Hemp Growing

Others on the farm believe that the courses are open to all workers except pickers. This unofficial, yet effective exclusion of pickers from the English classes inadvertently shores up segregation on the farm.Mateo is 29 years old, a Mixteco father of two young children. He has worked on the farm for 12 years and has taken English classes for 5 years. His family had enough money to allow him to finish high school in Oaxaca before emigrating. He is fluent in his native language, Mixteco Alto, and Spanish, and is the only Oaxacan person on the farm who speaks English. He is also the only Oaxacan with a job other than picker. He oversees pickers in the strawberry and blueberry harvests. He hopes to continue studying English and be promoted on the farm until he can ‘‘work with his mind instead of his body’’ . Mateo worries about the pregnant women in his crew picking long days in pesticide-covered plants. He explains that many give birth prematurely due to the difficulty of their work. He also worries about the low pay of the pickers. The pay for strawberries has gone up only a few cents per pound in a decade and the pay for blueberries has gone down in the past several years. Barbara and Mateo manifest the common desire to treat workers well even though the structures within which they all work are ‘‘unfair’’ . Mateo’s position as the only Oaxacan crew boss shows the importance of the ability to study English in order to be promoted and helps illuminate the contours of the structures leading to vulnerability.During my second summer on the farm, a white, female college student came up to me and said, ‘‘So, I hear you’re writing a book.’’ Laura grew up in the area and worked assigning pickers to rows and checking ID badges.

She is studying Spanish in college in Seattle and enjoys talking with and learning about the pickers. She has been frustrated with the way one supervisor, Shelly, sees the Mexican pickers. She explained, ‘‘One day we were walking back to the cars, grow bench one girl was talking to one of the pickers, practicing her Spanish. I don’t know if they were even talking to each other but Shelly said something to her, she didn’t want her to talk to pickers. It’s like she doesn’t trust them. She gets frazzled a lot. I was surprised, like, ‘why didn’t she want you to talk to them?’ ’’ Although the higher farm management sees the employment of white teenager checkers to be developing positive values toward agriculture and diversity in the valley, checkers also learn that they deserve to have power over Mexicans, even those old enough to be their parents or grandparents. The teenagers are paid minimum wage while being allowed to talk and sit most of the time, while the pickers have to kneel constantly and work as fast as possible in order to keep their jobs. The checkers are given power over the number of pounds marked for pickers. They are allowed to treat the pickers as people who do not deserve equal respect. This experience serves to develop the lenses through which symbolic violence, the naturalization of inequality, is affected . In addition, Laura points out that the farm management sometimes works directly to keep labor positions and ethnicities segregated.Several small groups of field workers are paid per hour. All live in labor camps and work seven days a week from approximately five in the morning until the early evening. Approximately a dozen men, mostly mestizo Mexicans along with a few Mixteco Oaxacans, drive tractors between the fields and the processing plant.

The tractors carry stacks of berry containers several feet high, and the drivers are exposed to direct sun or rain all day. In addition, small groups of mostly mestizo Mexican men and women, and a handful of Mixtecos, work in other capacities, from tying off the new raspberry growth to covering blueberry bushes with plastic, from spraying chemical or concentrated vinegar pesticides to using hoes between rows of plants. Thirty-some raspberry pickers work 12 to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for approximately 1 month. Two or three people work on each raspberry harvester, which is approximately one-story tall, bright yellow, and shaped like an upside down ‘‘U’’ tall enough for the row of raspberry bushes to pass beneath its middle. The machine shakes the bushes such that the ripe berries fall onto a conveyor belt and then onto a crate. One worker drives the machine; the others move the full berry crates and remove bad berries and leaves. They are all seated and have minimal shade from umbrellas attached to the machine. All the raspberry pickers are US Citizen Latinos from Texas; most are relatives of the raspberry crop manager.Pickers are the only group not paid by the hour. Instead, they are considered ‘‘contract workers’’ and are paid a certain amount per pound of fruit harvested. Most live in the camp furthest from farm headquarters and some live in the next furthest camp. Each day, they are told a minimum amount of fruit to pick. If they pick less, they are fired and kicked out of the camp. The first contract picker I met, a Triqui man named Abelino, explained, ‘‘The hourly jobs, the salaried jobs are better because you can count on how much you will make. But, they don’t give those jobs to us.’’ Approximately 25 people, mostly mestizo Mexican with a few Mixteco and Triqui people, pick apples. The field boss, Abby, explained to me that picking apples is the hardest job on the farm. Apple pickers work 5 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, carrying a heavy bag of apples over their shoulders. They repeatedly climb up and down ladders to reach the apples.

This job is sought after because it is known to be the highest paid picking position. However, the majority—350 to 400—of pickers, often called simply ‘‘farm workers,’’ work in the strawberry fields for one month, followed by three months in the blueberry fields. Other than a few Mixtecos, they are almost all Triqui men, women, and children; agricultural workers can legallybe 14 years or older. Most pickers come with other family members. The official contract for strawberry pickers is 14 cents per pound of strawberries. This means that pickers must bring in 50 pounds of de-leafed strawberries every hour because the farm is required to pay Washington State minimum wage . In order to meet this minimum, pickers take few or no breaks from 5 a.m. until the afternoon when that field is completed. Nonetheless, they are often reprimanded and called perros , burros, Oaxacos, or indios estupidos. Many do not eat or drink before work so they do not have to take time to use the bathroom. They work as hard and fast as they can, arms flying in the air as they kneel in the dirt, picking and running with their buckets of berries to the checkers. Although they are referred to as ‘‘contract workers,’’ this is misleading. The pay per unit may be changed by the crop managers without warning or opportunity for negotiation. Strawberry pickers work simultaneously with both hands in order to make the minimum. They pop off the green stem and leaves from each strawberry and avoid the green and the rotten berries. During my fieldwork, I picked once or twice a week and experienced gastritis, headaches, and knee, back, and hip pain for days afterward. I wrote in a field note after picking, ‘‘It honestly felt like pure torture.’’ Triqui pickers work seven days a week, rain or shine, plant nursery benches without a day off until the last strawberry is processed. Occupying the bottom of the ethnic-labor hierarchy, Triqui pickers bear an unequal share of health problems, from idiopathic musculoskeletal pains to slipped vertebral disks, from type 2 diabetes to premature births and developmental malformations . Most Triqui workers on this farm are from one village, San Miguel, located in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Next, I highlight the economic and physical hardships of the pickers on the farm and on the US-Mexico border, touching on the importance of language, ethnicity, and education in the organization of the farm labor hierarchy. I also indicate the importance of immigration and border policies in determining the structural vulnerability of farm workers. Marcelina is a 28-year-old Triqui mother of two. A local non-profit organized a seminar on farm labor for which I invited Marcelina to speak about her experiences migrating and picking. Shyly, she approached the translator, holding her one year-old daughter, speaking in Spanish, her second language.My first day picking, the only people who picked as slowly as I did were two Latina US citizen girls from California and one Latino US citizen manwho commuted from Seattle. After the first week, the two Latina girls began picking into the same bucket in order to make the minimum and keep one paycheck. The second week, I no longer saw the man from Seattle. I asked a supervisor where he had gone, assuming he had decided the work was too difficult and given up. She told me the farm made a deal with him that if he could make it through a week picking, they would give him a job paid hourly in the processing plant. He has been ‘‘one of the hardest workers’’ in the plant since then. I inquired as to why indigenous Mexicans could not get processing plant jobs. The supervisor replied, ‘‘People who live in migrant camps cannot have those jobs, they can only pick.’’ She considered it farm policy without any need for explanation. Thus, marginalization begets marginalization. Structural vulnerability increases along the labor hierarchy and is reinforced by official and unofficial policies, practices, and prejudices . The indigenous Mexicans live in the migrant camps because they do not have the resources to rent apartments in town. Because they live in the camps, they are given only the worst jobs on the farm. Unofficial farm policies subtly reinforce labor and ethnic hierarchies. These profiles show that the position of the Triqui workers at the bottom of the hierarchy is multiply determined by poverty, education level, language, citizenship status, and ethnicity. In addition, these factors produce each other. For example, a family’s poverty cuts short an individual’s education, which limits one’s ability to learn Spanish , which limits one’s ability to leave the bottom rung of labor and housing. Poverty, at the same time, is determined in large part by the institutional racism at work against Triqui people in the first place. Segregation on the farm is the result of a complex system of feedback and feed forward loops organized around these multiple nodes. Late in my second summer on the farm, the pickers walked out of the field just after the pay per weight was lowered. The pickers listed over 20 grievances about the working conditions, from low pay to racist statements from supervisors, lack of lunch breaks to unfair promotions of mestizo and Latino workers over indigenous pickers. Over the next week, several executives and a dozen pickers held meetings to discuss the grievances. The executives were visibly surprised and upset at the explicit racist treatment and differential promotions on the farm. They promptly instructed the crop managers to pass along the message to treat all workers respectfully. Lunch breaks and higher pay were instituted, but were silently rescinded the following summer. The pickers called the document a ‘‘contract’’ and requested signatures from the executives. The farm president filed it as a ‘‘memo.’’ This strike, the temporary nature of its results, and the conversion of the contract into a memo highlight the differential demands and pressures at all levels of the farm hierarchy. The executives demand that all workers are treated with respect at the same time that their real anxieties over farm survival prohibit them from effectively addressing the primary, economic concerns of the pickers. Although everyone on the farm works for and is paid by the same business, they do not share vulnerability evenly. The pay and working conditions of the pickers function as variables semicontrollable by the farm executives as partial buffers between market changes and the viability of the rest of the farm.

A different farmer echoed this sentiment, saying that “I’m not going to magically get rid of issues that soil tests show… I can only slightly move the needle, no matter what I do.” Most farmers recognized that soil tests produced inconsistent results because of differences in timing and location of sampling. As one farmer noted, “You can take the same sample a couple months apart from the same field and get very different results.” Likewise, another farmer shared that, “I still struggle with the fact that I can send in two different soil tests and get two very different results. To me that seems like the science is not there.” Farmers also emphasized that each of their “fields are all so different” with “a lot of irregularity in [their] soil.” According to several farmers, soil tests did not account for variations in soil texture and soil structure, despite their observations of the influence of both edaphic characteristics on soil test results. For example, one farmer pointed out that fields that were plowed or were previously furrow irrigated created marked differences in soil test results. Similarly, another farmer shared that if a sample for soil testing was taken from an irregular patch in a field with heavier clay, differences in soil texture across samples skewed soil test results. If a systematic sampling approach was not considered, several farmers emphasized that results of soil tests might be “misleading.” Another source of inconsistency that farmers voiced stemmed from variation in protocols used across different labs that processed soil samples. One farmer stated that in their experience, “soil tests are not really accurate, botanicare rolling benches because if I use a different lab, a different person [ie, consultant] doing the soil test, it’s all different.”

