Cannabis Grow

In framing garden loss as a lack of community control, Soil Generation links the struggle to preserve urban agriculture to broader concerns that are reflected in local civic conventions, and also highlights the legacies of colonialism and racism that have displaced and oppressed Black and Brown people, immigrants, and indigenous communities in Philadelphia and beyond going back centuries. With this critical perspective, Soil Generation called for changes in the distribution of power—not only changes in the city’s land use policy, but also in the relationships that cohered among local community groups and large nonprofit organizations. As of 2021, this effort is ongoing. Soil Generation has been integral in bringing the voices of urban growers directly to public officials, remaining active in advocating for more garden preservation in the Land Bank’s biennial strategic plans and organizing a public hearing with City Council dedicated to urban agriculture in 2016. At that hearing, impressed with the diversity of testimonials—both the demographics of the speakers and the reasons they expressed for valuing urban agriculture—council members committed to pay more attention to the issue. The current process underway to formalize urban agriculture planning in the city is the product of Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture through a rights- and justice-based framing, and the dynamics of this process are illustrative of how Soil Generation’s outsider status and social movement strategies have pushed the city to go further in revising land use policy than city officials would have through insider advocacy efforts alone.

In 2019, the city hired Ash Richards, a city planner with strong ties to Soil Generation, for the new position of Director of Urban Agriculture in the Parks and Recreation Department. Later that year, vertical grow the city began a notably bottom-up process to develop an urban agriculture plan. Soil Generation, along with design firm Interface Studio LLC, won a competitive Request for Proposal process to aid in the public meetings and plan development . The first public meeting was held in December 2019, and the next was held up by the onset of the pandemic. The second, virtual public meeting began in February 2021, delayed in part because of time taken to bring Soil Generation and Interface Studios together for “facilitation, education and healing” . Here, Soil Generation’s leader seeks to emphasize the organization’s legitimacy as “the community experts” with genuine relationships and knowledge of the needs of urban growers and people of color . Soil Generation’s framing around racial power dynamics speaks to the historically rooted resentment building in the civic conventions of residents of color in the city, and this framing is helping to mobilize a broader shift in the culture of decision-making across the city. According to my interviewees, Soil Generation and its allies have initiative similar conversations in groups such as the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. In comparison to Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s civic conventions have included more cynicism about government and less expectation that city officials will be responsive to the desires of ordinary citizens. While these civic conventions have limited the opportunities for gardeners across the city to gain public resources or legitimacy for their sites, they have also created an opening for social movement mobilization to challenge a dynamic that has left much of the public dissatisfied. Soil Generation has sought organizational legitimacy as a representative of community interests—not as a service provider, but as an organizer of the social movement seeking policy and cultural change on behalf of the city’s Black and Brown growers.

The urban agriculture movement that Soil Generation is leading in Philadelphia is framing the problem of garden loss in terms of structural inequalities and unexamined cultures of control that have done more than just displace gardens. Their efforts are thus an important and energized node within a broader movement to evolve the city’s politics, policies, and culture to become more equitable and responsive to the needs of poor residents and people of color. Soil Generation’s framing around equity and community control of land use represents a potentially powerful augmentation in the legitimacy of urban agriculture from the narrative that PHS developed regarding urban agriculture’s potential role in neighborhood economic development, providing a stronger rationale for the long-term preservation of community gardens threatened by changing economic conditions. Overall, relative to the efforts at garden preservation in Milwaukee and Seattle, the social movement Soil Generation has built likely holds the greatest potential for achieving structural change beyond garden preservation.Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle’s civic conventions hold the highest expectation of citizens’ participation in the political process. Long-held values for bottom-up rather than top-down governance have supported the establishment of a dense infrastructure for civic participation. Yet even with all of the participatory infrastructure they have achieved, Seattle residents remain distrustful of elites, and ideas about the need for active political engagement are still widely shared. The city’s political opportunity structure has offered numerous opportunities for residents to assert their interest in community gardens and to draw public resources for administration, site improvements, and even land acquisition; at the same time, the city’s discursive opportunity structure has enabled social movement mobilization through a framing of the need to safeguard public interests from potential government abuse.

Seattle’s civic conventions around challenging elite control through political engagement have deep roots in the city’s history . More recently, the 1999 Battle in Seattle—mass protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization that brought together labor unions, environmentalists, and other civil society groups—made international news and soured the public on the mayor at the time due to his heavy-handed response. Seattle residents have organized resistance to more local political concerns in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, with campaigns to change the municipal government’s direction and increase its accountability. The officials elected under these campaigns were integral in creating and supporting the P-Patch Program, providing public funding and land for an activity that residents wanted to enjoy. Civic conventions in Seattle include ideas about organizing to challenge elites in order to assert resident interests, and also about neighborhood-level governance. The public is used to local initiatives and expects that residents in a particular neighborhood will be able to participate in decisions about their community . These conventions have formalized into civic infrastructure such as a large, active network of neighborhood associations; district councils that represent hyper-local interests in conversation with the city; and a Department of Neighborhoods that is tasked specifically with responding to resident interests. As described on its website, the Department of Neighborhoods exists to “provide resources and opportunities for community members to build strong communities and improve their quality of life. Through our programs and services, we meet people where they are and help neighbors develop a stronger sense of place, build closer ties, rolling grow table and engage with their community and city government” . The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods oversees a Neighborhood Matching Fund, similar to Milwaukee’s CIP grants, that awards public resources to proposals that engage the community in making improvements that residents desire. Civic conventions in Seattle dictating an active, ongoing role for the public to participate in governance have contributed to the creation of robust infrastructure for asserting and actualizing resident interests. Both the ideas and infrastructure in Seattle’s civic conventions have benefitted the PPatch community gardens and advocates’ efforts to preserve them. With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, the Neighborhood Matching Fund has proven invaluable for building, improving, and legitimizing the city’s community gardens . The infrastructure of neighborhood associations and district councils was tapped in the 1990s both to legitimize residents’ desire to save a threatened garden and to mobilize the public around Initiative 42, a policy that effectively makes permanent all of the gardens on public land . Ideas about challenging elite control and respecting neighborhoods no doubt helped galvanize the public to support Initiative 42, which garnered almost 24,000 signatures in a matter of months. The flow of resident input in governance through structured channels, such as from neighborhood associations to district councils to the Department of Neighborhoods or from residents participating in the formalized neighborhood planning process of the 1990s, has made clear the widespread appreciation for P-Patch community gardens and legitimized their continued presence. Overall, Seattle has very strong civic conventions supporting citizens’ role in governance, creating numerous opportunities for garden advocates to both provide input directly to city officials and mobilize the public when more pressure was needed.Comparing against Milwaukee and Philadelphia, data from interviews and documents demonstrate the prominence of participatory civic conventions in Seattle. Codes for neighborhood association, citizen advisory committee, bottom-up governance, citizen voice, elected official accountability, neighborhood planning, and public hearing were all the most frequent in Seattle documents and interviews out of the three cities I investigated.

Civic ideas and infrastructure have supported public engagement in governance decisions related to PPatches and also the assertion of how much use-value residents get from the gardens. Furthermore, as the P-Patch Program expanded over time, encompassing more land and requiring more public resources for administration, the infrastructure created by Seattle’s civic conventions facilitated feedback that helped program leaders and garden advocates adjust their operations in accordance with the wider public interest and thereby insulate the program from any challenges to its legitimacy. Aligning gardening sites, activities, and communication with widespread values and concerns ensured that the P-Patch program remained popular and continued to receive public resources over time. Since the program’s inception, P-Patch leaders had invited city officials to “harvest banquets” and other opportunities for positive press. In the 1990s, leaders of the nonprofit supporting the P-Patches encouraged gardeners to significantly increase their contact with the city’s elected officials beyond the annual meeting. They did so in order to defend the program’s budget from cutbacks in 1991, secure a resolution expressing support for P-Patches as a land use in 1992, resist the removal of two threatened gardens in 1995 and 1996, and achieve the passage of Initiative 42 as an ordinance in 1997 . As the P-Patch program grew and increasingly formalized its operations, P-Patchers articulated the benefits of their program in terms of broadly shared values, taking advantage of another discursive opportunity structure that Seattle’s culture presented. Many gardeners made donations to food banks, and in the 1980s the program administrators began tracking contributions. When one of the program’s most active volunteers Wendy McClure organized a produce collection and delivery system called Lettuce Link, the reported food bank donations gradually increased. In editions of the P-Patch Post newsletter from the 1990s, gardeners were asked to measure and report the total pounds of produce they donated if they weren’t giving through Lettuce Link. The regular column for requesting help and equipment also noted the need for produce scales to ensure that donations could be weighed and tracked. In these ways the gardeners’ food donation activities were rationalized over time, and along with publicized events like the Day of Giving that began in 1994, the quantified donations helped build legitimacy for the P-Patch program as one channeling civic action to help low-income people. In addition to their food bank donations, P-Patch administrators and volunteers demonstrated their program’s commitment to low-income Seattleites by tracking how many low-income participants the program had, and by working with residents of the city’s public housing to build gardens specifically for them. Especially once the program hit political turbulence in the mid-1990s, when gardeners mobilized the public in a somewhat confrontational strategy to preserve threatened gardens, city officials scrutinized the extent to which the P-Patch Program was serving a truly public purpose. The program’s leadership and its most vocal advocates were homogenously white and middle- or upper-middle class, so opponents of the program may have wished to paint it as a giveaway to already-privileged people. However, surveys of the gardeners in the mid-1990s showed a diverse constituency, with higher percentages of renters, low- and moderate-income people, and people of color than the city’s overall demographics. The program’s demonstrated diversity, and the addition of an initiative specifically benefitting immigrant gardeners in public housing, served to align the program with the value of multiculturalism important to many Seattle voters at the time. In order to ensure that the gardens continued to serve the public equally, officials in the Department of Neighborhoods worked with the program’s advocates to prioritize building new gardens in underserved areas of the city . Over time, this has meant that the distribution of P-Patches across the city is genuinely more equitable in terms of access for low-income residents.

Soil Generation was formed in conscious opposition to the PHS modus operandi that had long been the public face of urban agricultural activities in Philadelphia. Seeking its legitimacy from Black and Brown growers and community members, Soil Generation has worked to put forth a narrative that gives more voice to growers of color, who have long made up the majority of the city’s community gardeners and urban farmers. They have also taken a more critical approach to the city’s land use policy, working to reframe political struggles around urban agriculture in terms of equity and community control rather than economic development and revitalization. In Philadelphia, more than in Milwaukee or Seattle, stark contrasts are evident in the way urban agriculture is framed by different organizations , which points to Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture in a way that proves more resilient in the face of development pressure. Codes for social cohesion and fairness, justice, equity were not applied at all to PHS documents; they were only applied in the Philadelphia case when brought up by gardeners testifying at public hearings or by Soil Generation as they advocated for policies such as the Land Bank . PHS did sometimes emphasize social benefits that community gardens offered; however, these social benefits tended more toward characteristics that city officials and elite philanthropic funders would appreciate, such as skill acquisition , self-reliance , flood table and a sense of pride in one’s neighborhood . While these social benefits are undoubtedly important, they are less reflective of what gardeners themselves have found valuable about the city’s community gardens.

