Significant to the presentation of results and discussion is the supremacy of private property in the United States legal system. When comparing the Lopez agricultural case study to “idealized” visions of agroecological food systems, many steps towards the “ideal” are thwarted by private property “enclosures” of the agricultural commons, which is more pronounced in the United States than in other geographic contexts. Thus, progress towards visioning and establishing agroecological local food systems must reconcile with unique challenges in the U.S. land tenure system, and ultimately promulgate strategies for loosening the supremacy of private property if real power is to be restored to those growing our food. Through a compilation of fieldwork, ethnographic notes, participant-observation, and immersion into the community, this chapter presents data on the Lopez Island sustainable foodsystem case study, and constructs analysis of food system transformation framed by the paradigm of agroecology . I draw on social science research methods including semi-structured interviews and ethnographic techniques to bring forward ideas and solutions from leaders in the agricultural community of the San Juan Islands. Research partners include the San Juan Island Agricultural Resource Committee , the San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild , the Lopez Community Land Trust , the Lopez Island Farm Education program, Washington State University San Juan County Extension, San Juan Islands Conservation District , Midnight’s Farm, Stonecrest Farm, Sweetbriar Farm, and Lopez Harvest. I find that the Lopez food system transformation towards resilience, sustainability, plant grow trays and equity is a work in progress, requiring political and economic shifts in order for regenerative food production practices to spark regeneration and equity in other branches of the food system.
Significantly, farmland transition barriers and land access challenges3 combined with new and beginning farmer training are areas requiring further investment, investigation, and institutional capacity in order to secure the progress made to date into subsequence generations of sustainable farmers.It is already well established in the agroecology and sustainable food systems literature that the chemical-industrial farming system causes adverse human health, labor, social justice, environmental and climate outcomes . Thus, alternatives to the chemical-industrial farming system are imperative to develop and advance for environmental and social justice reasons. The current dominant food system is driven towards yield-maximizing outputs enabled by increasingly consolidated, mechanized monocultures, which are in turn reliant on a potent mix of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels. This system functions at the expense of human health, fair labor conditions, equitable food distribution, and environmental preservation. Furthermore, the current food system contributes significantly to the problem of climate change, emitting approximately 25% of the global greenhouse gas emissions portfolio . Conversely, regenerative agroecological food systems have the potential to store more carbon annually in the soil than what is emitted through processes like respiration and plant decay, which at scale could amount to significant global carbon offsets , buying time for theplanet to adopt other necessary technological and social changes to reduce carbon emissions . Agroecological, sustainable, and organic farmers are leading the way towards demonstrating new ways to both produce sufficient quantities of food and mitigate climate change through soil C sequestration.
Regenerative agriculture 4’s climate mitigation potential is highlighted in a recently released report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, stating that “negative emissions technologies—natural and engineered strategies for actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere such as agroforestry and silvopasture, biomass gasification and biochar—deployed at scale in the United States could sequester between 0.6 and 1.4 gigatons of C annually by 2050” . A report by Terra Genesis International further breaks down the mitigation potential of regenerative agriculture practices per hectare as depicted in Figure 4. According to Silver, “plants, and the soils they live in, are tremendous resources in the battle against climate change… soils have the potential to be deep, long-term repositories of some of the carbon captured by plants, keeping it from returning to the atmosphere for years to decades or longer” . Silver and her team of researchers quantify the impact of existing “agricultural mitigation practices” as potentially lowering global temperatures by 0.26°C by 2100, under RCP 2.6 . Other researchers helped develop the “Soil C 4 per Mille” initiative, launched at the COP21 talks in Paris in 2015, calling for all nations to increase soil carbon storage on agricultural lands by 0.004%, which would create a significant global carbon drawdown effect of 2-3 Gt C annually, offsetting 20-35% of anthropogenic emissions . What are these “agricultural mitigation practices” and how exactly can they be scaled across global agricultural acreage? Undoubtedly, local geography and context matter, along with available social, intellectual, and financial resources. This chapter will explore the first half of the question and explore the application of mitigation practice in the San Juan Island geographical context. A selected list of practices most relevant to Lopez Island farms are listed in Table 1 below. It is worth noting that many of these practices, in particular no-till and cover cropping, are broadly relevant to agricultural producers in both the conventional and organic industry, offering opportunities to build a “big tent” in the agriculture sector’s response to climate change.