Several farmers also raised issues related to how well soil tests were calibrated to their type of farm. For example, one farmer pointed out that they do not use soluble forms of nitrogen, and instead relied on their animal rotations and cover crops to supply nutrients as part of their fertility program; this farmer emphasized that, “I think we need to get to a place with soil testing where it would be more applicable or be more accurately useful for a farm like mine. This farmer questioned if available soil tests were calibrated to their type of farm, given that soil tests were designed for conventional agriculture . Relatedly, farmers expressed that soil tests often did not match up with their own observations of their soil and fields. One farmer plainly stated, “I’ve had soil tests that I felt were wrong; they often do not match up with what I’ve observed and gathered.” So instead, this farmer created a work around, “I usually just rent a backhoe every year and dig up one of my fields.” Another farmer also discussed this gap in soil tests, and stated the reason for this misalignment in farmer knowledge of soil and soil test results occurred because soil tests only provided “snapshots” and that observation was “just more practical in the end” because of the historical, iterative knowledge-making farmers engage in. To this farmer, these snapshots were a “another tool” but not as powerful as direct observation; as a result, soil test results did not inform decision-making on this farm. These sentiments were often directly related to the issue of sampling discussed above. By far, the largest limitation of soil tests that nearly all farmers discussed related to the lack of analysis and interpretation of results provided by most commonly available tests.

Farmers used a variety of metaphors to get at this general point. For example, one farmer likened using soil tests as a fuel gauge. This farmer stated that “the soil test tells me my tank is half empty, but it doesn’t tell me how far you’re going to be able to go… I think what’s lacking from soil tests, if someone with experience [could] help me interpret the results.” Another farmer wished they could ask “someone who has a lot of experience with doing soil tests—what do the results mean to you? Then I would incorporate my thoughts into the results… but there is not expertise and no dialogue.” This lack of dialogue was echoed by several farmers that saw the usefulness of soil tests in the collaborative interpretation of the results. Establishing definitions of soil health among farmers in this study was important to gauge as a starting point to discuss soil fertility, and also for selecting fields used for soil testing. Among farmers in this case study, there was general consensus on defining soil health, with strong overlap in the particular language used by farmers. Because farmers who participated in this study were geographically located within a significant node of the organic movement in California and many of the farmers interviewed participated directly or indirectly in the growth of this movement , the similarity in responses to define soil health suggests that—on the one hand, these farmers continue to draw their understanding of soil health from the culture and guiding principles of the organic movement to this day . Indeed, maintaining healthy soils was a central component of the organic movement, as stewardship of soil represented a direct connection to the land and a form of environmental protection . At the same time, the aspects of soil health that farmers touched on here were also similar to findings by other previous studies , which suggests that—on the other hand, more recent codification of the five soil health principles by the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service has led to widespread integration of a national soil health lexicon, as put forth by federal policy .

This soil health lexicon, in combination with farmers’ deep cultural history with organic agriculture, likely unified definitions of soil health among farmers in this study. Interestingly, while nearly all farmers interviewed touched on the first four soil health principles in some capacity, even farmers who used integrated crop livestock systems did not explicitly mention the importance of livestock integration . This finding suggests that perhaps due to sensitivity around food safety concerns, farmers may not openly emphasize livestock integration in conversation, because although this practice may be considered beneficial to their soil, in reality, they face structural and policy limitations . Despite the emphasis on understanding nutrient cycling and nitrogen availability to crops in soil health research and fertility management , we found that for most farmers interviewed in this study, tracking nutrient levels was less important than other aspects of fertility management. Moreover, for these farmers, managing for soil fertility required a holistic approach that went beyond understanding nutrient levels. Farmers also underscored that measuring indicators for soil fertility was not particularly useful to maintaining soil fertility in practice, because assessment of soil indicators lacked integration with management practices. In most farmers’ experiences, assessing soil indicators was often associated with prescriptive rather than holistic solutions. In this sense, farmers stressed that the synergy of multiple management practices over space and time guided their approach to building and assessing soil fertility on-farm, rather than using soil nutrient levels as a guide—a key finding that is also emerging in recent literature . While farmers agreed that gauging soil nitrogen and other key soil nutrients was important to consider and be aware of generally, other aspects of soil management, such as promoting soil biological processes, maintaining adequate soil moisture and aeration, or planting cover crops in regular rotation, were more critical to adequately maintaining soil fertility on their farm. An analogous soil health study similarly found that among predominantly non-organic farmers in the midwestern part of the US, measuring nutrient levels in soil was generally not highlighted by farmers interviewed . When prompted to discuss key aspects of soil health, a majority of farmers in this past study completely omitted mention of the importance of gauging nutrient levels, ebb and flow tray or in their case “soil mineral fertility,” as an indicator for soil health. This prior finding in combination with our findings here suggests that measuring nutrient availability to crops may not be as important as initially hypothesized to organic and non-organic farmers alike. Importantly, Gruver and Weil posited that the lack of emphasis on soil mineral fertility among these midwestern farmers may have occurred because they perceived that their soil fertility was not currently limited by nutrient availability to crops. Our research with organic farmers in California corroborates this hypothesis, and we suggest further research in other farming contexts to see if this sentiment among farmers is more widespread. We learned that there were three related reasons for why organic farmers in our study expressed that measuring nutrient levels was not particularly relevant for gauging soil fertility on their farm operation. For one, as already mentioned, farmers emphasized that they relied on carefully orchestrated soil management practices—such as the application of cover crops and livestock rotations—rather than depending on organic nitrogen-based fertilizers—to supply nutrients to crops. Because a majority of farmers applied less than 25 kg-N/acre of additional fertilizer per growing season, farmers in this context emphasized that their soil chemical and biological processes related to soil fertility may potentially diverge from agriculture that was predominantly or exclusively fertilizer-based.

By creating internally regulated farming systems via diverse management practices, these farmers observed that in general nutrient availability to their crops was ensured over the growing season. This key finding shared by farmers overlapped strongly with hallmarks for resilient agriculture outlined by Peterson et al. , who summarized features of internally regulated farming systems and key management practices associated with these systems. Based on knowledge shared by farmers, we suggest that it is possible for farming systems that integrate multiple management practices rather than rely on external fertilizer inputs to create soil conditions that “buffer” soil nutrient levels. In these internally regulated systems, measuring nutrient availability to crops may be less practical or even achievable with available soil indicators, as certain nutrients only become available as needed by local soil processes, and strongly depend on plant root structure, associated mycorrhizal pathways, and microbial communities present . To this end, several farmers hypothesized that available soil indicators were not sensitive to alternative approaches to maintaining soil fertility, likely because these fertility management practices operated on different timescales of nutrient release compared to direct fertilizer application. These conclusions drawn by farmers on the limits of measuring nutrient availability to crops were not unlike broad thematic gaps in measuring bioavailable nitrogen to crops discussed by Grandy et al. and others previously . In particular, Grandy et al. discussed the importance of considering soil health gradients, especially on farms that are not “ecologically simplified” and do not rely extensively on fertilizer application; such farm systems, like the farms examined in this study, are not as dependent on soil inorganic N and instead rely on what Grandy et al. call “a highly networked supply of organic N.” In other words, as farmers in this study also pointed out in interviews, soil health and fertility depend on a variety of factors, such as plant root accessibility, the microbial communities present, and soil mineral properties . As hypothesized in recent soil health literature, available soil indicators may not fully capture the complex plant-microbe-soil interactions that regulate fertility, particularly on organic farms that use minimal organic fertilizer application—a sentiment supported by farmer knowledge in this region as well. Second, farmers in this study also questioned whether available indicators for soil nutrient levels were calibrated not only to alternative farming approaches but also to local soil conditions. Farmers emphasized that soil test metrics were not grounded in their farm operation and produced inconsistent results that were likely due to a combination of spatial and temporal variations in their land, and also due to differences in inherent soil characteristics. As most farmers also pointed out, soil indicators for fertility did not explicitly calibrate for inherent soil characteristics, such as soil structure and soil type, or soil management history. Yet, to farmers, local knowledge of prior and ongoing soil management were integral to making management decisions that improved, or at least maintained, soil fertility on their farm. Farmers in this region stressed that the synergy of management practices they applied were often calibrated to account for physical soil variability among fields, and therefore were closely informed by their local soil conditions and unique management histories.

These initial results highlight the usefulness of establishing farm typologies based on indicators for soil organic matter as a novel approach to study gradients in soil quality on organic farms. The three farm types generated based on soil organic matter levels served as a key starting point for further analysis of the role of management in relation to soil quality. Accordingly, not only were the three farm types identified in this study significantly different based on indicators for soil organic matter levels, but the farm types also aligned with general trends in management among sites, which indicated a link between soil organic matter levels and management. In particular, as the four indicators for soil organic matter collectively serve as a proxy for soil quality, our results suggest that soil quality indicators may show responsiveness to the impacts of short-term management. In our study, crop diversity, crop rotational complexity, and tillage emerged as the strongest drivers of farm type differences, as shown by LDA coefficients . These results also coincided with average values for management variables compared across all three farm types , though variables for ICLS and cover crop application overlapped considerably across all three farms. These cursory findings extend results from ongoing work from others , including a recent 4-year study by Sprunger et al. —which focused on organic corn systems in the Midwest. Sprunger et al. likewise reported strong links between soil metrics such as total N, total C, soil protein, and POXC—and on-farm management practices, such as crop rotation patterns, manure and cover crop application, and tillage. While extensive work has been done on organic corn and grain systems in the midwestern region of the US, cannabis drying racks commercial our study provides new insight on the applicability of these common soil metrics in entirely different organic farming systems and climate regions—specifically on high-value vegetable farms operating in the dry, hot Mediterranean climates of northern California.

Our results also underscore the usefulness of on-farm interviews in developing management variables that are potentially linked to soil indicators . Whereas most previous studies have frequently utilized mail-in surveys that rely on binary responses from farmers to understand management , our study, following Guthman and others, highlights the uneven gradient in management practices that exists among organic farms and the importance of in-depth interviews . For example, rather than simply noting the presence or absence of tillage at a field site, our study accounted for the number of tillage passes per season that a farmer implemented on a particular field site, which required soliciting a range of responses from each farmer to create a congruent metric across all field sites. As displayed in Table 6, the mean values for frequency of tillage and crop abundance differed across the three farm types in our study; these management variables strongly separated Farm Type I from the other two farm types and weakly correlated with soil quality. On the other hand, crop rotational complexity generally separated all three farm types, but did not correlate with increasing soil quality. These results suggest that while certain management practices may increase soil organic matter pools as frequency decreases, some management practices may require finding a “sweet spot” to achieve higher soil organic matter levels. Relatedly, the implementation of ICLS did not appear to be as strong of a source of differentiation among the three farm types. One reason for this weak link between soil organic matter levels and ICLS may be due to the lack of a temporal component in the development of this soil metric. For example, some farms may have recently rotated livestock on their fields, while other farms may not have rotated livestock for several years on that particular field; our metric does not capture such spatial and temporal differences. Though limited studies on organic systems in California currently exist, previous studies in the midwestern US have found that the integration of livestock does increase organic matter levels on-farm ; however, based on our results, crop diversity, crop rotational complexity, and frequency of tillage present stronger influences than cover crop application and ICLS in differentiating working organic farms—at least in this particular context.