In Philadelphia’s urban agriculture movement today, PHS looms large because of its long history, its citywide reach, and its well-funded public relations; nevertheless, the organization is seen as problematic by a portion of the city’s gardeners because it is more representative of white, professionalized, and upper-class conceptions of urban agriculture than those of the majority of Philadelphia’s urban growers. As PHS adapted its Philadelphia Green program over time in pursuit of available funding, the organization increasingly legitimized urban agriculture for its blight-removal and neighborhood revitalization potential, a framing which has resonated well with city officials and the wider public and which has shaped the big policy victories that urban agriculture advocates have achieved. PHS’s emphasis on greening as a tool for neighborhood redevelopment has also brought the negative effects of gentrification to the forefront of the public conversation around urban agriculture. PHS is not leading the charge to preserve gardens or counteract the negative effects of gentrification, but their activities have indirectly influenced organizing and mobilization in the city . Of all the organizations in the three case-cities, Soil Generation is arguably doing the most to challenge the logic of the growth machine and assert the interests of marginalized residents in its efforts to mobilize a social movement and secure permanent gardens.In Seattle, community gardens have gained a notable degree of site security because of social movement activities in the 1990s; while the garden advocates achieved virtual permanence for many of the city’s gardens, they did so in part by appealing to growth machine logic in framing the value of gardens .

The case of Seattle’s P-Patch Program, and the volunteer-led nonprofit advocacy organization that arose alongside it, demonstrates the clearest example of how an organization was able to pivot from community-based service provision to movement organizing , while largely maintaining its own legitimacy and augmenting the legitimacy of urban agriculture with a more compelling narrative about its potential benefits. The Seattle P-Patch Program was founded in 1973, when the City of Seattle stepped in to pay the property taxes of Rainie Picardo , who had been allowing neighborhood residents to garden individual plots on his former truck farm. The $950 expense from the city’s general fund was legally justified as support for residents’ recreation, and Council members advocating for the move also argued that it was a unique opportunity to help needy families feed themselves during an economic downturn. In 1974, due to the program’s huge success, the Picardo Patch was joined by ten additional community garden sites in different neighborhoods; since then, the P-Patch Program has continued its expansion to now include nearly 90 gardens citywide. At first, the program was administered by the Department of Human Resources because of its goal of feeding people. In 1997, the program was moved to the Department of Neighborhoods with the recognition that one of its primary effects was to build community among residents who wouldn’t otherwise know each other. In the Department of Neighborhoods, the P-Patch Program thrived under the leadership of department director Jim Diers. With a background in Alinsky-style organizing, Diers took to heart the department’s mission to act on residents’ ideas rather than imposing initiatives from the top down.

With Diers leading the Department of Neighborhoods, new gardens were added in many neighborhoods where residents wanted them, and existing gardens made improvements that increased their appeal for the non-gardening public. Diers provided steady leadership that saw the program grow and become more popular, but the framing to legitimize urban agriculture in Seattle had been established in earlier decades through the organizing efforts of volunteers leading the P-Patch nonprofit. Only a few years after the city government established the P-Patch Program, gardeners organized a nonprofit that has continued to operate alongside the program and fulfills functions that the public entity cannot take on. Originally named the P-Patch Advisory Council and now called GROW Northwest, the P-Patch nonprofit has had a different structure and has undertaken different initiatives over the years. Some of its primary, long-running activities have been advocating for favorable municipal policy, fundraising, paying plot rental fees for low-income gardeners, purchasing and holding title to gardens that were formerly privately owned, purchasing liability insurance for the gardens, serving as the fiscal sponsor for individual garden fundraisers, and facilitating communication among gardeners . The P-Patch nonprofit has effectively coordinated gardener activities and talking points, helping to streamline the program’s operations, maximize its impact, and legitimize PPatches in the eyes of the wider public. Evidence from interviews and issues of the P-Patch Post newsletter makes clear that over the program’s history, gardeners consciously organized their efforts and built the legitimacy for urban agriculture around the food production and community building aspects of the P-Patches. In the late 1980s, dedicated P-Patch volunteer Wendy McClure started an initiative called Lettuce Link that systematized food bank donations by coordinating a schedule of drivers from different gardens and providing information about the closest food banks for different sites. Over time, Lettuce Link installed storage bins, scales, and tracking lists at many of the gardens in order to facilitate measurement and annual reporting of the program’s donations to food banks. Gardeners I interviewed in 2016 would readily emphasize that the program had donated over 40,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce to local food banks the previous year. These interviewees understood that reporting a specific amount of food donated helps to make the gardens’ public benefit clear for city officials and any potential skeptics. As a result of Lettuce Link and the gardeners’ efforts to demonstrate the extent of their food bank donations, P-Patches were incorporated into the city’s strategic planning for food security, hydroponics flood table first undertaken in the mid-2000s. The P-Patch Program director was included on the Interdepartmental Team developing the city’s Food Action Plan, a group which also included at least one P-Patch gardener among the city employees involved. In order to increase food security and local food production, the Seattle Food Action Plan makes recommendations under Strategy 1, “Prioritize food production as a use of land,” and Strategy 2, “Develop and support programs to produce food on City-owned land,” that specifically advise implementing policies to support and expand the P-Patch program . The process of gardeners systematizing their activities, and then gaining additional recognition and legitimacy through the city’s actions, is characteristic of the interplay between city staff and the P-Patch nonprofit over the history of the P-Patch Program. The case of Seattle suggests that an organizational structure of a city gardening agency supported by a gardener-led nonprofit is a stable and effective model for developing, maintaining, and defending urban agriculture. Through a similar process, P-Patch participants gradually amplified the community building benefits of community gardens. In all three cities, the benefit of increased social cohesion among diverse people is widely understood by gardeners and urban agriculture advocates . However, in Seattle this social benefit was more clearly documented, and mobilized more in framing the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use, than it was in either Milwaukee or Philadelphia.

As will be described more in Chapter 3, the process for documenting community-building in Seattle’s gardens was first evident in the PPatch Post, which ran a series of statements called “I Love My P-Patch Because…” from 1989-1993. These gardener testimonials offered many reasons to value the P-Patches that span almost the full “panacea narrative” attesting to urban agriculture’s wide range of potential benefits, but among these testimonials the community-building power of P-Patches is the most commonly noted benefit, with comments such as “I like my neighbors too: There’s always someone nice to talk to when I go to the garden” . In 1995-1997, when P-Patch advocates were pressuring the city to preserve a threatened P-Patch, and then appealing to the public to pass an initiative preventing the city from repurposing its garden sites, they emphasized how the gardens brought different kinds of people together and contributed to the neighborhood character of Seattle . In a 1998 edition of the P-Patch Post, the president of the P-Patch nonprofit explained the feedback advocates had received about how much the community-building potential of gardens mattered to decision makers and the public. Analysis of P-Patch documents shows that from the late 1990s onward, codes for diversity and design for community were much more frequent than they had been in the 1970s and 1980s. The latter code reflects interplay with city program staff who began to discourage fencing in the gardens, and the wider Department of Neighborhoods staff, who approved numerous grant applications from individual gardens seeking to add publicly accessible community-building features, such as picnic tables and benches, in garden improvement projects. Over time, the work of both the P-Patch Program and the P-Patch nonprofit have contributed to the longevity, popularity and security of community gardens in Seattle. Through the early 1980s when the city faced budget cuts, funding for the P-Patch Program shrank dramatically, and higher plot fees combined with reduced services caused foreboding rates of attrition . During these lean years, the program survived with two part time staff, Barbara Donnette and Barbara Heitsch, who according to interviewees familiar with the program’s early history and the P-Patch Post from that time, worked well beyond the hours they were being paid for. Moreover, the P-Patch nonprofit has relied solely on volunteer labor for its entire history. Almost every P-Patch Post newsletter contains a long list of acknowledgements for donations, tasks completed, and group initiatives fulfilled; indeed, the production of the P-Patch Post itself has been accomplished almost entirely through volunteer labor . The P-Patch nonprofit has been led by a series of extremely dedicated volunteer presidents, board and committee members, and the P-Patch Post attests to the organization’s ceaseless effort to recruit and train new leadership from among the program’s gardeners. Reviewing the program’s history through its newsletters reveals a remarkable level of dedication on the part of many gardeners, and even some non-gardeners, whose combined efforts have built, maintained, enhanced, and defended Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens for almost 50 years. The contributions of these volunteers should not go underappreciated, for the program would never have achieved such reach and longevity without them; however, making such a prodigious time commitment is not possible for everyone. Relying on volunteers and people who can accept low salaries to run an organization means that its leaders are likely to be relatively privileged. Indeed, for much of the P-Patch Program’s history, the leadership demographics have been far whiter than that of program participants overall . The PPatch Program has counted significant numbers of Southeast Asian refugee families among its gardeners since the mid-1980s, and surveys in the 1990s showed that the program’s demographics were more racially diverse than the city overall. However, program staff and nonprofit leadership alike were virtually all-white until the mid-2000s.

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, rolling flood tables and at the same time community social ties, through operations such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and community gardens. Participants in these projects tend to be more involved in politics and their communities than the general population . 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. Other CBOs promote democratic participation among their members by teaching them to flex collective power and engage directly with funders and decision-makers. This democratic participation may be conceptualized narrowly for the organization’s specific purposes, or it may be developed more broadly as a “public-goods politics” that seeks to educate voters on defining problems and demanding new, more community-based solutions if the current system isn’t working for them .

