growing in a region with some of the highest agricultural land values in the nation.

Managing soils to promote quality and yields presents a unique challenge in dry farm systems, as the surface soils that farmers typically target for fertility management in irrigated systems dry down quickly to a point where roots will likely have difficulty accessing nutrients and water. As deficit irrigation and drought change microbial community composition in agricultural and natural systems, farmers were also interested in how dry farm management might shift fungal communities, and if that in turn would improve tomato harvest outcomes. Beyond general shifts in fungal communities, farmers were specifically curious about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculants, which are increasingly available from commercial sellers. Recent research has shown that AMF can help plants tolerate water stress, and that inoculation can improve harvest outcomes in some agricultural systems. Farmers therefore wanted to test commercial AMF inoculants’ potential benefits in the dry farm context.It is difficult to imagine what this dissertation would have looked like without the collaboration, mentorship, and friendship of my advisor, Timothy Bowles. Working with Tim has been one of the greatest joys, privileges, and teachers of my career, and his influence can be seen in every corner of the ideas and approaches in these pages. Tim’s example is one I want to follow wherever I go, whether it be his drive to include justice and equity in conversations of science, his thoughtful and generous approach to any collaboration, or his commitment to honoring family, friends, art, and his own wellbeing alongside the demands of an academic lifestyle. My thanks also go to Todd Dawson and Eoin Brodie, who generously served on my committee, leant me all sorts of fun field and lab equipment, invited me to lab meetings, and provided valuable gut checks all along the research process. Todd’s enthusiasm for understanding plant-AMF symbioses has been contagious, and I so appreciate our conversations and the excitement they breathed back into me when I was mired in research logistics. Eoin continues to surprise me with his ability to glance at my results and understand them better than I do, and my work is certainly better for it. Little of this research would have been possible without Jim Leap. As far as I’m aware, Jim knows every dry farmer in the state of California, and he connected me to nearly every farmer I worked with. I’m honored to consider him a friend and a mentor, and delighted every time I get to visit his farm. Jim is limitless in his capacity to teach and learn about diversified farm management, and also in his ability to guide me towards joy in this work. Of course literally none of the dry farm work in this dissertation would have been possible without the brilliant farmers I was able to collaborate with. Though of course I won’t out them all here for privacy reasons, I hope they know that they are both the reason I do this work, and the reason I can do this work. Of all the farms I have gotten to connect to over the course of my dissertation, I want to give Brisa Ranch an extra dose of gratitude. Verónica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, Cole MazariegosAnastassiou, and Claire Woodard have taught me what agroecology can look like, and their farm has been the inspiration for much of the research I have done in this PhD. It was always such a gift to stop by after a long field day and remember what this work is all about. The undergraduates I worked with in the lab and field were also a source of inspiration. Rose Curley, Alex Dhond, Melanie Rodríguez, Javier Matta, and Bethany Andoko were at my side for the work that has built the foundation of my research. Amidst sample collection and analysis that at times seemed interminable, you kept me afloat with your careful diligence and enthusiasm, and allowed me to grow with you as we explored our way through the research process. My gratitude also goes to the many other undergraduates whose work made this research possible: Karly Ortega, Grace Santos, Yordi Gil-Santos, Amiri Taylor, Moe Sumino, Gisel De La Cerda, and Joey Mann. Also at my side throughout this work were the members of the Berkeley Agroecology Lab: Cole Rainey, Kenzo Esquivel, Miguel Ochoa, Paige Stanley, Aidee Guzman, Ansel Klein, Hannah Waterhouse, Janina Dierks, Franz Bender, Maria Mooshammer, Khondoker Dastogeer, Jennifer Thompson, Kait Libbey, and Kangogo Sogomo have created a community that I could rely on, learn from, and grow with. From before day one, Cole has shown up for me as a friend, sounding board, teacher, and mood-lifter, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the trajectory of my career is better for their influence. Kenzo is a joy to work, cook, organize, and make music with, and his friendship has buoyed me along this ride. Ben Goldstein, though not technically part of the lab, holds a similar place in my heart, and has become an invaluable colleague as well as friend.