While management is undoubtedly an important driver of soil organic matter levels, our findings also suggest that soil texture may play a more significant role than management in determining levels of SOM than originally considered. Though management explained 18% of the variance among the three farm types, further analysis showed that soil textural class was the more dominant factor as shown in Figure 5; in fact, soil texture class was 44% greater than management in explaining the three farm types. This important result from our study complements parallel findings from Sprunger et al. , who also determined that soil textural class, rather than management, explained the largest amount of variation among the soil indicators they measured on their midwestern US-based organic corn systems . Our combined findings provide an initial indication that regardless of the organic system— ie, crop, climate, and/or geography—soil texture is the more dominant determinant of soil indicators for soil quality rather than the diverse management practices applied to these systems . This broader finding is significant because it supports emergent research that suggests that while management certainly contributes to soil quality, inherent characteristics of the soil in a given field may place limits on achievable organic matter levels on organic farms . Based on our findings, it is evident that even along minimal gradients in soil texture class, organic matter levels strongly differ. Soil texture is known to be a strong control on soil organic matter dynamics across diverse ecological systems—not just agricultural systems—in part because organic compounds, particularly those derived from soil microbes, are among those capable of stabilization by physical and chemical mechanisms, including aggregation, sorption on mineral surfaces, and entrapment within fine pores . At a fundamental level, soils with greater amounts of clay tend to stabilize SOM on surfaces more than soils with high sand and/or silt content , as clay particles provide greater surface area through organo-mineral associations than other particle sizes . For example, it has been shown in numerous previous studies that as clay content increases, the relative abundance of total soil N also increases . Further other studies have shown that soil texture and structure can influence SOM chemistry, and therefore, SOM stabilization . Our study takes previous research in agricultural contexts one step further to show that while management is important to consider, soil texture may be the more dominant factor; however, based on our results, it is still unclear which direction soil texture may be driving SOM. Nonetheless, our results highlight that contextualizing management in the native soil texture is essential to understand the limits of management imposed by pre-existing constraints of the soil. In practice, current emphasis in on-farm soil health research and quality assessments tends to focus on the importance of changing management to build healthy soils and improve soil quality without explicit consideration for soil texture . In this study, the gradient of soil textures across the farm fields sites was relatively limited and even so—soil texture still explained a significant component of the variance observed compared to management. Given this outcome, our findings here reinforce the importance of using soil texture as a starting point for evaluating soil quality.

Knowing the soil textural class of different fields may help farmers determine the management practices that have greatest potential for improving soil quality on farms with even small variances in soil textures; soil texture class may also help farmers better contextualize results of their soil health tests. Our study suggests that moving forward, soil texture should be more explicitly considered when making management recommendations to improve soil quality on organic farms. That said, vertical grow racks understanding the interactive effects between management and soil texture continues to be a gap in on-farm research and soil health assessment. Future studies might build on our approach and examine whether applying a similar suite of indicators to capture soil organic matter levels may yield similar connections with management in other organic farming contexts in California—and elsewhere in the US. Our study provides a potentially widely applicable method for developing a functional understanding of soil organic matter in complex agricultural landscapes. In this sense, the overall significance of the results of the cluster analysis highlights the efficacy of developing typologies to provide a useful tool for understanding the complexity of working agricultural landscapes. Importantly, the development of farm typologies allowed for additional analysis of other soil indicators for N cycling an availability—by using the farm types as a central tool for further investigation.Though the range of gross N cycling rates from this study are comparable to N cycling values reported from previous studies in organic agricultural systems , we found that farm types did not have significantly different gross N mineralization and nitrification rates—contrary to our initial hypothesis and despite that farm types strongly differentiated based on soil organic matter levels. These hypotheses were in part based on prior work with organic farms in this region that reported instances where inorganic N pools were low—well below established soil nitrate threshold sufficiency values—but that the crops themselves showed high production of, and sufficient N . Fields in which this trend was observed had the highest levels of soil C, and so in this previous study, it was hypothesized that higher rates of N production explained this observed trend. However, nitrogen bio-availability for crops is not just a function of the gross production of inorganic N by microbes but is also influenced by physical soil characteristics within the rhizosphere, such as the local soil structure and mineralogy, plant root structure and associated mycorrhizal pathways, as well as accessibility of water to plants and soil microbes . These variable conditions in the rhizosphere are not captured by measuring N cycling rates but still directly influence bio-availability of N. For these reasons, the N cycling results of this study may not follow prior findings from Bowles et al. . Still, we did observe an influence of soil organic matter levels on N cycling, particularly in terms of gross nitrification rates. As shown in the Linear Mixed Model results in Table 12, SOM indicators do appear to have an influence in predicting gross nitrification rates , even as the proportion of variation explained is modest . This slight trend is also evident in the boxplots . The weak but significant link between soil organic matter levels and gross nitrification rates is important to highlight because these results suggest that building soil organic matter presents one way to increase nitrification rates and potentially crop N availability. Because the plant-soil-microbe N cycling system is strongly influenced by soil water content and soil structure, it is possible that gross N cycling indicators lack the responsiveness that SOM indicators exhbiti especially in scenarios where improved soil quality allows for crops to continue accessing soil microsites with available N . Similarly, crops with more abundant and active mycorrhizal community associations can extend into smaller Ncontaining aggregates that may be otherwise locked up for crops with less root proliferation andhyphal associations. Additionally, it is also possible that changing microbial community composition in the soil may lead to greater immobilization of N, locking up available N but not necessarily impacting gross production of N. These plant-soil-microbe interactions that control availability of N may not be detectable solely by measuring gross N flows. 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.

On-farm experimentation was a critical component of knowledge building as well. For these farmers, experimentation consisted of on-farm methodical trials implemented at small scales, most often directly on a small portion of their fields. Experimentation was often incited by observation , a desire to learn, increased alignment with their own ethos, or a need to pivot in order to adapt to external changes. Farmers experimented to test the feasibility of implementing specific incremental changes to their current farming practices before applying these changes across their entire farm. For example, one farmer relied exclusively on trucking in urban green waste compost as part of the farm’s fertility program when she first started farming. However, one year, she decided to allow chickens to roam in a few of the fields; within a few years, those fields were outproducing any other field on farm, in terms of crop yield. She quickly transitioned the entire farm away from importing green waste compost to rotating chickens on a systematic schedule throughout all fields on her farm. This form of experimentation allowed this farmer to move from relying on external inputs for fertility to cycling existing resources within the farm and creating an internally regulated farming system . For this farmer, this small experiment was monumental and shifted her entire farm towards a management system that was more in alignment with her personal farming ethos. As she described, “When you look at everything on the farm from a communal perspective and apply that concept of community to everything on the farm… it literally applies to every aspect of your life too.”The organic farmers in Yolo County that were interviewed for this study demonstrated wide and deep knowledge of their farming systems.

Results show that white, clone rack first- and second-generation farmers in alternative agriculture do accumulate substantive local knowledge of their farming systems—even within a decade or two of farming. These particular organic farmers demonstrated a complex understanding of their physical environments, soil ecosystems, and local contexts that expands and complements other knowledge bases that inform farming systems. In order to integrate the wide range of knowledge shared in the results, a theoretical framework that incorporates emergent characteristics of the process of farmer knowledge formation is helpful to consider. In the first section of the discussion, we outlined a framework for farmer knowledge formation is outlined. For the latter half of the discussion section, we elaborate on key aspects of farmer knowledge that emerged from results of this study. Figure 1 summarizes a proposed theoretical framework for farmer knowledge formation. This framework recognizes the importance of linking social and ecological processes in order to capture interactions between humans and the environment, and is therefore informed by and extends existing frameworks in the social-ecological literature and can be applied to other farming contexts . The framework encapsulates both social and ecological ways of knowing through an adaptive feedback process, wherein farmers are considered the primary actors in this process of knowledge formation. As shown in Figure 1, farmer knowledge forms through both social and ecological mechanisms. Social mechanisms refer to social and cultural phenomena that influence farmer knowledge and their personal ethos interactively; ecological mechanisms represent how farmers’ observations of and experiences with environmental conditions and ecological processes on their farms influences their knowledge and ethos . Here, farmer ethos is broadly defined as a farmer’s worldview on farming—a set of social values or belief system that a farmer aspires to institute on their farm .

As highlighted in yellow, social mechanisms play a central role in producing a farmer’s ethos and in integrating ecological knowledge into their farm operation. At the same time, ecological mechanisms contribute to a farmer’s local ecological knowledge base, and importantly, place limits on the incorporation of social values in practice on farms. Together, these social and ecological mechanisms provide the filter through which farmer ethos and ecological knowledge is re-evaluated over time. As outlined in green, farmer ethos also mutually informs ecological knowledge, and vice versa, in a dynamic, dialectical process as individual farmers apply their ethos or ecological knowledge in practice on their farm. Based on results of this study, social mechanisms include inherited wisdom from and informal conversations with other local farmers . Likewise, direct observation, personal experience, and on-farm experimentation—wherein a farmer applies the scientific method to make abstract science concrete—are central to developing farmers’ specific ecological knowledge . In general, farmers interviewed tended to rely less on abstract, “basic” science and more on concrete, “applied” science that is based on their specific local contexts and environment . In this way, social and ecological mechanisms were key in translating abstract information into concrete knowledge among farmers interviewed. Findings suggest that experimentation codifies direct observations to generate farmer knowledge that is both concrete and transferable. To a lesser degree, personal experience enhanced farmer knowledge and guided the process of experimentation.This framework is useful for categorizing and tracking farmer learning on working farms. As an example, farmers with a stewardship ethos viewed themselves as caretakers of their land; one farmer described their role as “a liaison between this piece of land and the human environment.” Farmers that self-identified as stewards or caretakers of their land tended to rely most heavily on direct observation and personal experience to learn about their local ecosystems and develop their local ecological knowledge.

This knowledge directly informed how farmers approached management of their farms and the types of management practices and regimes they applied. That said, farmer ethos did not always completely align with farming practices applied day-today due to both social and ecological limits of their environment. For example, one farmer, who considered himself a caretaker of his land expressed that cover crops were central to his management regime and that “we’ve underestimated how much benefit we can get from cover crops.” This same farmer admitted he had not been able to grow cover crops the last few seasons due to early rains, heavy clay in his soil, and the need to have crops ready for early summer markets. In another example, several farmers learned about variations in their soil type by directly observing how soil “behaved” using cover crop growth patterns. These farmers discussed that they learned about patchy locations in their fields, including issues with drainage, prior management history, soil type, and other field characteristics, through observation of cover crop growth in their fields. Repeated observations over space and time helped to transform disparate observations into formalized knowledge. As observations accumulated over space and time, they informed knowledge formation across scales, from specific features of farmers’ fields to larger ecological patterns and phenomena. More broadly, hydroponic shelves using cover crop growth patterns to assess soil health and productivity allowed several farmers to make key decisions that influenced the long-term resilience of their farm operation . This specific adaptive management technique was developed independently by several farmers over the course of a decade of farming through long-term observation and experimentation and, at the time, was not widely accessible in farming guidebooks, policy recommendations, or the scientific literature. For these farmers, growing a cover crop on new land or land with challenging soils is now formally part of their farm management program and central to their soil management. While some farmers considered this process “trial and error,” in actuality, all farmers engaged in a structured, iterative process of robust decision making in the face of constant uncertainty, similar to the process of adaptative management in the natural resource literature . This critical link to adaptative management is important to consider in thebroader context of resilience thinking, wherein adaptive management is a tool in the face of shifting climate regimes and changing landscapes . Specifically, the framework provided in this paper is useful to understand some of the underlying social and ecological mechanisms that produce farmer knowledge, and that may in turn inform adaptive management and pathways toward more resilient agriculture . In this sense, farmer knowledge represents an untapped source for informing concrete adaptative management techniques that are initially adapted to local contexts but also have the potential to be widely applied. Farmer knowledge provides an extension to scientific and policy knowledge bases, in that farmers develop new dimensions of knowledge previously unexplored in the scientific literature. Farmers offer a key source of and process for making abstract knowledge more concrete and better grounded in practice, which is at the heart of adaptive management .