In other words, there are multiple logics through which community-based organizations like gardening programs can promote “civic engagement” among their constituents, and researchers should be careful to assess the nature of political participation at work rather than treating it as a flat, present-or-absent feature . Regardless of their strategies for engaging members, attracting resources, and building legitimacy, civil-society groups such as garden programs and other CBOs must navigate a challenging organizational environment. While many of these organizations have expanded in size and scope under roll-back/roll-out neoliberalization, funding for the work of social service provision is still limited and the competition for it is strong. For organizations based in low income communities, tension may develop between maintaining legitimacy in the local community and building a professionalized reputation with funders and policy-makers . In a local political environment unresponsive to grassroots community pressure, organizations are unlikely to engage in efforts at civic participation at all . Furthermore, receiving funding from government sources may lead nonprofits to moderate their advocacy tactics, engaging in more insider and less outsider strategies [though see also Fyall and McGuire 2015]. Thus, a study of community gardening programs should examine the extent to which garden organizations hew to the priorities of funders versus gardeners themselves, and analysis should also pay close attention to the tactics chosen for engaging with city leaders. The same dynamics have been identified for social movement organizations at various scales, which have been found to survive and succeed in their goals by navigating shifting political opportunities while continuing to mobilize resources from their environment . Especially for movements of the poor, the choice to formalize an organization may bring greater access to resources, but it can also constrain protest tactics . Systems that control power and resources largely function to conserve the existing institutional arrangements that afford them this control , in part through the influence they exert directly on policy making, and in part through their role in resource allocation . Ultimately, flood and drain tray any organization working to shift the balance of resources and power in society—such as revising land use policy in a way that limits development—must navigate the constraints of an organizational environment in which better-resourced and more powerful entities will resist such change.In spite of the inertia imposed by powerful forces in the organizational environment, social relations do change over time, and social movement organizations are influential to this process. As it relates to urban gardens, community groups have organized to challenge the urban growth machine, bring equity to the food system, or counter other processes they perceive as harmful to them through activism and social movements. Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as contentious action by a group of less powerful people who use “dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, action-oriented cultural frames” to maintain their collective action toward desired ends even as they come up against more-powerful opponents. This definition serves to distinguish social movements from elite political manipulations and from less confrontational forms of organized civic participation—all of which are forms of action that occur in the varied landscape of urban agriculture and the organizations that promote it. In studying the effectiveness and long-term viability of social movements, theorists have identified several important analytical dimensions. Political and discursive opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and framing interact in both the emergence and development of social movements . Conceptualizing the socio-political environments in which movements must operate, “political opportunity structures” describe the legal and institutional infrastructure that enables or constrains various forms of political action , while “discursive opportunity structures” refer to cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate, forming the context in which social movement claims and actions will be received by the wider public . Social movements are more likely to succeed when they can take advantage of favorable opportunity structures, but they also need to draw in sufficient resources to maintain their functioning such as material support, legitimacy, information, leadership, and active participation from movement supporters . One critical strategy for a movement to attract supporters, elicit active participation, and sway decision-makers to support their agenda is through strategic framing. “Framing” refers to the negotiation of meaning and the deployment of collective action frames that work to persuade a greater share of the public and/or decision-makers that the social movement’s goals should be met .

While opportunity structures are largely exogenous conditions that structure movement possibilities, social movement leaders and participants can significantly influence resource mobilization and framing processes through their choice of actions. Research has shown that the success and survival of both CBOs and social movement organizations is partially contingent upon the organizational environment in which they operate, and that an organization’s ability to attract resources from its environment – including both material resources and legitimacy – has a significant influence on outcomes . The quality and decisions of leadership also matter for harnessing the opportunities and resources that exist in the organization’s environment. Legitimacy is a critical resource for all types of organizations, not just those that are part of social movements. Initially, organizations seek legitimacy to gain credibility with their target audience and organizations in their environment; to do so, they need to establish a clear meaning for their activities . Legitimacy that builds credibility is necessary for organizations to gain passive support for their existence, and organizational scholars argue that a conceptually distinct aspect of legitimacy is that which affords continuity as organizations work to motivate “affirmative commitments” from at least some people— employees, customers, grantors, and others who keep the organization functional . Thus, motivating action that will sustain the organization requires not just gaining but maintaining legitimacy—processes requiring different strategies that must be tailored to the organizational environment . For urban agriculture organizations, both gaining and maintaining legitimacy present challenges. Since the act of growing food in cities has fallen outside many people’s expectations, gardening organizations have needed to engage in public-facing efforts to make their activities legible and legitimate. Once they have credibility, urban agriculture organizations must employ additional legitimation strategies to ensure continuity, as gardens require consistent labor to maintain to keep up their legitimized appearance as a garden rather than a weed patch. Critically, building and maintaining legitimacy is a process “dependent on a history of events” , which decreases the possibility for organizations to change their own practices and narratives of meaning without risking a loss of legitimacy. While organizational scholars have articulated the challenges involved in gaining and maintaining legitimacy, as well as in challenging and responding to challenges of legitimacy, little research investigates what happens when changes in external conditions necessitate new forms of legitimacy to maintain existing activities and operations. For urban agriculture organizations, this is especially relevant when real estate conditions change and gardens that have been legitimized as temporary spaces are threatened with development. If organizations seek to overcome elite interest in repurposing the land, they face the challenge of reshaping themselves from community-based organizations providing services into social movement organizations staking new claims and demanding change in a policy or paradigm. While both CBOs and SMOs have been defined and widely discussed in the literature, little research exists that explores the extent to which their activities overlap. Minkoff develops the concept of “hybrid organizational forms,” but does so specifically in the context of identity-based organizations born of social movements that adapted to an increasingly partisan environment. The concept has not been applied or analyzed for organizations with other origins, such as those that begin as service organizations and take up social movement work later on. Similarly, Sampson et al. urge the use of a social movements lens to analyze civic participation, describing an increase in “blended social action” that combines protest with civic action. While this research finds that collective action events tend to occur more often in neighborhoods with a higher density of nonprofit organizations, the authors do not examine the role of organizations in mobilizing blended social action.

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, dry rack cannabis program configurations and political-economic context as well as their impacts on local discourse and policy related to urban agriculture.

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 following sections provide a brief history of each city’s main community gardening programs, the political and economic conditions in which they have operated, and the policy victories they achieved.Like many cities in the US, Milwaukee has faced economic challenges from the 1960s onward related to globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs. The challenge has been particularly acute in Rustbelt cities such as Milwaukee, which lost over 100,000 residents between 1960 and 1980—a decline of almost 15%.

The city won federal funding to support urban gardening in 1978, and the resulting Shoots n Roots program expanded upon earlier cityled efforts with a focus on making use of vacant lots to mitigate the growing urban blight that had become a visible symptom of the city’s economic decline . The city permitted Shoots n Roots gardens on a year-by-year basis, wanting to ensure that the lots remained available for redevelopment; many sites were only part of the program for a few years. Shoots n Roots was ultimately housed in the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee County Extension, and like other public entities, the Shoots n Roots program was not positioned to engage in contentious politics, which precluded pressing the city for long-term land access. The program gradually came to focus on large, county-owned parcels outside of the city limits as its federal funding was reduced over time. Consequently, while the Extension still supports community gardening activity in and around the city of Milwaukee, this program is no longer the primary administrator for urban gardens in the city. Milwaukee’s primary community gardening program, Milwaukee Urban Gardens , was founded in 2000 by local residents who had lost their gardens to development following aperiod of relatively stable and gradually improving economic conditions in the 1990s. Originally created to purchase community garden sites and advocate for long-term garden and greenspace preservation, in 2013 the program merged with an environmental programming organization, Groundwork Milwaukee, and now serves as a single point-of-contact for anyone in the city looking to get involved with a garden or start a new one. Through the MUG program, renamed Milwaukee Grows in 2017, the city grants leases of generally 1-3 years for use of its vacant lots for community gardens. Groundwork Milwaukee also provides liability insurance, roll bench educational programming, and a paid youth work force to help residents build and maintain gardens. While the City of Milwaukee does not guarantee that its land will remain permanently available for the roughly 100 MUG community gardens, it has agreed to sell a few lots for urban agriculture projects in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, with an electoral mandate for progressive and environmental policies in the 2010s, the city government became actively involved in developing the local food system through the HOME GR/OWN program. Created by Mayor Tom Barrett in 2013, this initiative seeks to streamline the legal process for residents and groups wanting to build gardens, commercial farms, or new parks on city-owned vacant land. The city partners with a wide range of local organizations to carry out sustainability and economic development projects through this initiative. However, the HOME GR/OWN program could come to an end at the whim of a subsequent administration. Perhaps because the city has been so supportive and not inclined to sell off any of the garden sites, MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee have not been actively advocating for a more permanent legal basis for their gardens in recent years. While the city’s political climate is fairly liberal and recent green initiatives have been popular with the public, local economic conditions remain challenging; the city retains control of vacant parcels in case opportunities arise to generate tax revenue and employment on most of the land that is currently permitted for MUG’s gardens. To build a more comprehensive and historical understanding of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, I interviewed 18 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in forming and implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee, and other organizations that interviewees identified as having contributed to the local popularity of urban agriculture. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel .

Combining data from these sources, I gained an up-close perspective on the process of contesting urban agriculture’s value as a land use in Milwaukee, and I developed a unique dataset of Shoots n Roots and MUG-affiliated gardens in order to map their locations over time. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was already nearly 150 years old when it began its community gardening program, Philadelphia Green, in 1974. Originally centered around the appreciation of ornamental plants and landscape design, PHS grew into “a more holistic understanding of plants as a tool for urban transformation” when it took on the role of greening Philadelphia in the 1970s. At this time, similar to both Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s population was shrinking and the economy was under strain from high unemployment and inflation. Over time, the Philadelphia Green program evolved to offer a range of greening services, and PHS played a role in shaping the larger policy debate around vacant land in Philadelphia. Today, the organization contracts with the City of Philadelphia to maintain parks, greenbelts, and museum grounds, in addition to supporting many of the city’s community gardens. For decades, these functions coexisted as part of the Philadelphia Green program; PHS has recently rebranded the work as a range of initiatives including City Harvest , Neighborhood Gardens Trust , Civic Landscapes , and LandCare . The program’s urban agriculture network includes 140 current community gardens and urban farms across Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia has long supported PHS’s greening work on vacant lots, but over decades of collaboration the community gardens were generally viewed as a temporary land use. Philadelphia’s population hit its lowest between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, yet this period was also one in which many gardens were lost. Between 1996 and 2008, more than half of the city’s gardens were lost to parcel development or other changing conditions . PHS was involved in some land preservation efforts, but the organization did not pursue a blanket policy to preserve community gardens. As the discouraging trend of garden loss became apparent, and especially when a 2012 zoning amendment threatened the security of 20% of the remaining gardens, the city faced growing pressure to support and preserve its community gardens. Advocates from organizations including PHS, the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, and others sought changes to the city’s land disposition system, which at the time considered lots with gardens to be “vacant,” in order to improve the flow of information between gardeners and the city. They succeeded in halting the zoning amendment and then secured passage of the Philadelphia Land Bank Act in 2013. In the process of streamlining vacant lot disposition to spur economic development, the Land Bank must give gardeners priority to acquire their sites rather than listing these sites as vacant and available for developers. Today, PHS has a mostly indirect role in advocating for garden preservation. Its close affiliate Neighborhood Gardens Trust maintains a voice in policy debates while raising money to purchase and save gardens facing development threats as the city undergoes a period of rapid gentrification. In the last decade, in a context of gentrification and displacement heavily affecting low income residents and communities of color, other organizations—most notably Soil Generation, a Black-and Brown-led coalition of growers—have taken the lead in the citywide efforts to organize and advocate for garden preservation and land use policy. Soil Generation and allied groups continue to press the city for more socially just land dispensation through the Land Bank and for broader responsiveness to resident priorities regarding urban agriculture and other community-oriented land uses.