In the face of climate change and its accelerating impacts, solutions and strategies for adapting and mitigating climate change through island farming are clear. What is needed is governance structures and skillfully crafted policy change to fund and scale these practices democratically. So, this chapter examines Lopez governance structures, from farms to island to county and state scales, and asks: What are the strengths and barriers to realizing a truly sustainable local food system on Lopez? How do perceptions of strengths and barriers differ or align among different governance scales? What are opportunities for immediate action or next steps to move towards the county vision for a sustainable local food system? As Figure 5 illustrates, farms and farmers on Lopez are nested within island, county, and state governance scales. Farms can and do relate to each other horizontally, coming up with mutually beneficial and differentiated roles, responsibilities, and practices, where for example one farm may supply compost to others, while others provide woody debris back to that farm, and all farmers share strategies for eradicating common pests/weeds, taking care of animals in the absence of an island large animal vet, and securing inputs/supplies from both on island and off island sources . Farmers who raise meat share access to a USDA-inspected, certified organic Mobile Processing Unit for slaughtering animals on the island, the first of its kind in the nation and an example of polycentric governance involving island, county, and federal coordination. Each of these levelsof governance are relevant to the conversation, research, and process of working towards a sustainable, equitable and resilient local food system on Lopez. Ultimately, state- and county level political reforms are needed to unlock goals and changes sought by island organizations and farmers at the grassroots level, who are already attempting to self-organize to ensure sustainability of their SES. Governing and “understanding a complex whole requires knowledge about specific variables and how their component parts are related. Thus, we must learn how to dissect and harness complexity, custom grow rooms rather than eliminate it from such systems” .In addition to policy and governance structures, education is a key component surrounding food systems that can unlock transformative change. In this case study, a range of environmental and food systems education research are relevant, most significantly: 1) farmer to farmer education on regenerative agricultural practices and 2) climate change education for youth, farmers, and the general public.
Farmer to farmer education is a cornerstone of the agroecological paradigm, which recognizes the vast knowledge stores held by experienced farmers as well as trust and value created when farmers share information with each other in horizontal knowledge transfers . Farmer to farmer, or Campesino a Campesino networks are seen as essential to scaling up and out agroecological practices that “enhance the resiliency of agroecosystems” . This educational form shares much with critical pedagogy, popularized by Paolo Freire in Brazil in the 1970s, which similarly emphasizes horizontal relationships between teacher and student, where both teachers and students are encouraged to ask and answer questions in an anti-oppression, anti-hierarchical “classroom” that aspires to higher goals of transformational social change and justice . Farmers hold unique and practical forms of knowledge that have developed historically in the United States context through both firsthand experience and institutions such as land-grant universities, Cooperative Extension, and the Farmer’s Bureau. Farmer knowledge in the United States has become centralized in the hands of institutions and corporations who exercise power over large aspects of the food system, from production to consumption. This consolidation of knowledge is related to corporate consolidation and corporate funding of agricultural sciences in research institutions including land-grant universities and Cooperative Extension offices . Corporate and institutional influence over farmer knowledge and practices intersects with the National Farm Bill policies and system of subsidies and crop insurance, policies over which corporations also exercise influence, thereby dictating a pattern of mechanized, chemical intensive farming that is practiced on a large scale in the United States, a pattern that is self reinforcing. Unsurprisingly, as part of this top-down knowledge transfer funded by fossil fuel interests, farmers as a population demographic in the United States have been skeptical about human-caused climate change and expressed reluctance to take mitigative action . However, there has been a notable shift recently due to extreme weather impacts on the Midwest and California that are making climate change a harder reality to ignore, and leading some farmers to declare that “farmers and rural Americans, that’s who’s going to solve this; We have the land for renewable energy, and we have the farming systems to sequester carbon” . A farmer in Missouri informed The Guardian that “as climate change bites, farmers are increasingly accepting of the science as they are forced to spend more money on equipment and seeds to maintain current crop yields” . Importantly,research indicates that “farmers who were concerned about the impacts of climate change on agriculture were more supportive of adaptive and mitigative action and those who attributed climate change to human activities were more likely to support government action on mitigation” . Experiential education in climate resilient agriculture for farmers will be important to translating research into action, enabling sustainable local food systems transformation. Improving farmer and future farmer climate literacy is a crucial component of scaling and handing off climate friendly practices such as those identified in the literature , yet remains an area that has been under explored in food systems research. There is little mention of training or educating farmers about climate change, and minimal mention in the K-12 educational arena of incorporating climate change into school food programs like Farm to School. Farm to School programs refer broadly to environmental literacy in their education program element, but there is much room to grow for both FTS and adult beginning farmer training programs to incorporate coherent standards and curricula around climate literacy. Like all forms of environmental literacy, it comprises knowledge, attitude, and engagement/action dimensions . Concepts like environmental and climate literacy are notoriously difficult to measure and quantify but are nevertheless important educational objectives to build into both K-12 and farmer education spaces coherently through content and activities aligned with the best available science. While the Lopez farmer population is already largely climate-engaged and active, the development of climate and environmental literacy among young people and aspiring farmers is important and in need of development, outlined further below and in Chapter 4, which focuses on education. The following sections apply literature on agroecology, agriculture and climate change, SES, and climate education to the past, present, and potential futures for the Lopez Island farming community.Historically, Lopez was an island of woodlands and native prairie, populated with Coast Salish communities who used regular burning practices to clear land for subsistence cultivation, hunting, and fire risk management. European settlers arrived in the mid-1800s, some fleeing the Irish potato famine to resume a life of farming and fishing on Lopez. Following the European theft of native land and the settlement of a boundary dispute between the United States and Great Britain in 1872, the islands were surveyed into 160-acre parcels and opened up to homesteading under the Homestead Act .