As already elaborated, this framework for farmer knowledge formation offers a useful guide for mapping mechanisms for how farmers learn and codify local knowledge, and also provides necessary groundwork to connect farmer knowledge to farm management . Here, we synthesize six key insights from the study. These key insights in combination with the framework are particularly important to consider when engaging with farmers in alternative agriculture in future studies. Farmer knowledge accumulation, at least among organic farmers in this study, is mostly observational and experiential. Most farmers considered themselves separate from scientific knowledge production and though scientific knowledge did at times inform their own knowledge production, they still ultimately relied on their own direct observation and personal experiences to inform their knowledge base and make decisions. This finding underscores the importance of translating theory into practice in alternative agriculture. Without grounding theoretical scientific findings or policy recommendations in practice, whether that be day-to-day practices or long-term management applied, farmers cannot readily incorporate such “outsider” knowledge into their farm operations. Farmers thus provide an important node in the research and policymaking 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, 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.

Joya de Cerén serves as a valuable case study in household archaeology because of the detail that can be obtained concerning prehispanic Mesoamerican residential and rural lifeways . For example, the exceptional preservation establishes consistent characteristics and components of an average household in Mesoamerica. The structures at Cerén had an average of 70 ceramic vessels within them, many decorated with intricate painted designs and hieroglyphic depictions. Many of the structures held finely crafted obsidian blades tucked away within the thatch roofs, a safe and secure space for sharp and dangerous tools. The obsidian blades and fine ceramic in situ assemblages illustrate that these rural villagers were able to obtain materials necessary to complete daily tasks of life. Over all, the inhabitants of Cerén were doing quite well for themselves while occupying a rural segment of society. Households took care to surround themselves with many of their daily resource needs with thriving kitchen gardens and clusters of fruit trees. Recent paleoethnobotanical data from flotation samples collected from the agricultural infields reveal that these spaces not only supplied staple crops, but also an abundance of herbs and spices that could have flavored their meals and provided additional nutritional and medicinal benefits. Archaeological investigations at Cerén provide a unique perspective of household life in Mesoamerica and help archaeologists working in other areas to further imagine activities and behaviors in the past. The village of Joya de Cerén formed sometime after the eruption of Ilopango , vertical farming equipment suppliers a volcano located in the central area of El Salvador that would have created an uninhabitable environment for flora and fauna within 1000 km for perhaps a century .

The ancient agriculturalists of Cerén were almost certainly pioneers onto this recently transformed landscape with its rich, fertile volcanic soils of the Zapotitán Valley that they chose to reside within, located in central El Salvador . After weathering, ash deposited from volcanic eruptions is typically full of nutrients, so that eventually it can lay the foundation for vibrant ecosystems. A soil survey conducted in 1983 found that Cerén’s soils were in fact quite fertile in terms of the chemical and physical properties . The average pH of the soil within Cerén’s maize fields was neutral, with high levels of phosphorous, potassium, iron, and copper yet low concentrations of inorganic material . Cerén is situated at 450 masl in a tropical monsoon climate with an average annual temperature of 24 °C . The area receives 1700 ± 300 mm of precipitation per year, with the vast majority of rain falls occurring between May and October. The village is conveniently situated along the Rio Sucio, which provides a nearby water source. The Rio Sucio was clearly significant to the village, since the domestic, religious, and political structures at the site are all oriented 30° east of north, aligning the built environment with the riverbank . Even the agricultural ridges within the kitchen gardens of Household 1 and the milpas are oriented parallel to the Rio Sucio. Since water is sacred to the Maya, it is not surprising that the community was oriented to the water source. Reconstructions of the Zapotitán Valley before it was colonized by the Spanish suggest that the area was a tropical deciduous forest dominated by tree species such as breadnut , Spanish cedar , ceiba Gaertn, guanacaste Gresb, and quebracho Exell. In Pulle. Today, much of the original flora of El Salvador has been cleared for agriculture and urban development, making modern comparisons challenging. Through years of archaeological research at Cerén, we have a sense for what the landscape was like at the time of the eruption that buried this small agricultural settlement.

Phytolith evidence shows that the Cerén landscape was dominated primarily by grasslands; some phytoliths representing maize and squash were also present . Much of this grassland may have been dominated by Trachypogon spicatus Kuntze, the material used as thatch roofing on the earthen structures . Forest products used as construction materials or as fuel have been identified via the abundant charcoal remains recovered through paleoethnobotanical investigations at the site. These data indicate that the surrounding environment was comprised of multiple ecosystems, including tropical deciduous forests, wetlands, savanna, and second growth forests . The wood charcoal assemblage indicates that these villagers traveled to or traded with people who lived in various ecosystems nearby; they made use of the expansive and diverse floral setting available to them. This shows that the residents of Cerén did not solely rely on the gardens surrounding their homes or the maize and manioc fields surrounding the village for their resource needs. The small patches of plants cultivated immediately surrounding the Cerén structures are not the only gardens at Cerén. The entire landscape surrounding the village may have been considered their garden that they visited, maintained, tended frequently, and formed meaningful relationships with beyond functional or economic aspects. Paleoethnobotanical investigations at Joya de Cerén have incorporated a variety of methodologies since excavations began in 1978. Early work collected floral remains that were preserved in a variety of ways. Foodstuffs were directly preserved within storage vessels inside of household buildings. Tree parts were preserved through carbonization and recovered when encountered during excavations. Additionally, plaster impressions were taken of cultigens from visibly noticeable voids within the ash. Recovery efforts soon began to include the use of mechanized water flotation strategies with soil samples of 1 to 2 L in volume collected systematically from cultural contexts .

This study incorporates plant materials recovered as plaster casts or carbonized macrobotanical materials from the village as well as 80 flotation samples collected in 2013 from the maize agricultural fields and an earthen sacbe . ‘Sacbe’ is the Maya term for a causeway or road feature. Carbonized macrobotanical remains were analyzed and identified with the aid of comparative reference collections at the University of Cincinnati Paleoethnobotany Laboratory. Identification and imaging of botanical remains were accomplished using low-powered stereomicroscopes , a Keyence VHX 1000E digital microscope, and a Philips FEI XL-30 Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope. Within the immediate vicinity of the four separate households identified at the settlement are kitchen gardens adjacent to the structures containing various plants that were growing at the time of the volcanic eruption. These kitchen gardens provided a small amount of produce using a large diversity of plant species to supplement the staple crops growing in the larger fields . These plants provided food, medicine, tools, and other resources to the village as well as aiding in spiritual and cultural activities. Cerén’s kitchen gardens demonstrate that these spaces were not just locations for decorative/shade plants, they reflect the traditional ecological knowledge of the village inhabitants and diversified their diet to go beyond the staple crops while also supporting other household needs . There were numerous fruit trees surrounding the structures including avocado , guava , calabash , cacao , and nance DC.. Lamb argues that a house-lot garden should be considered a living and a social space as it can provide an area for social gatherings and other communal activities. This perspective can be envisioned within the ancient village at Cerén since the fruit trees surrounding the homes would have created desirable outdoor activity spaces in such a hot tropical climate by supplying shaded, comfortable areas, plant drying rack in addition to producing nutritious fruits for consumption. The distribution of these trees at Cerén demonstrate that the villagers included trees into their perception of household spaces, rather than limiting such a space to include just herbs and major cultigens. Adjacent to Household 1 were rows of agricultural ridges with piñuela , malanga Schott, and manioc. Charcoal fragments from jocote may be indicative of a tree between structures 1 and 6, whereas plaster casts document guava, calabash, and piñuela were growing just outside the kitchen . Household 2 had patches of maize milpa within just a few feet of the structures and had large concentrations of seeds and branches indicating nearby cacao, avocado, and calabash trees. The small milpa plots adjacent to the households were more carefully maintained compared to those farther away from any structure in that they exhibited more formalized ridges, suggesting that the aesthetic appearance of the homes gardens was of importance to the ancient inhabitants . The small maize plots were managed using a ridge and furrow technique with the soil being tilled between rows . Household 4 was surrounded by a garden plot including rows of agave , some chile plants, cacao and avocado trees, and a guava tree, producing an abundant assemblage of fruits.

To the west of the structure manioc and piñuela plants were growing as well. It is likely that additional plants were thriving within the house-lot gardens at Cerén besides what was encountered using plaster cast recovery methods and large carbonized branches, but water flotation collection strategies were not yet implemented at the time of these investigations. It is common for volunteer plants to develop surrounding home gardens that may be tolerated and cared for by residents. As discussed further below, the more extensive agricultural fields in this ancient village exhibited many plants that may have been volunteers in disturbed environments and were subsequently tolerated and perhaps even encouraged. Further excavations could confirm the same cultivation strategies within the house-lot gardens as well, revealing wild species that could contribute towards nutritional, medicinal, and ornamental needs of the village occupants. These house-lot gardens were likely conceptualized and managed at the scale of the household, in comparison to the more expansive agricultural fields which could have been incorporated into larger statelevel organization . Each house-lot garden space at Cerén is organized differently and composed of its own set of plant species, suggesting that each household managed such spaces. The agriculturalists at Cerén chose to surround their homes with a variety of important plant species so that their daily needs could be fulfilled by simply stepping outside of their doorway, as can be seen with the variety of food products noted above that encompassed the village center. The soil within these village gardens would have been easily fertilized and replenished through household refuse along with human and animal waste . Additionally, the array of fruit trees could have provided shade for the house compounds and ample space for daily activities. Rural commoners, such as those living at Cerén, could have enjoyed practices that were usually associated with the elite through their gardens by growing desired plants within their own land. 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 , 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.

The contents of the stomach—which not even the possessor usually sees—is put on public display. The common reaction to vomiting, both producing it and witnessing it, is disgust. Julia Kristeva specifically mentions vomit as a material producing the situation of abjection. To abject literally means to “throw away.” For Kristeva, this concept helps us understand how we create ourselves in opposition to other things we deem not-us and radically unacceptable. Food and vomit occupy a middle space between me and not-me. As Kristeva writes, when I vomit, “I spit myself out.” The act of vomiting, as well as seeing vomit, reminds the vomiter or viewer of her own implication in the not-me, even as vomiting represents an attempt to draw a bright line between self and other. In this sense, abjection is both an action and a relationship, tying the self to the not-self. Vomiting, then, like the place of the neighborhood in the city, marks a zone in between private and public. Following Kristeva, that zone is paradoxical: it is both undeniably me and undeniably not-me. In Rue Ordener, rue Labat, the space of the neighborhood is both the symbol and the stage for the enactment of this paradox. Kofman’s family apartment on rue Ordener also performs an act of abjection. When Kofman and her mother return to their apartment on rue Ordener, they find that the Gestapo, “dans leur fureur d’être venus pour rien, . . . avaient, nous dit le concierge, jeté les meubles par la fenêtre. Les fauteuils et le divan de la chambre de mon père, tout avait été cassé, brisé. Ils avaient fait le vide.” [“In their anger at coming up empty-handed, . . . had thrown the furniture out the window, the concierge told us. The armchairs and the sofa from my father’s room—everything had been broken, smashed. They’d emptied it out” ] Like Kofman herself when she vomits on the street, hydroponic rack system her apartment is made to disgorge its contents so that the private furnishings of the house are made public. With Mayol’s help, we can see how destructive the “abjection” of Kofman’s apartment on rue Ordener is.