Interestingly, prior studies in the region found that organic fertilizer use in the early organic movement was potentially more widespread. For example, early organic farmers in Yolo County who were interviewed by Guthman et al. in the early 1990s used high nitrogen-based organic fertilizers such as pelleted chicken manure, seabird guano, and Chilean nitrate to supply fertility to soil in their organic production; based on interviews here, several decades later, farmers appear to have significantly cut back on the use of such high nitrogen-based organic fertilizer products. Several of these farmers have explicitly realized that “more is not better” when it comes to organic fertilizers; as discussed above, the majority of farmers interviewed here have shifted towards implementing a synergy of management practices that promotes good soil structure, increased soil microbial activity and soil organic matter, and adequate soil moisture rather than using high nitrogen-based organic fertilizers. Third, these organic farmers unanimously agreed that soil test results could be more useful to them if the numerical results were also provided with meaningful interpretation, ideally in the form of a direct conversation—and that importantly, moved beyond prescriptive recommendations for nutrient additions and organic fertilizer application. Farmers interviewed used a variety of rich metaphors to elaborate on this point, cannabis grow equipment such as likening soil test results to the fuel gauge in a car; both provide little insight into the actual mechanics of how well the system, be it an engine or a soil ecosystem, is actually functioning.

This key takeaway from farmers in this study suggests that available soil indicators do not fully account for the complexity of their ecological farming systems, and that farmers see the interpretation of soil test results as an essential part of addressing the underlying complexity, and holistic soil function in their broader agricultural ecosystem. Our study provides an initial window into farmer knowledge of soil function in relation to soil fertility; however, as PetrescuMag et al. emphasize, deeper research on this particular gap in farmer knowledge of soil function is essential to determine the specific content of interpretations accompanying soil test results that would be practical and informative to farmers. Another potential way to bridge this gap in applicability for farmers would be to incorporate descriptive indicators for soil fertility in conjunction with available quantitative soil indicators. As Romig et al. suggested several decades ago, descriptive indicators can integrate well with existing soil metrics, and therefore provide mutually acceptable alternatives to discuss soil health and fertility among farmers and scientists alike. Finding a common language through which to engage is at the heart of this current gap in soil health research . Indicators for soil fertility measured here provided limited effectiveness in differentiating between fields deemed by farmers as “most challenging” and “least challenging” , which suggests that current scientifically developed metrics for measuring soil fertility do not align well with farmer developed benchmarks for soil fertility. This outcome additionally suggests that nutrient availability was not the driving factor for farmer perceptions of soil performance, at least in terms of soil fertility.

Of the eight indicators for soil fertility measured in this study, total soil nitrogen was the only indicator that was able to detect differences in soil fertility ; however, fields selected by farmers as “most challenging” showed on average higher values of total soil nitrogen than fields selected by farmers as “least challenging.” Because higher total soil nitrogen values are generally equated with higher soil fertility in the soil health literature, we hypothesized that the “least challenging” fields would show on average higher values of total soil nitrogen . This alternative outcome here suggests that while this soil chemical property shows sensitivity to differences perceived by farmers in their selected fields, this commonly used indicator does not adequately capture the direction of farmer knowledge of soil fertility between their selected fields. On the one hand, it is not surprising that total soil nitrogen was the only soil indicator able to detect differences between farmer-selected “most challenging” and “least challenging” fields, especially given that after nearly a century of research total soil nitrogen remains one of the most predictive measures of soil fertility status . However, the contradictory direction of our results for total soil nitrogen between farmer-selected “most challenging” and “least challenging” fields emphasizes that current scientific application of this soil indicator does not readily transfer for use on-farm. One potential reason for this inconsistency may be because as a soil indicator, total soil nitrogen reflects both the amount of chemically stable organic matter and more active organic matter fractions, and therefore gives a rough indication of nitrogen supplying power in the soil.

However, in practice it is possible that fields deemed by farmers as “least challenging” have depleted their nitrogen supplying power due to more frequent crop plantings, for example— compared to fields that are “most challenging” and therefore may be less frequently planted with crops throughout the year. This finding underscores the current lack of interpretation of soil test results in community with both agricultural researchers and farmers present together; the current gap in interpretation of soil testing results was repeatedly emphasized by farmers during interviews, and suggests that— moving forward, contextualizing and interpreting soil test results in local farming contexts is key to disentangling potential mismatches between farmer knowledge systems and agricultural researcher knowledge systems. To move toward this outcome requires deep listening and relationship building on the part of agricultural researchers not currently widely applied . Whereas another similar study found that active carbon was the singular most sensitive, repeatable, and consistent soil health indicator able to differentiate between fields in their study on organic farms in Canada , we highlight that one potential reason for this difference in our results might be as a result of differences in management in each study. While our study consisted of farms along a gradient of organic management , the prior study focused on three organic farms with similar management. This divergence in results highlights the importance of accounting for a gradient in management when evaluating the efficacy of soil health indicators on working farms. Much remains to be learned about how inherent soil properties and dynamic soil processes interact with complex management systems on working farms . Limited prior research that has looked at the effects of multiple soil management practices indicates that metrics for soil health are a product of both inherent soil properties and dynamic soil properties . Whether available soil indicators could translate these soil properties and processes when management systems are complex remains unclear. As an added layer of complexity, field variability is hard to distinguish from management-induced changes in soil properties . To address this challenge, prior studies have suggested increasing samples, the number of sites, and sampling strategies that account for spatial and temporal variability ; however, as farmers themselves expressed in this study, such an approach requires additional time and resources, and may not increase their utility—at least to farmers—in the end. In this sense, vertical grow rack farmer knowledge may serve as an important mechanism for ground-truthing soil health assessments, particularly when management is synergistic and does not rely heavily on organic fertilizers. As emphasized by our results above, farmer involvement in soil health assessment studies is imperative to better converge soil indicators with farmer knowledge of their soil. Lastly, our results also highlight the utility of incorporating information about nitrogen-based fertilizer application on sampled field sites, particularly when assessing soil indicators on working farms with a large variation in the quantity of N-based fertilizers applied . Farms on the low end of additional organic fertilizer application showed minimal differences between farmer selected fields for soil fertility, particularly in terms of soil inorganic nitrogen —which suggests that differences in soil fertility in fields with more circular nutrient use may be less detectable using commonly available soil indicators. This cursory finding here corroborated farmer observations touched on in the previous section above, and requires further investigation to see if similar trends extend to other organic systems. Here, we have identified several gaps in the utility of commonly available indicators for soil fertility among a unique group of organic farmers in Yolo County, California using interviews with farmers and field surveys. Our study highlights that if available soil indicators are to be considered effective by farmers, they must be grounded in farmers’ realities. Moving forward, working in collaboration with farmers to close this continued gap in soil health research will be essential in order to ground widely available soil indicators in real working farms with unique management systems and variable, local soil conditions. This approach is particularly needed among organic farms that do not rely extensively on nitrogen-based organic fertilizers and additional nutrient input to supply their fertility, as available soil indicators do not adequately reflect farmers’ descriptive metrics for soil fertility.

Moreover, our research elevates concerns that currently available soil indicators used in soil health and fertility assessments may not fully capture the complex plant-microbe-soil interactions that regulate soil fertility, particularly on organic farms that use minimal organic fertilizer application. Moving forward, additional studies that pursue a deeper dive into nutrient dynamics across a gradient of management and varying nitrogen-based fertilizer input is needed. Overall, the strong overlap between farmer knowledge in this study and ongoing soil health research speaks to the opportunity to further engage with farmers in developing useful indicators for soil health and fertility that are better calibrated to local contexts and draw on local farmer knowledge. A deeper investigation of farmers knowledge systems, in particular farmer understanding of soil function in connection with crop productivity, soil health, and soil fertility, represents a critical path forward for this research arena. Additionally, we recommend placing greater emphasis on developing descriptive indicators for soil health and fertility in collaboration with farmers that are better integrated with ongoing qualitative soil health and fertility metrics. These descriptive indicators should not be developed in isolation to ongoing research on soil health and fertility assessment, but rather as an integrated research process among scientists, farmers, and extension agents—importantly, with scientists as listeners working toward a shared language. 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 farm headquarters. 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 .

While not significant, SOM indicators were also selected in the development of the LMM for gross mineralization rates as well. These results are congruent with previous research looking across ecosystem types that reported a relationship between N cycling rates and SOM indicators. For example, a meta-analysis published by Booth et al. that examined woody, grass, and agricultural ecosystems found a strong positive relationship between indicators for SOM and gross N mineralization. It is likely that in this prior study, the range of ecosystem types analyzed were sufficiently broad to detect a significant trend between indicators for SOM and N cycling. However, in our context, which encompasses agricultural systems only—it is possible that previously established trends are less detectable within this narrower range of ecosystem type. As shown in Figure 1 , if the range of ecosystem type is constrained to include only agricultural systems, the relationship between indicators for SOM and gross N mineralization is less evident. In summary, our results suggest that SOM indicators, while not significant, do play a role in influencing N cycling across the farm systems studied here. While initially, we found it surprising that N cycling soil indicators were not strongly linked to SOM indicators, one known limitation of measuring gross N mineralization and nitrification in the field is that while gross N production of inorganic N relay supply of available N to crops, gross rates in our case represent potential rates standardized to temperature and moisture—and therefore do not represent in situ rates found directly in the field. Moreover, using gross N production of inorganic N as an indicator for soil N cycling also poses inherent limitations for determining actual available N beyond those created by field conditions, as discussed above.

However, cannabis grow racks while measuring gross N production of inorganic N may provide a more limited applicability for quantifying N cycling than originally hypothesized, the lack of a strong relationship between common soil indicators for organic matter levels and gross rates of soil N cycling does not necessarily mean that building organic matter with intentional management does not lead to greater N availability for crops. For example, a recent study by Wade et al. that used identical indicators to measure soil organic matter levels in the midwestern region of the US found that these indicators for soil quality do indeed influence supply of N—based on crop responses . While this recent study focused on yield response to fertilizers and their relationship to soil health and soil quality and considered biogeochemical processes as intact , we speculate that the influence of soil quality on N supply determined by Wade et al. is not as detectable when measuring gross N cycling directly. We suggest that there may be circumstances where N cycling indicators are not as responsive to N supply, but soil quality is still improving. Such circumstances can arise for example when minerals in the soil lock up available N or when soil microsites create differences in N cycling that is not reflective of actual N supply to crops. In this sense, soil organic matter indicators better reflect local soil conditions, such as soil structure and root structure of crops, that overcome limitations imposed by mineralogy and/or soil microsites. For this reason, these soil organic matter indicators are both more comprehensive and more responsive for measuring N availability than N cycling indicators. As Grandy et al. point out, after a century of research, few indicators provide better insight to N availability than total soil N content . Grandy et al. also highlighted that indicators for soil organic matter, such as those used in our study, represent soil metrics with a slow turnover rate as compared to the fast turnover rate among indicators for N cycling.

This difference in soil indicator turnover rate may also be useful to consider in our study, as it is possible that gross N flows may have a faster turnover rate than SOM indicators and are therefore less responsive when compared to soil quality indicators and existing management regimes. Because our study focused on within season dynamics, the incongruity between soil indicator turnover rates is likely intensified. In addition, because our on-farm study examined cumulative impacts of diverse management approaches on N availability, it is also possible that these differences in soil indicator responsiveness lacked sensitivity not only due to differences in indicator turnover rates but also because the indicators for available N measured here may be more sensitive to management practices not explicitly captured in this study . Likewise, given the strong influence of soil texture we found, soil clay content and mineralogy may play a more dominant role in influencing N cycling, potentially obscuring links to management in this context . In particular, clay content strongly influences stabilization of organic N through the formation of aggregate protected organic matter and through the preservation of microbial biomass, which ultimately limits bioavailable N . In recent years, the concept of “soil health” in the United States has become codified as a research and policy tool to unify efforts towards 1) improving soil function on farms, and more broadly 2) building on-farm resilience . While the exact definition of “soil health” continues to evolve, the concept generally refers to “the continued capacity of soil to function” in a way that sustains ecological, environmental, and human needs . On the technical front, soil health research has focused on effective and efficient ways to measure and improve soil health, and on quantifying benefits associated with building soil health .

Concurrent research has also placed particular emphasis on the role of “innovative” on-farm management practices in building soil health and promoting on-farm resilience . This research has taken a practice-centric approach that primarily uses social science methods to examine farmers’ views or farmers’ uses of specific practices, and has— importantly—generated insight into the adoption of key management practices related to soil health . Despite this work, to date, very few studies in the US explicitly incorporate farmer knowledge of soil health and soil management beyond farmer perspectives on the topic and/or farmer motivations for adopting soil health practices . However, farmers possess wide and deep place-based knowledge of their soils that has the potential to advance work on soil health beyond its currently limited scope . Inclusion of farmer knowledge is integral if one outcome of ongoing research on soil health is to address both social and ecological resilience. Farmers are uniquely positioned to share their onthe-ground social realities and their local ecological knowledge of their soils and farming systems . To be clear, inclusion of farmers in this research arena is essential if only to contribute farmer knowledge and farmer voices to the existing body of work—which to date has been lacking . This call for inclusion of farmer knowledge represents: 1) a departure from the majority of prior research in the US that tends to emphasize the advancement of research and policy agendas aimed at behavioral change ; and 2) simultaneously, a shift towards explicit inclusion of farmer knowledge in the knowledge-making of emergent soil health research. While farmer knowledge is certainly important and underutilized, cannabis drying racks consideration for quantitative assessments of soil health remains a critical component of advancing soil health. Available indicators to quantify soil health already exist and are widely applied both on farms and in scientific studies. These soil indicators prioritize so-called “principles of soil health” to assess health through evaluating soil function, usually emphasizing metrics for organic matter quality, nitrogen availability, soil biological activity, and water cycling . Currently, our understanding of how local farmer knowledge of soil To investigate these questions, we applied a case study approach, engaging in on-farm research of 13 organic farms and their respective farm owners in Yolo County, California, USA—a region where this type of farmer inclusive soil health research has been limited to date. We used qualitative, in-depth field interviews in combination with quantitative field sampling and subsequent laboratory analysis. This research focused on Yolo County in particular, because of its unique role as a hub for innovative, high-value organic vegetable production . These thirteen organic farmers specifically—because of their historical relationship to their land and their intimacy with the physical place they farm—collectively represented a salient case study through which to understand soil health and fertility from a grounded perspective. More broadly, we led this work with a Farmer First approach in order to give voice to organic farmers of this region, and to provide a model for future inclusivity of farmer knowledge in the growing body of work on soil health.We conducted our experiment on 13 farms in Yolo County, California, on unceded Patwinspeaking Wintun Nation tribal lands—located along the western side of the Sacramento Valley between late March 2019 and December 2020. The region is characterized by Mediterraneantype climate with cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers. Precipitation in the 2019 water year 2019 was 807 mm—the fifth wettest winter on record.

The mean maximum and minimum temperatures were 33.9oC and 15.5oC, respectively for July 2019. Mean annual maximum and minimum temperatures for 2019 were 24oC and 9.8oC, respectively. All farm sites were on similar parent material . Most farms were situated on either loam, clay loam, or silty clay loam. All 13 farms selected for this soil health study were located in Yolo County . The organic farms represent a majority of the farms in the region with a diversified array of vegetable and fruit crops that sell to a variety of consumer markets, including farmers’ markets, wholesale markets, and restaurants. 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. 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, 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 .

Farmers thus provide an important node in the research and policy making process, whereby they determine if scientific findings or policy recommendations apply to their specific farming context—through direct observation, personal experience, and experimentation. Understanding the mechanisms of farmer knowledge formation and precisely how farmers learn is essential to integrating farmer knowledge into the scientific literature. As outlined in the farmer knowledge formation framework, farmer ecological knowledge is accumulated over time based on continuous systematic assessment through direct observation, personal experiences, or experimentation. This iterative feedback approach to learning among organic farmers is akin to the scientific method and parallel in approach to adaptive management in agriculture . As highlighted in the results, it is possible for a farmer to acquire expert knowledge within one or two generations of farming alternatively. Documenting this farmer knowledge within the scientific literature—specifically farmer knowledge in the context of relatively new farmers in the US—represents a key way forward for widening agricultural knowledge both in theory and in practice . This finding is significant because it underscores the importance of farmers not as subjects of science but as actors within the scientific community. This study provides one example for documenting farmer knowledge in a particularly unique site for organic agriculture. Future studies may expand on this approach in order to document other contexts with recent but deep agricultural knowledge on alternative farms.

For example, pipp mobile systems when farmers were asked to talk about soil management specifically, several farmers struggled with this format of question, because they expressed that they do not necessarily think about soil management specifically but tend to manage for multiple aspects of their farm ecosystem simultaneously. This result aligns with similar findings from Sūmane et al. across a case study of ten different farming contexts in Europe, and suggests that farmers tend to have a bird’s eye view of their farming systems. Such an approach allows farmers to make connections across diverse and disparate elements of their farm operation and integrate these connections to both widen and deepen their ecological knowledge base.For most farmers, maintaining ideal soil structure was the foundation for healthy soil. Farmers emphasized that ideal soil structure was delicately maintained by only working ground at appropriate windows of soil moisture. Determining this window of ideal soil moisture represented a learned skill that each individual farmer developed through the iterative learning process elaborated in Figure 1. This knowledge-making process was informed by both social mechanisms gained through inherited wisdom and informal conversations and ecological mechanisms through direct observation, personal experiences, and experimentation . As farmers developed their ecological knowledge of the appropriate windows of soil moisture, their ethos around soil management shifted. In this way, over time , these farmers learned that no amount of nutrient addition, reduced tillage, cover cropping, or other inputs could make up for damaged soil structure. Destroying soil structure was relatively easy but had irreversible, long-term consequences and often took years, in some cases even a decade, to rebuild.

This key soil health practice voiced by a majority of farmers interviewed represented a different framing compared to messaging about soil health vis-a-vis extension institutions , where soil health principles focus on keeping ground covered, minimizing soil disturbance, maximizing plant diversity, keeping live roots in the soil, and integrating livestock for holistic management. While these five key principles of soil health were mentioned by farmers and were deemed significant, for most farmers interviewed in this study, the foundation and starting point for good soil health was maintaining appropriate soil structure. Though soil structure is clearly important in NRCS conception of soil health, soil structure is not explicitly considered in the core soil health principles. The results of this study emphasize that the most successful entry point for engaging farmers around soil health is context specific, informed directly by local knowledge. Among farmers in Yolo County—a significant geographic node of the organic farming movement—soil structure is a prevalent concept; however, in another farming context, this entry point may significantly diverge for social, ecological, economic, or other reasons. Each farming context therefore necessitates careful inquiry and direct conversation with local farmers to determine this entry point for engagement on soil health. For this reason, in most cases it may be more relevant to tailor soil health outreach to the local context rather than applying a one-size-fits all model.The capacity to learn and pass on that learning are essential for organic farms to be able to adapt to ever changing social and ecological changes ahead . Across all farmers interviewed, including both first- and second-generation farmers, farmers stressed the steep learning curves associated with learning to farm alternatively and/or organically.

While these farmers represent a case study for building a successful, organic farm within one generations, the results of this study beg the question: What advancements in farm management and soil management could be possible with multiple generations of farmer knowledge transfer on the same land? Rather than re-learning the ins and outs of farming every generation or two, as new farmers arrive on new land, farmers could have the opportunity to build on existing knowledge from a direct line of farmers before them, and in this way, potentially contribute to breakthroughs in alternative farming. In this sense, moving forward agriculture in the US has a lot to learn from agroecological farming approaches with a deep multi-generational history . To this end, in most interviews—particularly among older farmers—there was a deep concern over the future of their farm operation beyond their lifetime. Many farmers lamented that no one is slated to take over their farm operation and that all the knowledge they had accumulated would not pass on. There exists a need to fill this gap in knowledge transfer between shifting generations of farmers in order to safeguard farmer knowledge and promote adaptations in alternative agriculture into the future.Most studies often speak to the scalability of approach or generalizability of the information presented. While aspects of this study are generalizable particularly to similar farming systems in California such as the Central Coast region, the farmer knowledge presented in this study is not generalizable and not scalable to other regions in the US. To access farmer knowledge, relationship building with individual farmers leading up to interviews as well as the in-depth interviews themselves require considerable time and energy. While surveys often provide a way to overcome time and budget constraints to learn about farmer knowledge, this study shows that to achieve specificity and depth in analysis of farmer knowledge requires an interactive approach that includes—at a minimum—relationship building, multiple field visits, and in-depth, multi-hour interviews. Accessing farmer knowledge necessitates locally interactive research; this knowledge may not be immediately generalizable or scalable without further locally interactive assessment in other farming regions. Local knowledge among farmers in US alternative agriculture has often been dismissed or overlooked by the scientific community, policymakers, industrial drying rack and agricultural industry experts alike; however, this study makes the case for inclusion of farmer knowledge in these arenas. In-depth interviews established that farmers provide an important role in translating theoretical aspects of agricultural knowledge into practice. It is for this reason that farmer knowledge must be understood in the context of working farms and the local landscapes they inhabit. As one of the first systematic assessments of farmer knowledge of soil management in the US, this research contributes key insights to design future studies on farmer knowledge and farmer knowledge of soil. Specifically, this study suggests that research embedded in local farming communities provides one of the most direct ways to learn about the substance of farmer knowledge; working with the local UCCE advisor in combination with community referrals provided avenues to build rapport and relationships with individual farmers—relationships that were essential to effective research of farmer knowledge. Farmer knowledge of soil management for maintaining healthy soils and productive, resilient agriculture represents an integral knowledge base in need of further scientific research. This study provides a place-based case study as a starting point for documenting this extensive body of knowledge among farmers. It is our hope that this research will inspire future studies on farmer knowledge in other contexts so that research in alternative agriculture can widen its frame to encompass a more complete understanding of farming systems and management motivations—from theory to practice.