The apartment is a bounded space that allows the dweller to lead a life: within one’s four walls, one can know one’s personal space and organize one’s furnishings. The bounded space of the neighborhood allows the inhabitant to negotiate between the perfectly private and the perfectly public outside world. When the apartment on rue Ordener is made to vomit its contents onto the street, that “interdependent” relationship between home and neighborhood is destroyed, making, as Mayol writes, daily life impossible. The “device” of the neighborhood negotiates between home and not-home so that you can understand your place in society. If you do not have a home, if your home is suddenly public and lying in the street, such a negotiation is impossible. If your home is not private, or is gone entirely, how do you know where your neighborhood is? After the violent abjection of her family’s belongings and the loss of her home, Kofman stands as open to the depersonalizing environment as that bombed out building. The prominence of the public/private environment of the neighborhood underscores the importance of space, particularly the space of the city, in Kofman’s text. In fact, the neighborhood is not the only intermediary space Kofman addresses in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. After describing how her father would light a cigarette as soon as the sabbath was over, and how she used to love to purchase Zig-Zag rolling papers for him, she writes, “Plus tard, dans un rêve, je me représentai mon père sous la figure d’un ivrogne qui traversait la rue en zigzaguant” [“Later, in a dream, my father appeared to me as a drunk zig-zagging across the street” ]. This dream inscribes her father, and the smoke that symbolizes the fragility of her memory of him, onto the street, creating a path in space from her memory of her father. The zig-zag shape, usually two parallel lines with a slanted line connecting them, is a visual rendering of intermediate space; the slanted line mediates between one parallel line and the other.

Kofman’s narrative about her father, and about her own life, cannot move straight forward in textual space; it must zig zag.Zig-zagging occurs at several levels of Kofman’s narrative: at the level of chapter organization, narrative structure and diction. All of these levels create an image of the mental space that Kofman asks the reader to experience. In addition to the image of zig zagging, I will use the concept of the crossroads and Kofman’s term, voie de traverse, to consider the way space functions at these three levels of the text. Kofman employs zig-zagging to “spatialize” her text, creating a 2-dimensional plane instead of a straight narrative. Her story does not move straight from the beginning to the end. Instead, hers is of a dual identity, of a woman who is simultaneously the daughter of her mother and the daughter of mémé. Because a linear, chronological text makes such simultaneity difficult to convey, spatialization allows the reader to experience more than one moment in time concurrently. Freud begins by discussing children’s tendency to fantasize about having a different set of parents, one that is higher in social class . The “romances” Freud describes— perhaps of having been switched at birth, or of being secretly adopted—allow a child to envision him or herself as separate from his or her parents. Because, according to Freud, these fantasies occur before a child knows about the mechanics of sexual reproduction, the child does not necessarily see a reason why he or she could not be the child of another couple, or the product of a secret liaison between their mother and another, superior, man. In fantasy, then, the child is able to leave the family and create an identity of his or her own, a step towards maturity and independence. Rue Ordener, rue Labat is a very literal “family romance.” Kofman’s childhood experience of persecution is the peacetime child’s experience writ large. Freud mentions that, as “intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong” .

Kofman becomes aware of her “category”—Jewish, a child of immigrants—not by degrees, but rather all at once. And unlike the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman does not need to fantasize that she has another mother—she actually has one. mémé, like the fantasy parents in “Family Romances,” is “of higher social standing” insofar as she is a full French citizen and a Christian. In order to discover the “category” to which his or her parents belong, the child must develop the ability to look at his or her parents from the perspective of an outsider, a step towards imagining him or herself as separate from the parents. For Kofman, her survival depends upon imagining herself from another’s perspective well enough to actually inhabit a different, Christian, identity. In Freud’s formulation, the child escapes from the suffocating triad with the parents by way of fantasies in narrative, employing the texts of others to build a new story. In a sense, they write their own Bildungsroman, their own story of their origins and maturation. Children’s fantasies of being adopted, he says, are “usually a result of something they have read” . These narratives offer escape routes by which the child may strike out on his or her own, independent from the family. In using others’ texts to create a genealogy, the child builds a bridge to the biologically unrelated fantasy parents, a crucial step towards becoming an independent person. Separating oneself from the private realm of the family, even in fantasy, means entering the public outside world as an individual. Like the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman’s also uses others’ texts to escape from her family and operate as an individual in the public world, rolling tables grow charting a movement from private to public via a coming of age story involving multiple parentage. Kofman has a deep relationship to these texts, and description of a new living situation seldom comes without a note about what books she read there. While the people who gave her the books disappear from her life, she carries the books they gave her from place to place.Kofman’s intertextual escape routes are not confined to passing textual references. At two points in Rue Ordener Rue Labat, Kofman breaks the narrative thread of her story to dwell on the work of others that seems, at least on a very superficial level, to be tangential to the story at hand. Chapters 18 and 19 point outside of Kofman’s text, allowing both Kofman and the reader to escape her story. Chapter 18, “Les deux mères de Léonard”, discusses Leonardo’s “carton de Londres” and Freud’s analysis of it. Chapter 19 remains separate from the narrative thread, this time allowing Kofman to discuss “un de [s]es films préférés” [“one of [her] favorite [films]” ], Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. These two intertextual chapters come in the last third of the text, directly after the chapter recounting the “Liberation” of Paris and her mother’s liberation from the house of mémé. A story only about Kofman’s experiences during the war would end there, implying her relationship with mémé ended with the war and perhaps implying a slightly happy ending as she becomes again her mother’s daughter and is reunited with her siblings. Chapters 18 and 19 offer the reader a chance to pause before diving into the unhappy ending that awaits, as well as a chance to reflect on the resonances Kofman’s story has with these three works that mean so much to her.

While these chapters allow Kofman to meditate on her own story through resonances with these other texts, they also accomplish a meta-textualization, in which not only Kofman-the-subject of the text, but also Kofman-the-writer of the text seeks to escape the story. The intertextual chapters, insofar as they create “escape routes” from Kofman’s story, puncture the text, unsealing it, making it less hermetic. Through these intertextual references, which, on the one hand, import others’ texts to create a path out of the text and, on the other hand, enlist the reader for the creation of the text. The reader must do his or her own work when faced with intertext, using previous knowledge to unpack the significance of the reference. One way to envision the particular relationship of Kofman’s text to space is to imagine a Möbius strip, with Rue Marcadet, or the intertextual moments, as the twist. A Möbius strip is merely a loop with a twist in it, but tracing a path on one side will bring you to the other. If you begin at the interior of the strip and follow the loop through the twist, you get to the exterior side. Similarly, Kofman begins in the interior, in her family home, and takes rue Marcadet to a life on the exterior in which she can be seen on the street as the Christian daughter of mémé. Rue Marcadet, in this formulation, is an intermediary space between the public and private realms. Like the two sides of the Möbius strip, rue Ordener and Rue Labat do not intersect without the voie de traverse of rue Marcadet. Thus Kofman’s public and private lives, represented by the two streets, take place simultaneously but do not intersect. The intertextual moments in the text make it clear, however, that the public and private realms do not merely share an ambiguous liminal space. The intertextual sections of the text, which make reference to shared culture beyond that text and are thus in a sense public and outward-facing, paradoxically lead the reader more deeply into Kofman’s private domain. When Kofman seems to move from private to public, as when she addresses a work of art or a film, she is always also moving in the opposite direction, towards intimate mental consequences of her story that she does not address directly. Chapter 18 works in this way, enabling Kofman to examine facets of her mother’s experience that she cannot or does not discuss in the course of the memoir. She begins the chapter by mentioning that she chose the “carton de Londres” as the cover image for her first book , L’Enfance de l’Art. After introducing the guest speaker , the rest of the chapter is given over to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s drawing. Freud hypothesizes that the Virgin and St.

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, 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, plant grow trays but will provide an increasingly robust and adaptable example for how farms can continue to function and thrive while drastically reducing water inputs.These works all employ textual space and the space of the city to create monuments to ambiguous and divided histories.

All three of these texts lay a particular importance upon space, both the physical space in which the texts take place and the textual space the author creates. At its most basic, a monument is the combination of memory and space, a concretization of memory that is both the product of a collective desire to commemorate and the locus of subsequent commemorative activities, such as pilgrimages or ceremonies. Thus the texts I have chosen to investigate here, and texts like them, have a claim to monumentality in that they have a pronounced spatial aspect and are specifically concerned with a past moment that has both personal and collective importance. By thinking of these texts as monuments, one can move towards answering an otherwise puzzling set of questions: why do so many memoirs and novels of historical violence lay such a heavy emphasis on space, especially the space of the city, and why are so many formally innovative? Considering a text as a monument also emphasizes the spatial aspects of these texts, providing a framework for understanding them not simply as texts among texts but also as monuments among monuments. Each of these texts is in dialogue with traditional, physical monuments; in each there are moments when the protagonist must consider the ways in which a physical monument memorializes, and the ways in which it may also fail to do so. The texts consider how physical monuments seek to shape memory and whose agenda they serve. Implicit in these encounters with monuments is the alternative of the text itself, the ways in which the textual monument can add a voice, complement or enter into dialogue with the physical monument. Language, from which these monuments are built, may be a powerful way to influence the “collective frameworks” for memory of which Halbwachs speaks.

Language is a product of the collective and creates the social space in which a community exists. On the other hand, because words may have many layers of meaning and association, they may bridge the gap between the purely personal and the purely collective, allowing individual memories to influence and change the “collective framework.” It may be worthwhile to consider what we mean by the term monument, and how a text may also lay claim to the word. A monument maybe triumphant, as in Roman victory columns and the Arc de Triomphe, or it may stand as a reminder of a painful past experience, like Henri Pingusson’s Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, on Ile de la Cité. In many cases, a monument develops layers of meaning over time, creating multiple dialogues between different moments. Even when layers of meaning are not added purposely, the meaning of any monument changes over time as newer historical events cast the subject of the monument in a different light. The Arc de Triomphe, for instance, is a monument that has acquired state-sanctioned layers of meaning and has also, because of its extraordinary symbolic importance, attracted others who would use and change the symbol. First built by Napoleon to celebrate his victories, after World War I the tomb of the Unknown Soldier was placed underneath it, complicating the meaning of the arch. When, in 1940, the occupying Germans marched around the arch, they were both capitalizing on the symbolic importance it already had and adding yet another layer of meaning. Such physical public monuments are political instruments. A monument constructed or approved by the state represents a purposeful shaping of public memory, whether tacit or explicit. These monuments express the explicit agenda of those in power and also may reveal an agenda unexpressed by them elsewhere.

A monument may express the unity of the nation that created it, since to erect a monument at all implies a certain agreement among the various constituencies about what to memorialize and how to do it, but it can also show the anxious efforts of those in power to smooth over differences between factions. Tombs represent a kind of nexus of institutional and personal monumentalizing. On the one hand, an individual tomb has less of a claim to expressing collective memory than a monument created and funded by a large group. On the other hand, they are public monuments to the memory of a person. Whereas a small, highly personal memento is inaccessible to others and not meant to resist the damaging effects of time, a tomb is built of weather-resistant stone and can be visited by any member of the public. The grave, positioned as it is between collective monument and private memento, may seem a good solution to the problems of memorializing I mention above. It is personal enough to express individual complexity, but public enough to avoid hermeticism. Yet, for the authors I discuss, the grave can still be problematic. For Kofman, the words said over it cannot capture the complexity of the person underneath, and their relationships with others. For Perec, the grave cannot fulfill its promise to serve as a boundary; it cannot provide a space for the dead so that they can be truly “at rest” for the mourner. In Rodoreda, the fixedness of a tombstone, its immobility and the way it yokes a single name to a single body, overvalues the past and a specific place, denying the mourner the ability to grow and change, to move forward in time. The word monument, whether referring to large public monuments, to personal graves or to texts, derives from the latin “monere,” to remind or warn . A “monument” was not always a physical edifice. At first, the Latin word monumentum referred to “a commemorative statue or building, tomb, reminder, cutsom grow room written record, literary work” . At this early moment in its life, the word intriguingly connects writing and literature with commemoration and also with death. A dress is still an object that encloses space. In the texts I analyze, Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda similarly critique monumentality, suggesting smaller memorial objects that, especially in Perec and Rodoreda, are be pieced together to form a shape. Yet textual monuments are not just monuments on the metaphorical level; texts can function as monuments quite literally. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Torah became a temple in writing, a substitute for and representation of the missing physical temple. In their introduction to From a Ruined Garden, a collection of translations of yizker-bikher, memorial books written in Yiddish to document and commemorate Jewish communities in Eastern Europe that were liquidated during the Second World War, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin touch on how the need for historical memory in the absence of the physical temple provided a template for textual memorial forms that emerged much later . When survivors of the war, as well as those who remembered the towns and cities even though they had emigrated earlier, wished to memorialize a place and its occupants, they were imagining the text they created as a literal monument to those who had died. “It is worthwhile noting,” write Kugelmass and Boyarin, “that when landslayt from the town of Zwolen set out to produce a memorial book, their expressed intention was ‘to create a monument’” . Many memorial books have “a table of contents . . . and title page [with] drawings of gravestones as their backgrounds,” making very clear the book’s function as a textual monument . The original yoking of literary works to space, memory and death that can be uncovered in the meanings of the original Latin word monumentum thus continues to cling to the word monument. We can trace it from Horace through Du Bellay, as they describe literary monuments as simultaneously living and dead, all the way to the memorial books translated by Kugelmass and Boyarin.Like a building, a city is a city because of its boundaries. The boundedness of the city took on particular significance during the Occupation and the Spanish Civil War .

Rodoreda’s protagonist never leaves Barcelona, and Perec and Kofman give particular weight to the moments when they enter or leave Paris. Their texts are not just buildings or structures: on another level, they are also city-texts. Kofman and Rodoreda even name their texts after city streets, cementing the relationship between the book and the city. Following Benjamin, we can see that the city is the space of history. In his article on this topic, “Archiving,” Michael Sheringham elaborates on this point. The city is a “memory machine” . Palimpsestic, it is the place of history while in the countryside “myths hold sway” . A city, in this formulation, is thus the proper home of monuments. If the city is a nation’s microcosm, then the monuments placed there speak for the whole. And if the city is a psyche writ large, monuments are concretized memories, a culture’s memory cues. In the texts I analyze, the city itself is also a kind of monument, a giant memory palace whose spaces and buildings can function like a spatial monument. The narrators move through the space of the text seeking to construct their identities through the city and its monuments. Their experiences evacuate the traditional monuments of meaning, however, and they find themselves adrift in a city without landmarks. The text itself becomes the missing monument. A monument is a piece of a system for perpetuating memory, working together with rituals of memory and the visitors themselves. Whether textual or physical, monuments are thus containers for memory, or locations where memory may take place. Monuments, by providing a literal space for memory, help to preserve it for, and transmit it to, those who come later. They therefore always function in relation to time, creating a dialogue between the past and the present. A monument might be understood as an expression of time in space, existing in the present but acting as a pointer to a moment in the past and thus stretching back in time. Created as a permanent reminder of an event, monuments have a claim to a certain timelessness. Physical monuments are traditionally made of durable materials like stone or metal, designed to withstand the effects of time. Yet in their apparent timelessness, they nonetheless evoke the timefulness of the relationship between the visitor and the past event. A visitor senses his or her own mortality in the face of a more permanent structure like a monument, and is also conscious of the distance between the present and the memorialized past event.

To test for a relationship between RCI and predictive factors, all variables were centered and RCI was regressed against a set of covariate data in a linear mixed model including US state as a random effect to account for regional differences . We included interactions for which we had a priori hypotheses . The model was estimated using the R package `lme4`64. Two model assumptions are violated in the above model, requiring updated estimates of the parameters’ standard errors. First, because RCI is a derived statistic with an unusual domain, the index is not distributed according to a known distribution family and violates the assumption of normality in the residuals. Second, residuals showed high spatial autocorrelation at multiple scales and with an unknown structure, necessitating a non-parametric approach. Both violations are likely to shrink standard errors of the estimated parameters, leading to overconfident estimates; to illustrate, in the case of spatial autocorrelation, if the explanatory variables are randomly located in relation to crop rotation, spatial autocorrelation in crop rotation would falsely inflate significance. An algorithm for sparsely distributed spatial data, derived by Lahiri 2018, was implemented in R . Spatial block bootstrapping involves iteratively resampling data in spatial blocks to mimic the generation of autocorrelated data. Choice of block size is nontrivial, and choosing the optimal block is an open question, but blocks should be larger than the scale at which autocorrelation operates. Using the R package `gstat`to compute a variogram of the residuals generated by the naive LMM, hemp drying racks we determined that range was 400815m. We used this as the dimension of each spatial block . We repeated this bootstrap with a range of possible spatial block sizes and found that this inference on parameters was robust to the choice of block size .

RCI scores have statistically clear correlations with land capability, mean rainfall, distance to the nearest bio-fuel plant, and field size, as well as with several interactions between these variables . Standard errors from the spatially blocked bootstrap were much larger than uncorrected naive confidence intervals, reflecting that accounting for spatial non-independence is necessary to estimate uncertainty of parameter estimates. Rotational complexity decreased with NCCPI, a proxy for land capability. We find that land of higher inherent capability is more likely to be used for lower complexity rotations. Rotational complexity decreased with average rainfall during the growing season. Fields with ample precipitation during the growing season are more likely to have simplified rotations. Though the relationship between the proximity of the nearest grain elevator and a field’s rotational complexity is not statistically clear , RCI showed a clear increase with distance to the nearest bio-fuel plant. Fields that are closer to bio-fuel plants are therefore more likely to have simplified rotations. Rotational complexity decreased with field size, with larger fields being more likely to have simplified rotations. Two of the interactions included in the model show statistically clear relationships. There is a positive interaction between land capability and field size, with higher quality land associated with decreasing RCI on small fields and slightly increasing RCI on large fields . The interaction between land capability and rainfall variance show a negative effect on RCI, with highly variable rainfall accentuating land capability’s impact on RCI . Interpretations of the relationship that each variable has with rotational complexity are shown in Table 4. Though each change is associated with a small shift in average RCI across the region, these can represent massive shifts in regional land management.

As crop rotations continue to simplify in the Midwestern US despite robust evidence demonstrating yield and soil benefits from diversified rotations, our ability to explain and understand these trends will come in part from observing the biophysical and policy influences on farmers’ crop choices at one key scale of management: the field. By developing a novel metric, RCI, that can classify rotational complexity over large areas at the field scale, we open the door to regional analyses that can address the unique landscape conditions that impact farmers’ field-level management choices and their subsequent influence on rotational simplification. We find that as farmers are pushed towards simplification by broad federal policies , physical manifestations of these policies like bio-fuel plants are correlated with intensified simplification pressures. Similarly, we see that the pressure to build soils and boost crop yields through diversified rotations intensifies in fields with lower land capability, while conversely the negative effects of cropping system simplifications are accentuated on the region’s best soils.RCI uses the sequence of cash crops on a given field as a proxy for crop rotation, and sorts these sequences into scores based on the sequence’s complexity and potential for agro-ecosystem health. Because this metric has not been used in previous analyses, we verified RCI’s validity through comparisons to previous estimates of rotational prevalence in the region. For example, two separate surveys of farmers in the Midwestern US showed that between 24% and 46% report growing “diversified rotations”which we consider to be an RCI of greater than 2.24 . In the present study, 34% of fields had an RCI greater than 2.24. This and further comparisons of RCI to previous work show that RCI is capable of capturing previously-noted trends in the region.

The ability to analyze rotations at the field scale across the entire Midwestern US allows us to ask how farmers optimize their rotations in complex economic and biophysical landscapes that include pressures to both simplify and diversify. Several biophysical and policy variables show statistically clear relationships with rotational complexity: high land capability, high rainfall during the growing season, and proximity to bio-fuel plants are all associated with rotational simplification. Given policy incentives, farmers often find that “corn on corn on dark dirt usually pencil out to be the way to go,” with farmers growing corn year after year when high quality soil is available. However, when that proverbial “dark dirt” is not available, calculations are not so simple. If growing conditions are sufficiently poor , these intensive corn systems may not be profitable, and farmers will have to rely more heavily on non-corn crops to maintain crop health and profitability in their fields. We see this dynamic at play with land capability in the present analysis. Despite—or rather because of— the fact that more diverse rotations improve soils, the most degrading cropping systems counter intuitively tend to occur on the highest quality land. Highly capable lands can be farmed intensively without dipping into a production “danger zone” in years with weather that is historically typical for the region, creating a pattern of land use that is likely to degrade these high quality lands in the long term and potentially jeopardize future yields, particularly in the face of climate change. Recent analyses show that enhanced drought tolerance and resilience for crops is one of the key benefits of diverse crop rotations. In the present analysis, mean rainfall during the growing season correlates positively with rotational simplification. Farmers may therefore be employing crop rotation in areas of low rainfall to achieve production levels that will keep a farm solvent, industrial rolling racks as was seen with rotational complexity increases in Nebraska during a drought period from 1999 to 200773. This trend is further accentuated by the negative interaction between land capability and rainfall variance in our analysis, where higher rainfall variability leads to even more diverse rotations on marginal lands. Proximity to bio-fuel plants, the main policy indicator in our model, showed a statistically clear trend towards rotational simplification, likely due to increased economic profits. Local corn prices increase by $0.06 – $0.12/bushel in the vicinity of a bio-fuel plant, amplifying incentives to grow corn more frequently. Wang and Ortiz Bobea were surprised not to find an impact of bio-fuel plant proximity on county-level frequencies of corn cropping in their own analysis, and the present analysis—done at a field rather than county scale—shows exactly this expected effect: corn-based rotations are simplified when in closer proximity to a bio-fuel plant. In the current economic and policy landscape, farmers are pushed to simplify rotations through more frequent corn cropping, especially in proximity to bio-fuel plants, while marginal soils and low rainfall pull fields towards more diverse rotations.