A fundamental challenge in agriculture is to limit the environmental impacts of nitrogen losses while still supplying adequate nitrogen to crops and achieving a farm’s expected yields . To balance among such environmental, ecological, and agronomic demands, it is essential to establish actual availability of nitrogen to crops . A holistic, functional understanding of plant N availability is particularly imperative in organic agriculture, as in this farming context, synthetic fertilizers are not applied and instead, production of inorganic N—the dominant form of N available to crops—depends on internal soil processes . In organic agricultural systems, farmers may seasonally apply cover crops or integrate livestock as alternative sources of nitrogen to crops—in addition to or in place of using organic fertilizers. In applying these alternative sources of nitrogen to soil, organic farmers rely on the activity of soil microbes to transform organic N into inorganic forms of N that are more readily available for crop uptake . Currently, the predominant way crop available N is measured in organic agricultural systems tends to examine pools of inorganic N in soil . Inorganic N, or more specifically ammonium and nitrate , represents the predominant forms of N taken up by crop species in ecosystems where N is relatively available, such as in non-organic agricultural systems that apply inorganic fertilizers . However, in organic systems, crop available N is largely controlled by complex soil processes not adequately captured by simply measuring pools of ammonium and nitrate. First, because nitrogen made available to crops is controlled by soil microbes—wherein crops only have access to inorganic forms of N after microbial N transformations occur to first meet microbial N demand—pinpointing the flow of N moving through inorganic N pools as a result of these microbial N transformations is necessary to accurately measure actual N availability to crops . Second, extensive recycling of N among components of the plant-soil-microbe system complicates relying solely on measurements of inorganic N pools, which do not reflect these dynamics . As an example, one previous study in organic vegetable systems showed examples where inorganic N pool sizes in the soil were measured to be low, yet there existed high production and consumption rates of inorganic N . This outcome highlighted that if the turnover of inorganic N is high—for instance, high rates of soil ammonium production exist in the soil with simultaneously high rates of immobilization by soil microbes and high rates of uptake by plants—measured pools of inorganic N may still be low . This study also showed that conversely, there may also exist situations when inorganic N pools are low and rates of ammonium and nitrate production are also low, in which case N availability would limit crop production. In organic systems especially, higher carbon availability as a result of organic management can increase these microbially mediated gross N flows, thereby increasing N cycling and turnover of inorganic N . Thus, we hypothesize that measuring total production of ammonium from organic N, or gross N mineralization, and subsequent total production of nitrate from ammonium, or gross N nitrification, may provide a more complete characterization of crop available N in the context of organic systems . Though the application of such diverse management practices on organic farms is known to affect rates of N cycling in soil , measuring N flow rates as a proxy for crop available N is currently uncommon on working organic farms. The current historical emphasis on measuring inorganic pools of N in organic agriculture was originally imported from non-organic farming, wherein the Sprengel-Liebig Law of the Minimum was a widely accepted agronomic principle . In practice, this Law of the Minimum placed particular importance on using artificial fertilizers to overcome so-called “limiting” nutrients—namely, inorganic forms of N. Because inorganic N is relatively straightforward to measure, focus on quantifying pools of inorganic N has since become common practice among agronomists and agricultural researchers . However, the continued acceptance of the Law of the Minimum in organic agriculture underscores the gap in a functional understanding of organic agricultural systems, in particular the role of soil microbes in mediating N cycling.

For example, Theobroma cacao seeds, rinds, branches, and other plant parts were identified in areas surrounding both Households 2 and 4 and ceramic vessels were recovered that contained cacao residue. Cacao was a prized plant in Mesoamerica, with its value translating into both beverages and as a form of currency . Cacao resources are typically associated with ceremonial activities, which are generally believed to have been practiced mainly by elite individuals . Yet, Cerén demonstrates that rural households in Mesoamerica had access to valued and prized plant resources. The above depictions of Cerén allows one to envision the small village as a comfortable place to reside. Privacy was not a priority in that walls or barriers were not created to block visibility of households and human activities within them. The visibility and openness of the Cerén household gardens is apparent through visual recreations of the settlement . This is not to say that the ancient inhabitants were open with all aspects of their lives. Sharp tools like obsidian blades were consistently stored up high in the thatch roofing, out of reach from children who could easily injure or cut themselves. Food that was stored within ceramic vessels was almost entirely found within structures and was neatly organized into various jars containing maize, manioc, beans, cotton, and squash , pipp grow rack demonstrating that collected food items were hidden in that they were not readily visible to a passerby. The Cerén people certainly kept many of their belongings in specific locations so that they would not be visible to just anyone—but their gardens were evidently not hidden or demarcated with proprietary intentions.

Gleason defines gardens and fields as spaces that are cultivated and bounded. However, no evidence has been found for fences surrounding house gardens or even fields at Cerén. Clear boundaries between households were not necessarily marked with physical materials or through strategic placement of cultivated flora. The closest evidence for any physical boundaries are the rows of agave outside Household 4, but the spatial location of these suggest more of a garden patch, which provided a source of fiber rather than a natural fence. Fencing is often utilized to keep animals out of cultivated spaces. Identified zooarchaeological remains recovered from the site suggest that the residents of Cerén did consume white-tailed deer , domesticated dog , peccary , and duck . Household 1 exhibited the largest concentration of unmodified animal remains as well as obsidian blades which tested positive for nonhuman animal protein, suggesting that this household processed more meat that the others excavated thus far . All of these animals were certainly capable of disturbing cultivated spaces, yet this must not have been of great concern to the ancient residents since no regular barriers were put in place surrounding the gardens or fields. Besides the fruit trees surrounding the homes, which would have concealed a bit of the space around each dwelling, the Cerénians did not bother to hide their wealth in terms of the foodstuffs growing in their immediate surroundings. Since the Cerén households were able to see other neighboring gardens and fields, this suggests something about the intimate relationships these inhabitants had with each other . Large quantities of beneficial wild and domesticated plants encompassed their entire village, just waiting to be transformed into collected food, goods, and tools that could be stored to ensure a prosperous future, supporting a sense of regular landscape management.

There has been no indication that the gardens within the village were blocked off, with access denied to neighboring households or even views blocked. If we view the household gardens as a form of wealth at Cerén, each household’s potential was readily visible, and each villager would have had a basic knowledge of everyone’s relative wealth in terms of plant goods. This becomes more significant when we consider that each household likely had a surplus of certain plant products. For example, Household 4 had a courtyard garden consisting of rows of agave plants, whose fiber was transformed into rope and clothing material. It was probably well known among the inhabitants that this domestic unit provided the main fiber resources for the village . Such important aspects of their livelihoods were not kept secret, with the knowledge of each households’ belongings visible yet controlled with the use of storehouses. Each household at Cerén produced surplus goods that could be exchanged within the community and perhaps at nearby marketplaces. The kitchen gardens demonstrate that each household also produced their own basic commodities for the household’s consumption, thus creating a dual role for the kitchen gardens as both subsistence and market production . Even if we consider the perspective that collected food was stored almost entirely inside the structures, away from the public eye, recent spatial distribution studies by Farahani et al. show that food was stored throughout the village in domiciles, bodegas, and kitchens. Most structures contained ceramic vessels that would have been used to hold foodstuffs, so these materials were not necessarily hidden or private. It is important to note that preservation is not perfect at Cerén, leaving much to be imagined by archaeologists. Granted, foodstuffs that were in ceramic vessels were preserved well when the thatch roofs collapsed during emplacement of Unit 3 tephra.

However, foods stored in organic containers such as gourds and baskets did not preserve, and those containers themselves did not preserve except for the painted surface of a single gourd under the bench in Structure 2 . Gourds, for example, could have been good storage containers for manioc or malanga flour as it could be kept dry under the roofs. While the archaeological preservation only allows a glimpse of the most durable storage containers, it is still clear that subsistence and diet were not hidden aspects among the social lives of Cerén inhabitants; they were very prevalent in their day to day routine and view of neighboring households through the presence of productive garden plots. Since 2007, excavations at Cerén have focused on the agricultural contexts south of the village, beyond the immediate vicinity of the structures excavated thus far and reveal extensive fields of staple crops that serve as an extension of the fields found adjacent to the household gardens. Infields of maize were situated close to the village. The maize, belonging to the Chapalote-Nal-Tel race, has been identified within the milpa through plaster casts of entire stalks, as well as carbonized kernels, cupules, and larger cob fragments . Farther south of the main village center, just past the maize agricultural fields were outfields of manioc. All of the agricultural fields were cultivated in a series of ridges oriented parallel to the ground slope to help with moisture removal and drainage, just as the kitchen gardens were within the village. The mean precipitation in the Cerén area is at the maximum ideal range for manioc, so drainage was necessary for productive manioc yields. Excavations of the extensive manioc fields strongly suggest that this root crop likely comprised a significant portion of the diet in this region during the Late Classic period, pipp horticulture racks cost suggesting that this food regime could have been widespread throughout Mesoamerica . The unique preservation of agricultural fields at Cerén allows us to view both maize and manioc as staple crops that greatly contributed towards the diet of these Late Classic inhabitants in Mesoamerica. The inter-ridges of the maize fields—i.e. the smaller ridges that did not contain plaster casts of maize stalks—showed evidence of squash and common beans . This conclusion was determined through paleoethnobotanical recovery efforts that utilized both plaster cast techniques and water flotation of soil samples. These inter-ridges were not as large as the maize ridges, but were nevertheless distinct ridges and were located in an alternating manner in between the larger maize ridges. A plaster cast of a squash gourd was recovered in between the maize ridges in an inter-ridge within the milpa of Operation AE, along with multiple bean cotyledons that were identified from soil samples originating from other inter-ridges . Multiple common bean populations have been found throughout Cerén, appearing in storage containers, middens, and floor surfaces . Squash seeds and rinds have also been identified previously at the site, within ceramic vessels, a basket, and even atop a metate inside the kitchen structure . For the first time the presence of both beans and squash is now verified within the milpas and shows that farmers at Cerén practiced inter-planting within their agricultural fields . The eruption apparently occurred in August when maize was mature, yet common practices today in El Salvador suggest that squash and beans would not have been planted yet.

The paleoethnobotanical remains propose that in the past these three annual plants were cultivated simultaneously at Cerén, especially considering that all three were recovered in a mature form. Inter-cropping maize, beans, and squash is advantageous in that it aids in an efficient and prosperous harvest; crop yields are prolonged into subsequent growing seasons, which is a common feature of many agricultural systems in the tropics. For example, the Kekchi Maya incorporate various plants in their milpas immediately after maize begins to sprout . The leguminous beans would have replenished the soil with nitrogen that had been depleted from maize, while the maize created a sturdy structure for the Phaseolus to climb upon and be supported. The squash likely served as a cover crop, helping to retain soil moisture by reducing the total surface exposed to sunlight and also helping to prevent soil erosion. Squash residues incorporated into soil also aids in the prevention of seed germination for many weed species . These ancient villagers were successfully maintaining an agroecological system that today we would describe as resilient and sustainable. Flotation samples taken directly and regularly from the interior of these agricultural ridges show that a great variety of plants were growing and thriving in the infields, not just the domesticates recovered and discussed above. These milpas are not just simple agricultural fields dominated by a single crop, they incorporate a variety of plants that could serve as food, medicine, and pesticides . The maize fields at Cerén had over a dozen weedy species growing in or around the well-maintained maize agricultural ridges, amounting to over 140,000 seeds and achenes . The varied floral assemblage within the infields reflects the effort that the Cerén residents made to diversify their agricultural production, a continuation from what can be seen in the household gardens. It was previously hypothesized that the Cerén residents had well maintained agricultural fields, with few intrusive plants growing among the domesticated crops. The intensification of paleoethnobotanical recovery has made the overwhelming abundance of weedy species visible archaeologically. The majority of the weedy species recovered from the agricultural fields have seeds with an average width of less than a millimeter, which makes water flotation an essential collection strategy to broaden the understanding of this complex agricultural system. Weeds are generally referred to as unwanted pests in agricultural fields and are defined as plants that grow predominantly in disturbed areas and are fast growing . This view regards weeds as problematic due to the competition for nutrients and moisture from soil within a field that weeds take part in, often contributing to a decline in yields, soil fertility, and an increase in other pests such as insects . However, many ethnobotanical studies that report weeds as a problem dealt with invasive species introduced from the Old World post-conquest, which would not have been a concern at the ancient village of Cerén. If competition for resources between weeds and food crops were a major factor, this obstacle could have been eradicated through laborious weeding. While it is possible that the farmers worked to remove weedy plants, the overwhelming abundance of weedy seeds and achenes suggests that the weeding process was not intensive. Perhaps the households at Cerén did not have an abundance of labor to devote to weed removal, which would have been done through manual labor at this ancient village with the use of stone and wooden tools which limit the ability to control the growth of unwanted plants . Alternatively, the residents of Cerén may have been knowledgeable of the multitude of applications for these ‘weedy’ plants, especially as nutritious herbs, given their strong presence among other food crops.

From a conceptual standpoint, there has been considerable debate in recent decades over how to best maintain agricultural productivity while also achieving systems that can maintain long-term productivity through resilience to environmental stress. These conversations often pivot around the idea of replacing industrial input-intensive agricultural practices with ecologically-based, knowledge-intensive systems. These ecologically-based systems are typically depicted as relying on on-farm biological diversity as a mechanism for increasing crops’ resilience to environmental conditions, whereas industrial systems are maintained with off-farm inputs. Even as biological diversification enters the agricultural ethos, there continues to be a pull towards achieving these biological outcomes through off-farm inputs. We typically think of chemicals and energy as the off-farm additions to conventional systems; however, products that mimic the biological effects of diversification practices can similarly be introduced from external sources rather than fostered on the farm. While AMF inoculation has indeed shown some benefit in more industrially managed systems, in the present study we observe that in a more diversified system, augmenting a field’s endogenous AMF community does not improve plant outcomes. Rather than replacing one external input with another , flood and drain hydroponics we find that farmers who already practice diversified management will likely have better luck pairing local climatic conditions with locally-adapted microbial communities.

More broadly, the full fungal community in dry farm, irrigated, and non-cultivated soils were distinct, indicating different selective pressures in each soil condition. Irrigation seems to be a filter on agricultural soils, resulting in a smaller community that overlaps substantially with dry farm soils. Given that in this study only tomatoes were present in dry farm soils, while crops on irrigated soils varied from field to field, we likely overestimate the diversity of irrigated soils relative to dry farm, making this community shrinkage in irrigated soils even more pronounced. While fungal community responses to drought vary widely in the literature, there is precedent for deficit irrigation shifting bacterial communities in processing tomato fields, and natural experiments with drought conditions have led to increased fungal diversity in cotton rotations. This lower fungal diversity in irrigated systems may be driven by lower soil temperatures that are less conducive to fungal growth, or directly linked to changes in fungal competition induced by water stress that enhance diversity in dry farm systems. On the other hand, agricultural soils and non-cultivated soils seem to be distinct communities with roughly equal magnitudes of taxa numbers despite high levels of disturbance that might act as a narrowing selective pressure. Dry farm fungal diversity may be caused by external inputs that introduce non-endogenous taxa to cultivated soils. Dry farm soils were not only distinct from the other soil locations, but consistently enriched in taxa in the class Sordariomycetes.

These indicator taxa formed a dry farm “signature” that was not only present in dry farm soils, but increased in magnitude in soils that had gone multiple years without external water inputs. This signature showed positive associations with fruit quality outcomes, which is of particular importance to farmers in this quality-driven system. Sordariomycetes were also associated with an increased likelihood that a plot would not have any marketable tomatoes on a given harvest day; however, as this was a rare occurrence that happened almost exclusively in the first/last weeks of harvest when yields were low for all plots, we do not expect that farmers will see an association between Sordariomycetes and yield declines. If anything, farmers may notice a slight truncation of harvest season duration in fields that have been dry farmed for several years. Sordariomycetes themselves may not be causing these outcomes, but rather point to the fact that soil microbial communities–possibly including bacteria and other microorganisms in addition to fungi–are consistently adapting to dry farm management. Sordariomycetes enrichment may indicate other community shifts that are ultimately the cause for enhanced fruit quality. Endophytes in the Hypocreales class, which was enriched in dry farm fields, are known to increase drought resistance and decrease pest pressure in their hosts, though none of the specific species known to exhibit this behavior were enriched in dry farm soils. On the other hand, Nectriaceae, the family that contains the Fusarium genus, was found to be enriched, though similarly no known pathogenic species were enriched in dry farm soils.

Our study explored dry farm management practices and their influence on soil nutrient and fungal community dynamics in 7 fields throughout the Central Coast region of California, allowing us to explore patterns across a wide range of management styles, soil types, and climatic conditions. Though we were able to sample from a large swath of contexts in which tomatoes are dry farmed, we are also aware that conditions will vary year to year, especially as climates change and farmers can no longer rely on “typical” weather conditions in the region. While we are confident in the patterns we observed and the recommendations below, we also encourage further study across multiple years to better understand the full scope of the decision space in which dry farm growers are acting.Given the scope of our current findings, we outline several management and policy implications for dry farmers and dry farming. Though we aim these implications towards the context of dry farm tomatoes in coastal California, we expect that they are likely to generalize to other dry farm crops grown in other regions with Mediterranean climates. First, given the expense and possibility that it is detrimental to fruit quality, we do not advise AMF inoculation for dry farm tomato growers. Second, we note the importance of nutrients below 60cm and the complexities of subsurface fertility management, and we recommend experimentation with organic amendments and deeply rooted cover crops that may be able to deliver nutrient sources that persist at depth, as well as planning several seasons in advance to build nutrients deeper in the soil profile. Finally, given our finding that dry farm soils develop a fungal signature that increases over time and its association with improved fruit quality, we encourage farmers to experiment with rotations that include only dry farm crops and even consider setting aside a field to be dry farmed in perpetuity. However, fully dry farmed rotations currently do not exist, likely due to a lack of commercially viable options for crops to include in a dry farm rotation. In order to experiment with potential dry farm rotations, as well as cover crops that can best scavenge excess nitrates and soil management regimes that can increase soil fertility at depth, farmers must be given both research support and a safety net for their own on-farm experimentation. Funding to mitigate the inherent risk in farmers’ management explorations will be key in further developing high-functioning dry farm management systems. Expanding land access to farmers who are committed to exploring dry farm management can additionally benefit these explorations. Dry farm tomato systems on the Central Coast point to key management principles that can both help current growers flourish and provide guidance for how irrigation can be dramatically decreased in a variety of contexts without harming farmer livelihoods. In these systems, managing nutrients at depth–at least below 30cm and ideally below 60cm–is necessary to influence outcomes in fields where surface soils dry down quickly after transplant. Fostering locally-adapted soil microbial communities that are primed for water scarcity can improve fruit quality. Farmers can otherwise manage nutrients to maximize either yields or quality, indoor vertical farming giving latitude to match local field conditions to desired markets. As water scarcity intensifies in California agriculture and around the globe, dry farm management systems are positioned to play an important role in water conservation. Understanding and implementing dry farm best management practices will not only benefit fields under strict dry farm management, but will provide an increasingly robust and adaptable example for how farms can continue to function and thrive while drastically reducing water inputs.Small, diversified farms on California’s Central Coast have been dry farming for decades, a practice that allows farmers to grow tomatoes and other vegetables with little to no irrigation in summers without rainfall, relying instead on water stored in soils from winter rains. Though dry farming was originally developed in this region to allow farmers to grow crops on land that had no water access, it has thrived from consumer demand for dry farmed tomatoes.

Superior flavors have enticed customers, allowing farmers to charge a premium for dry farm tomatoes and develop markets for this regional specialty. Tomato dry farming in the region has been notably devoid of involvement from academic researchers and extension agents; however, policy groups and the general public have shown growing interest in dry farming in recent years as water shortages in California force a reckoning with the precarity of the state’s agricultural water supply. Amidst growing urgency to develop low-water agricultural systems in the state, we interviewed ten Central Coast dry farmers, representing over half of the commercial dry farm operations in the region where the practice was developed, to collaboratively answer two central research questions: 1. What business and land stewardship practices characterize successful tomato dry farming on California’s Central Coast? 2. What is the potential for dry farming to expand beyond its current adoption while maintaining its identity as a diversified practice that benefits small-scale operations? We summarize farmers’ wisdom into nine themes about current dry farm practice, the potential for expansion, and future opportunities. We also synthesize farmer-stated environmental constraints on where dry farm management may be feasible into a map of areas suitable for dry farming in California. As we consider the process by which dry farming might expand to new areas and new operations, we highlight dry farming’s history as an agroecological alternative to industrial farming in the region and the need for careful policy planning to maintain that identity. Because policies that encourage dry farm expansion could change the economic landscape in which dry farming operates, we warn against the possibility that well-intentioned policies will edge small growers out of dry farm markets. At the same time, we emphasize the opportunity for dry farm tomato systems to model an agroecological transition towards water savings in California.Unlike other forms of dryland farming , in this region dry farm tomatoes are grown over a summer season where there is a near guarantee of no rainfall. Farmers plant tomatoes into moisture from winter rains, counting on soils to hold on to enough water to support the crops over the course of the entire dry summer and fall. While some farmers irrigate 1-3 times in the first month after transplant, severe water restriction is what gives the fruits their intense flavor, and farmers trade water cuts that lower yields for price premiums that consumers are more than willing to pay for higher quality fruits. Beyond Bay Area consumer’s enthusiasm for high-quality local produce, dry farm tomatoes also trace their origins to a richer food culture of justice-oriented and farmer-centric food distribution in the region . From the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program to strong community support for worker-owned and consumer food cooperatives , the Bay Area has become a hub of alternative values-based supply chains in a country largely dominated by an industrialized food system . Following this tradition, dry farm tomatoes originally found their footing in the United States in the Central Coast region 30 miles south of the Bay. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, innovative growers in small-scale cooperatives and teaching farms adapted an Italian and Spanish legacy of vegetable dry farming to the region’s Mediterranean climate, maritime influence, and high-clay soils . While these environmental features were necessary to grow tomatoes under dry farm management, the movement that sparked the reemergence of local farmer’s markets in the 1980’s also provided the access to direct to-consumer marketing that small farms needed to win consumer attention and loyalty, allowing farmers to both grow and sell this niche product. With their origins in local food distribution networks and local adaptations to a unique climate, dry farm tomatoes are now a signature of small, diversified, organic farms on the Central Coast and are a feature of many such operations’ business models. To this point, dry farming has largely followed its initial course and is only practiced at a small scale in the region, both in terms of geographic scope, and farm size.