RCI’s ability to classify rotational complexity across large regions at the field scale and with low computational cost opens doors to future analyses that explore the interplay between localized landscape conditions, management choices, and agricultural, environmental, and economic outcomes. We see a strong potential to employ this metric not only in new regions, but in analyses that address how results from field experiments with crop rotation may scale up to regional levels. We also note that the metric should be used with caution. For example, because RCI cannot recognize functional groups in crop sequences , it cannot capture the added benefits that diverse functional groups often add to a rotation. In addition, though RCI includes a perennial correction that avoids penalizing multiple consecutive years of perennials the metric likely still underestimates the benefits of perennials in rotations. RCI is neutral to the soil benefits of annuals vs. perennials, while in practice the year-round cover and crop species mixes that often accompany perennials may boost soil benefits beyond those of annuals. Consecutive years of perennials are uncommon in our study area , and we encourage caution before applying the metric to regions with a more substantial perennial presence. We therefore recommend using RCI in studies that explore a wide range of cropping sequences where large differences in RCI are very likely to be meaningful, rather than as a tool to rank sequences that give similar scores. It is also important to note that, though the index can be applied to data of any sequence length, RCI values from different sequence lengths cannot be compared to each other; a rotation that results in a 2.2 from examining a six-year sequence will not be a 2.2 when examining a five or seven-year sequence. We also note that in using crop sequence as a proxy for crop rotation, RCI cannot fully capture the cyclical nature of true crop rotations. Because RCI examines a fixed number of years, it may “split up” identical rotations in ways that give slightly different scores or ABBAAB in a six-year sequence. As these discrepancies will decrease when longer sequences are considered, we recommend applying RCI to sequences that are as long or longer than the longest expected rotation in the study region.We hope to see RCI used in future analyses that extend beyond the Midwest; however, regional and historic patterns of crop production likely influence farmers’ rotational decisions and may render RCI scores calculated from disparate geographical regions difficult to interpret when called into direct comparison. We therefore see great promise in RCI as a rotational metric, and caution against applications that are overly narrow and overly broad .The time period chosen in this study, 2012 – 2017, coincides with the introduction of the Renewable Fuel Standard, or “bio-fuel mandate,” which took full effect in 2012. This policy mandates that 7.5 billion gallons of bio-fuel be blended with gasoline annually, and caused bio-fuel plants to open and local corn prices to soar across the Midwestern US. Now in 2021, there is significant political pressure both to maintain the bio-fuel mandate in its current state and to relax the standards, and new exemptions to the mandate have already caused several bio-fuel plants to close in the region. Given the link between bio-fuel plant proximity and rotational complexity, our analysis suggests that these closures, if continued, would likely be associated with an increase in mean RCI in the Midwestern US. Using our current model, simulations of randomly closing 20 of the 198 bio-fuel plants in the region lead to an increase of 0.003 in average RCI in the region, driven by greater distance to the nearest bio-fuel plant. In turn, increasing average RCI by 0.003 represents, for instance, the equivalent of 41,000 ha of cropland switching from corn-soy rotations to the most diverse rotation possible . Rotational simplification near bio-fuel plants is a pertinent example of the influence that policy can have on farm management decisions and its landscape repercussions.

It was not until early 2012, however, that federal regulations were made consistent with legislative changes. Because of the historic discrimination against farmers of color, and other structural barriers to land ownership for people of color, the population of agricultural producers is already heavily skewed toward white men. Thus, such measures to guarantee FSA committees are representative of agricultural producers in any particular region fall short in their attempts to address the acutely historical causes and outcomes of structural racialization that have upheld white land ownership in particular. The second major channel among the Farm Bill and other federal food and agricultural policies that have played a historic and ongoing role in structural racialization is the Farm Bill’s commodity programs, which have undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color. While the FSA lending programs have upheld white farmland ownership amidst increasing consolidation and specialization, the Farm Bill commodity programs uphold white farmland ownership by way of increasing consolidation and The second major channel among the Farm Bill and other federal food and agricultural policies that have played a historic and ongoing role in structural racialization is the Farm Bill’s commodity programs, which have undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color. While the FSA lending programs have upheld white farmland ownership amidst increasing consolidation and specialization, the Farm Bill commodity programs uphold white farmland ownership by way of increasing consolidation and The second major channel among the Farm Bill and other federal food and agricultural policies that have played a historic and ongoing role in structural racialization is the Farm Bill’s commodity programs, grow racks with lights which have undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color.

While the FSA lending programs have upheld white farmland ownership amidst increasing consolidation and specialization, the Farm Bill commodity programs uphold white farmland ownership by way of increasing consolidation and The third major channel within the Farm Bill and other federal food and agricultural policies that has played a historic and ongoing role in structural racialization is the Farm Bill’s Rural Development programs, which are intended to help strengthen small communities by investing in water systems, housing, new businesses, infrastructure, and similar projects. Because many farms owned by people of color are in counties with little wealth and limited opportunities for non-farm employment, and because many rural and small town communities of color are faced with persistent poverty, Rural Development programs have the potential to promote socio-economic well-being for people of color and other historically marginalized communities. As of 2012, there is a larger percentage of whites in rural communities than in urban communities . Yet, within rural communities, people of color face higher rates of poverty: while only 14% of rural whites live in poverty, 34% of rural Blacks live in poverty. Additionally, as of 2010, Latinos/as, Blacks, and Pacific Islanders have the lowest home ownership rates compared to home ownership rates for whites . Thus, it is unsurprising that, according to a 2013 Tuskegee University study, farmers and rural communities of color have had The third major channel within the Farm Bill and other federal food and agricultural policies that has played a historic and ongoing role in structural racialization is the Farm Bill’s Rural Development programs, which are intended to help strengthen small communities by investing in water systems, housing, new businesses, infrastructure, and similar projects. Because many farms owned by people of color are in counties with little wealth and limited opportunities for non-farm employment, and because many rural and small town communities of color are faced with persistent poverty, Rural Development programs have the potential to promote socio-economic well-being for people of color and other historically marginalized communities.

As of 2012, there is a larger percentage of whites in rural communities than in urban communities . Yet, within rural communities, people of color face higher rates of poverty: while only 14% of rural whites live in poverty, 34% of rural Blacks live in poverty. Additionally, as of 2010, Latinos/as, Blacks, and Pacific Islanders have the lowest home ownership rates compared to home ownership rates for whites. Thus, it is unsurprising that, according to a 2013 Tuskegee University study, farmers and rural communities of color have had PART III OUTLINED HOW LENDING, commodity, and rural development programs have historically undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of people of color farmland ownership, and how long term changes in the structure of US farmland—the consolidation and specialization of agricultural production, in particular—have exacerbated such trends. Part IV continues this line of argumentation regarding the structure of US farmland and examines how programs geared toward supporting supposedly environmentally sustainable management practices also shape the socio-economic well-being of and farming and rural communities of color relative to white farming and rural communities. First, this part does so by providing a snapshot of the racialized distribution of costs and benefits regarding programs under the conservation title of the Farm Bill . It then outlines the significance of the historical continuity between environmentally-oriented programs and commodity support programs. Finally, it outlines the significance of four federal rural and agricultural support programs in particular—the Conservation Reserve Program , Environmental Quality Incentives Program , organic agriculture programs, and outreach and assistance programs—as well as recent corporate-backed trends in increased bio-fuel production. Part IV argues that, because of their inseparability from commodity crop production, and the consolidation and specialization of agricultural production, and despite the countless environmental benefits they produce, Farm Bill programs under the conservation title also undergird white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color. Ultimately, they do so by funneling benefits primarily to white large-scale landowners on high quality land and keeping even low quality white-owned farmland profitable—an inadvertent result of the history of farmland ownership in the United States that cannot be seen as separate from the history of racial discrimination.

This part argues, furthermore, that this is the case not only with commodity crop and acreage-based conservation programs , but that management practice-based conservation programs have similar effects. Furthermore, a fourth program, the Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program, contributes to the social and economic inequities that characterize commodity and conservation programs alike, yet holds great potential as a strategic rallying point against structural racialization. Finally, Part IV then addresses the relationship between structural racialization, industrial agriculture, environmental degradation, and climate change, and argues that farmers of color and communities of color bear the brunt of such environmental change.PART III OUTLINED HOW LENDING, commodity, and rural development programs have historically undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of people of color farmland ownership, and how long term changes in the structure of US farmland—the consolidation and specialization of agricultural production, rolling benches for growing in particular—have exacerbated such trends. Part IV continues this line of argumentation regarding the structure of US farmland and examines how programs geared toward supporting supposedly environmentally sustainable management practices also shape the socio-economic well-being of and farming and rural communities of color relative to white farming and rural communities. First, this part does so by providing a snapshot of the racialized distribution of costs and benefits regarding programs under the conservation title of the Farm Bill . It then outlines the significance of the historical continuity between environmentally-oriented programs and commodity support programs. Finally, it outlines the significance of four federal rural and agricultural support programs in particular—the Conservation Reserve Program , Environmental Quality Incentives Program , organic agriculture programs, and outreach and assistance programs—as well as recent corporate-backed trends in increased bio-fuel production. Part IV argues that, because of their inseparability from commodity crop production, and the consolidation and specialization of agricultural production, and despite the countless environmental benefits they produce, Farm Bill programs under the conservation title also undergird white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color. Ultimately, they do so by funneling benefits primarily to white large-scale landowners on high quality land and keeping even low quality white-owned farmland profitable—an inadvertent result of the history of farmland ownership in the United States that cannot be seen as separate from the history of racial discrimination. This part argues, furthermore, that this is the case not only with commodity crop and acreage-based conservation programs , but that management practice-based conservation programs have similar effects. Furthermore, a fourth program, the Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program, contributes to the social and economic inequities that characterize commodity and conservation programs alike, yet holds great potential as a strategic rallying point against structural racialization.

Finally, Part IV then addresses the relationship between structural racialization, industrial agriculture, environmental degradation, and climate change, and argues that farmers of color and communities of color bear the brunt of such environmental change.outlined below, however, maintain the structural benefits historically afforded to whites while keeping people of color at a structural disadvantage.One major Farm Bill conservation program that has undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color is the Conservation Reserve Program . The CRP is the largest federal, private-land retirement program in the United States, with 27.5 million acres covered at a cost of $20 billion over the next 10 years. It provides financial compensation for landowners to voluntarily remove land from agricultural production for 10 to 15 years in order to improve soil and water quality and create wildlife habitat. Acres enrolled in CRP have indeed shown a number of environmental gains, including reduced soil erosion, water quality improvements, and wildlife population improvement. However, a number of factors shape the purpose the CRP serves and for whom: first, enrollment is considered to be undesirable by some land owners, primarily because of the cost of compliance and the potential loss of farm income due to the prevention of the use of such land for agricultural production. Thus, as with the 1956 Soil Bank Program from which the CRP grew, it is the least productive land and lowest income households that are often enrolled and kept profitable. Second, studies have shown that conservation compliance does not present a strong economic deterrent for landowners who want to crop former CRP acreage after the CRP term is over, thus highlighting the potentially temporary nature of such economic relief. Third, and perhaps most importantly, only lands planted with commodity crops, especially, corn and wheat are eligible for CRP and not fruits or vegetables, or lands used for livestock. Because white farmers have historically owned large-scale grain and oil seed farmland while farmers of color have been relegated to smaller, non-commodity crop farmland, the Conservation Reserve Program potentially undergirds white farmland ownership, both during times of economic hardship and on marginal land. A 2005 Texas A&M University survey study, for example, found that white landowners were more likely to have land qualified for reserve programs—as well as programs such as the Stewardship Incentives Program and the Forestry Incentives Program . Such landowners not only received more favorable program outreach and assistance, as will be addressed below, they also had more incentives to participate due to the economies of scale and tax savings. Toward this end, the study found that white landowners, on average, were enrolled in the CRP longer and signed up more acres than landowners of color . One major Farm Bill conservation program that has undergirded white farmland ownership at the expense of farmland ownership by people of color is the Conservation Reserve Program . The CRP is the largest federal, private-land retirement program in the United States, with 27.5 million acres covered at a cost of $20 billion over the next 10 years. It provides financial compensation for landowners to voluntarily remove land from agricultural production for 10 to 15 years in order to improve soil and water quality and create wildlife habitat. Acres enrolled in CRP have indeed shown a number of environmental gains, including reduced soil erosion, water quality improvements, and wildlife population improvement. However, a number of factors shape the purpose the CRP serves and for whom: first, enrollment is considered to be undesirable by some land owners, primarily because of the cost of compliance and the potential loss of farm income due to the prevention of the use of such land for agricultural production. 

Toward this end, employers go to great lengths to unlawfully exclude qualified US workers in favor of H-2A workers, many of whom have themselves migrated to the United States during prior seasons. For example, employers schedule interviews at inconvenient times or locations; hire too early in the season, lead workers to arrive for work when there is none; limit their hours in order to discourage them from continuing to work; use employment contracts that demand that workers forfeit their right to sue a grower for lost wages and/or other illegalities; and impose productivity quotas and other unrealistic work demands on employees. These practices greatly discourage US workers from applying to these jobs, which then allows employers to “legally” hire H-2A workers. Additionally, the profits reaped by large agricultural employers and by corporations at all levels of the food system not only come at the expense of the food system worker’s livelihoods and US job loss, but are also subsidized by taxpayers themselves. For example, Walmart, which sells 25% of all the groceries in the United States and is the largest employer in the US and world, has among the lowest wages across the retail industry. Walmart workers cost US taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance that would counteract the consequences of their low wages, including SNAP, Medicaid and subsidized housing. Because 58% of food system workers surveyed reported having no health care coverage, more than one-third of workers surveyed have used the emergency room for primary care, which taxpayers help cover. Finally, corporations like Walmart are able to determine wages and benefits for workers throughout their entire supply chain, given their massive procurement power and ability to dictate purchasing prices to its suppliers. This pressure and influence forces suppliers to lower their worker’s wages, drain trays for plants multiplying the number of workers robbed of fair and livable wages and taxpayer subsidization of corporate profits.

In short, when food system workers require public assistance, the onus rests on taxpayers and the federal government, rather than on those that are responsible for creating these unhealthy outcomes—corporations. After over thirty years of liberal trade policies beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many developing countries have been left with a great dependence on the global market for basic food and grains. Developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion in the early 1970s. Yet by 2000, the food deficit in such countries had grown to $11 billion per year. At the height of the 2007–2008 global food price crisis, Low-Income Food Deficit Countries import bills reached over $38 billion for basic cereal grains. Such systemic vulnerability is, in part, a result of international finance institutions, structural adjustment, free trade agreements, and a broader divestment of the state from agricultural development. Furthermore, not only are overproduction and US food aid to blame, but also corporate actors use such international crises as oppor-tunities to make additional calls for emergency aid coupled with further trade liberalization and increased investment in agricultural productivity. The Farm Bill in particular has been instrumental in establishing and maintaining such systemic vulnerability. For example, although the 2014 Farm Bill authorizes $80 million annually for the Local and Regional Procurement Program, which encourages greater use of food that is locally or regionally grown for food aid, it pales in comparison to the $1.75 billion Food for Peace Title II through which United States Agency for International Development provides food assistance. Furthermore, foreign economies are undermined not only by such efforts that directly shuttle surplus and heavily subsidized commodities—produced for the benefit of corporate entities—to developing countries, but also by production support programs themselves, such as commodity payments or crop insurance.

For example, a 2012 International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development report found that the shift from direct payments to crop insurance support for farmers is likely to have far reaching effects on global trade and prices because of the anticipated change to cropping patterns. Specifically, the likelihood that the new programs will influence planting decisions is greatly enhanced because payments in all the new programs are calculated using actual planted acreage. Ultimately, if planting decisions are influenced enough, then program-induced changes in US crop acreage will be reflected in trade flows that have the potential to harm farmers in developing countries and cause fluctuations in global food prices. One major way corporations profit and exert their control with regard to education, research, and development is their influence over academic research and development. Agricultural research in the United States is carried out primarily by three entities: the federal government, largely through the US Department of Agriculture; academia, primarily through land-grant universities; and the private sector. Over the past several decades, corporate interests have co-opted publicly-oriented agricultural research and land-grant university research efforts in particular. The federal government created land-grant universities in 1862 by deeding tracts of land to every state to pursue agricultural research to support agricultural production in the United States. Although public investments have maintained agricultural research since the creation of these universities, over recent decades public funding has stalled, prompting land-grant universities to appeal to agribusiness to remedy such financial shortcomings. Significantly, the landmark 1980 Bayh-Dole Act pushed universities to take this particularly entrepreneurial role, generating revenue through producing patents from which the private sector could profit. The Bayh-Dole Act, as part of the neoliberalization of science and academic research itself, prompted greater industry influence over land-grant research, as university research agendas became oriented toward the needs of corporate partners.

Major agribusiness donors to land-grant universities across the United States, including Syngenta, Monsanto, PepsiCo, Nestle, Dow Agroscience, Chevron, DuPont and others, now push research carried out by faculty and students toward developments in bio-fuels, commodity crops research, genetically engineered foods, and other areas of interest. Land-grant universities today not only carry out corporate-directed research but also depend on agribusinesses to underwrite research grants, endow faculty chairs, sponsor departments, and finance the construction of new buildings. Even USDA research and USDA-funded research itself reflects corporate interests. The USDA spends roughly $2 billion per year on agricultural research, which goes toward funding USDA researchers and researchers at land-grant universities. This money, however, is largely directed toward a corporate-friendly industrial agriculture research agenda: the National Academy of Sciences found that USDA research prioritizes commodity crops, industrialized livestock production, technologies geared toward large-scale operations, and capital-intensive practices. The Farm Bill does not prioritize funding for more sustainable farming programs, with programs such as the Organic Agriculture Research and Education Initiative and Specialty Crop Research Initiative accounting for only 2% of the USDA’s research budget. Most research funding is directed toward commodity crops research. In 2010, for example, the USDA funded $204 million to research all varieties of fruits and vegetables, and spent $212 million to research just four commodity crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Another major way private industry continues to profit and exert their influence vis-à-vis relations of education, research, and development, is seed research and patents. Since the early 1980s, the global seed industry has grown substantially and is now worth an estimated $44 billion and is expected to grow to an estimated $85 billion by 2018. The cumulative effect of seed legislation has facilitated the massive consolidation of corporate power, thus securing corporate control of one of the most crucial agricultural inputs. This history of seed legislation began shortly before the New Deal, beginning with the US Plant Patent Act of 1930 and continued with the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act. Significantly, seed legislation did not move into the judicial system until the 1980 Supreme Court decision Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which laid the legal groundwork for the privatization and commodification of the genetics of seeds. In 1985, Ex Parte Hibberd, an administration decision by the US Patent and Trademarks Office, extended property rights to the individual components of organisms, 4 x 8 grow tray including genetic information, thus anticipating some of today’s contentious Genetically Modified Organism debates. Ten years later, Asgrow Seed v. Winterboer denied the rights of farmers to save and resell patented seed products, marking the continuation of a series of legislation that progressively placed power in corporate hands. In 2001, J.E.M. AG Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a legal dispute between a large seed company and small seed supply center, affirmed that newly developed plant breeds are covered by expansive utility patents. In 2013, furthermore, Bowman v. Monsanto held that patent “exhaustion doctrine” does not cover farmers’ reproduction of patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent owner’s permission, further reflecting and securing corporate profit and influence. Although inadequate disclosure laws make it difficult to determine the exact amount expended on the Farm Bill and on other pieces of legislation, during the two years preceding the passage of the Farm Bill on February 7, 2014, at least 600 companies spent over $500 million in lobbying. The largest spenders ranged from Fortune 500 leaders in banking, trade, transportation and energy to non-profit organizations. A joint investigation by Harvest Public Media and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found that the top 18 corporations and groups spent at least $5 million each in total lobbying from 2012 to the First Quarter of 2014.

These corporations and groups include: the US Chamber of Commerce, Exxon Mobil, Du Pont, the American Bankers Association, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Grocery Manufacturers Association, Wells Fargo, AARP, Monsanto, Independent Community Bankers of America, Coca-Cola, Association of American Railroads, Nestle, Nextera Energy, BNSF Railway Company, PMI Global Services Inc., Bayer Corporation, and American Forest & Paper Association. The commodities support programs outlined above make up one major set of Farm Bill issues influenced by such lobbying efforts. These direct payments have long received the attention of growers groups and other interest groups that are beholden to corporate interests. Specifically, alongside the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, and other general farm organizations, all major agricultural commodities are represented by a lobbying organization that aims to keep the Farm Bill’s commodity programs intact as per the supposed interest of the producers of such commodities. These organizations include: the National Cotton Council, the Sugar Association, and the National Corn Growers, among others. While indeed all industries are represented by lobbying organizations, the relative political and economic strength of actors within the US food system that are already oriented toward large-scale production, processing, distribution, and service—such as those above—highlights their significance, particularly concerning contemporary campaign finance reform efforts. With the change to crop insurance as the safety net centerpiece, banks and insurance companies spent at least $52.6 million in lobbying the 2014 Farm Bill and other issues in the two years prior to its passage. For example, Wells Fargo, the fourth-largest US bank, spent approximately $11.3 million in lobbying efforts, signaling the potential gain to be had by the company’s Rural Community Insurance Services, the largest crop insurance provider in the country. The American Bankers Association, another group that will benefit most from the boost to crop insurance, reported spending $14 million on lobbying, including advocacy for crop insurance and other rural lending plans. Other lobbyists for crop insurance included Independent Community Bankers of America, ACE INA Holdings and Zurich , the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents, and Deere & Co., the large equipment manufacturer that also has a crop insurance arm. Private sector spending on agricultural research has risen steeply since the 1970s and 1980s, exceeding public sector spending on agricultural research. From 1970 to 2006, private agricultural research expenditures—both in-house research and donations to land-grant universities—rose from $2.8 billion to over $8 billion, in inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars. Yet total public funding—directed toward land-grant universities and the USDA—rose from $3.1 billion to $6.1 billion in that same period. Federal funding of land-grant universities in particular reflect such trends: by the early 1990s, industry funding had already surpassed USDA funding of agricultural research at land-grant universities and by 2009, private sector funding had soared to $822 million, compared to $645 million from the USDA. Significantly, the economic recession substantially restricted research funding. Yet USDA land-grant university funding dropped twice as fast as private funding between 2009 and 2010, from 39.3% and 20.5%, respectively, reflecting the increasing dependence of university research on corporate funds, particularly during economic downturns.