Hannah’s mentorship has been invaluable at inflection points in my PhD process, and I can’t overstate how lucky her new grad students will be to have her as an advisor. I feel incredibly privileged to have the community support of more people than I can thank individually without making my acknowledgements longer than my dissertation. Communities that have given me particular encouragement, joy, and solace include the 2018 ESPM cohort, Friendship Village, the Sunset/Pomona/floating/CCST crew, my Park Palace queens, my sweet childhood friends, and every last Sheline and Socolar. You all make me feel connected to something I want to be accountable to. Within these communities, a few people stand out as being particularly instrumental in helping me thrive throughout this PhD. The folks at Rat Village–Abby, Alli, Brendan, and Charley–made a beautiful house into a beautiful home. You taught me how organization and communication can create abundance, and gave new meaning to what it can mean to live communally. Everything from fridge leftovers to card nights to casual kitchen encounters carried me through this experience, and I hope you will see my use of the term “Rat Village” in my dissertation as indicative of the lengths I am willing to go to to express my gratitude. Two dear friends, Erin Curtis Nacev and Claire Woodard, flood drain tray have been cornerstones of my PhD experience. They were both my gateway to the Bay Area–I would never even have arrived here if Berkeley hadn’t felt like the homecoming that you created.

Through med school, residency, and raising a child, Erin found time for visits and calls, and is my–and perhaps the entire world’s–best model for what a can-do attitude can be. She is generous, loyal, principled, a source of such joy, and capable of everything. Plus she and Zach made Evie, which is really the highest praise you can give a person. Of the narratives I have watched unfold over the course of my PhD, few have made me happier than watching Claire transform from the best of friends to the best of collaborators. It was her overwhelming loyalty as a friend and endless capacity for hard work that brought her to my first tomato field, and my own incredible luck that has kept her farming ever since. I marvel that the person I’m most likely to call crying on the phone is the same person I’m most likely to call about transplanting techniques. Claire’s accompaniment through this entire experience has been so thorough that it’s alarming to remember there was a time before Claire was a farmer, and to imagine what my field seasons would have looked like without her there. I have also been lucky to have the deep support of many family members on this journey. That my brother, sister-in-law, and sister-cousin all had PhDs when I arrived at Berkeley meant that my PhD did not have to be demystified, but rather was never mystified in the first place. Jacob, Bethanne, and Annelle’s guidance, encouragement, and commiseration have been the sweetest set of bumper rails as I ricocheted through this experience. Jacob in particular has fielded enough “hi how are you, but actually can we talk about statistics?” phone calls from me that you might think “random effect” is a family member we desperately need to gossip about. Luckily my niece, Isabelle, has been the most brilliant distraction when things get too heady–my heart remembers to refocus when I see her shining eyes. Though none of my grandparents are here to read this dissertation, I can see the way their faces would beam if I could show it to them. Their influences are almost comically obvious in my career choices–Grandpa Ray’s determination and proclivity for natural sciences, Grandma Yvonne’s steadfast commitment to social justice, Grandpa Milt’s philosophy and politics, and Grandma Molly’s effortless ability to connect to everyone she met.

From antiracism to interviews, DNA work to policy ideas, they have created a foundation that I want to build on, and their obvious pride in me has given me the confidence to start building. For my mom and dad, I reach the limits of what I know how to do with words. To say that your love and support for me was unwavering suggests the possibility that it might have wavered, and the knowledge that that is not possible is baked into the bedrock of my existence. You are the people I want to consult with every conundrum that comes my way, and the people who most celebrate my every success. Dad, you know it’s not possible to fill the space Mom left in our lives, and you fill every space around that. My luck at having Varun, my partner, in my life can be measured in the mornings I wake up happy, my growing ability to process out loud , the days my grump melts into grins, the times I go backpacking, the plants in our living room, the edited drafts of each chapter below, the width of our couch, and the number of dissertation-fueling treats in our cupboard. He is patient, joyful, loving, smart as all get-out, and an inspiration to me. His curiosity has brought a new perspective to the work I do, and I can navigate my decisions more clearly in the paths he reflects back to me. Varun, you extend yourself to nurture my growth, and you can see that growth written in these pages. I want to be with you everywhere. My final gratitude is to the land that made this work possible and its generations of stewards. These soils continue to inspire, feed, and live through millennia of care, and I am indebted to those who built relationship with these places. I want to acknowledge and pay my respect to the Awaswas speaking Uypi Tribe and Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, whose unceded territory encompasses the field sites and laboratories where this work took place. My work has benefited from the occupation of this land, and thus, with this land acknowledgement, I affirm Indigenous sovereignty.Over 70% of the 62 million ha of cropland in the Midwestern United States is grown in corn-based rotations. These crop rotations are caught in a century-long simplification trend despite robust evidence demonstrating yield and soil benefits from diversified rotations. Our ability to explore and explain this trend will come in part from observing the biophysical and policy influences on farmers’ crop choices at one key level of management: the field. Yet field-level crop rotation patterns remain largely unstudied at regional scales and will be essential for understanding how national agricultural policy manifests locally and interacts with biophysical phenomena to erode— or bolster—soil and environmental health, agricultural resilience, flood and drain tray and farmers’ livelihoods. We developed a novel indicator of crop rotational complexity and applied it to 1.5 million fields across the US Midwest. We used bootstrapped linear mixed models to regress field-level rotational complexity against biophysical and policy-driven factors. After accounting for spatial autocorrelation, there were statistically clear negative relationships between rotational complexity and biophysical factors , indicating decreased rotation in prime growing areas. A positive relationship between rotational complexity and distance to the nearest bio-fuel plant suggests policy-based, as well as biophysical, constraints on regional rotations. This novel rotational complexity index is a promising tool for future fine-scale rotational analysis and demonstrates that the United States’ most fertile soils are the most prone to degradation, with recent policy choices further exacerbating this trend.Biological simplification has accompanied agricultural intensification across the world, resulting in vast agricultural landscapes dominated by just one or two crop species. The Midwestern US is a prime example1, where corn currently dominates at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. An area the size of Norway is planted in corn in the Midwest in any given year with little variation in crop sequence; over half of Midwestern cropland is dedicated to corn-soy rotations and corn monoculture. Directly and indirectly, this agricultural homogeneity causes environmental degradation that harms ecosystem health while also contributing to climate change and increasing vulnerability to climate shocks. Agricultural diversification in space and time reverses this trend towards homogeneity with practices like crop rotations that vary which harvested crops are grown in a field from year to year.

Crop rotations are a traditional agricultural practice with ample evidence that complex rotations— ones that include more species that turn over frequently—benefit farmers, crops, and ecosystems. As one of the principles underlying agricultural soil management, diverse crop rotations promote soil properties that provide multiple ecosystem services including boosting soil microbial diversity, enhancing soil fertility, improving soil structure and reducing pest pressu. These soil benefits combine to increase crop yields and stabilize them in times of environmental stress. Crop rotations’ environmental and economic benefits typically increase with the complexity of the rotation , while conversely, biophysical aspects like soil structure and microbial populations are degraded as rotations are simplified. Despite its benefits, crop rotational complexity continues its century-long decline in the Midwestern US. Corn-soy rotations increasingly dominate over historical crop sequences that included small grains and perennials, with corn monocultures also on the rise. This increasing simplification is in part the result of a set of interlocking, long-standing federal policies aimed at maximizing production of a handful of commodity crops that distort farmers’ economic incentives. Regional rotation simplification is clear from analyses of crop frequency, county-level data, and farmer interviews. However, fine-grained patterns that more completely reflect farmers’ rotational choices across the region, and how those choices relate to influences from policy and biophysical factors that play out across agricultural landscapes, remain largely unstudied. This knowledge is essential for understanding how national agricultural policy manifests locally and interacts with biophysical phenomena to erode—or bolster—soil and environmental health, agricultural resilience, and farmers’ livelihoods. Bio-fuel mandates and concerted efforts to craft industrial livestock systems as end-users of these corn production systems make corn lucrative above other commodities, while federal crop insurance programs push farmers to limit the number of crops grown on their farms. These policies, along with the current corporate food regime, drive pervasive economic incentives to grow corn, and farmers must increasingly choose between growing corn as often as possible to provide a source of government guaranteed income, and maximizing soil benefits and annual yields through diversified rotations. These policies both alter agricultural economics at a national level by boosting corn prices and manifest locally in grain elevators and bio-fuel plants that create pockets of high corn prices with rising demand closer to each facility. Biophysical factors like precipitation and land capability that are highly localized and spatially heterogeneous can catalyze or impede this simplification trend. For example, increasing rotational complexity is one strategy that farmers may employ to manage marginal soils or greater probability of drought, while ideal soil and climate conditions allow for rotation simplification to be profitable, at least in the short run. As these top-down and bottom-up forces combine, we ask: how do farmers optimize crop rotational diversity in complex social-ecological landscapes, with top-down policy pressures to simplify intertwined with bottom-up biophysical incentives to diversify? Because biophysical factors and even policy influences vary greatly at the field scale at which management decisions occur, an approach is needed to assess patterns of crop rotation that can capture simplification and diversification at this scale. Though remotely sensed data on crop types can now show fine-scale crop sequences, previous approaches to quantifying rotational complexity have relied on classifying rotations based on how often a certain crop appears in a region over a given time period, aggregating over large areas, or examining short sequences. To date, methods to capture rotational complexity have therefore been unable to address management decisions at the field scale , and/or lose valuable information about the number of crops present in a sequence and the complexity of their order . At the other end of the spectrum, farmer surveys have impressively detailed the economic and biophysical considerations that go into farmers’ rotation decisions, yet are limited by the number of farmers they can reach and who chooses to respond. Here, we explore how aspects of farm landscapes influence field-scale patterns of crop rotational complexity across the Midwestern US. We developed the first field-scale dataset of rotational complexity in corn-based rotations, covering 1.5 million fields in eight states across the Midwest and ranking crop sequences based on their capacity to benefit soils. We examined rotations from 2012-2017 to coincide with the introduction of the Renewable Fuel Standard, or “bio-fuel mandate,” which took full effect in 2012.