Alternative economic models are emerging and require further study

Posted on September 21, 2023 by hemp2022

Urban agriculture remains a relatively small, yet important percentage of the larger food distribution system in cities: “few, if any, urban agriculture projects, are intended to replace traditional food retail or would claim to lead to food self sufficiency for individuals or for cities” . As such, very little is understood about where and how urban farmers distribute their food including modes of transportation delivery, either individually or in aggregate, and to whom . It is important to focus on the means through which food produced by different types of farm operations travels from farm to consumer, and the processes through which that food is exchanged , as this directly impacts access and consumption. The scholarly literature as well as media stories describe various modes by which fresh produce is distributed in the city to address fresh food access including both formal and informal distribution channels . Applying a distribution lens to the existing literature yields similar results to the food access analysis in that several articles theorize idealized distribution systems, showing the capacity of hypothetical urban and peri-urban farms to supply distribution networks that meet most urban food demands . Others highlight barriers and challenges farmers face in practice around distributing their produce to those in need while maintaining their operations . None, in our search, focus analysis on distribution flows of urban produced foods across a city. Rather, a more common focus is on which distribution channels are best for getting produce, not necessarily urban produced, into the hands of food insecure households or residents of “food deserts” . Is it a corner store, a large supermarket, or small local farm stand within a mile radius that households need to access fresh produce?Farmers markets as distribution sites receive critical assessments in the literature for their ability to serve as distribution channels to low-income consumers. Alison Hope Alkon writes about the closing of a farmers’ market in West Oakland,indoor grow tent a historically African American neighborhood, juxtaposed with the white spaces of farmers markets that are thriving in neighboring Berkeley in her book Black, White and Green: Farmers Markets, Race and the Green Economy.

She theorizes the promise and limitations of the “green economy” and chronicles the food movement’s anti-capitalist roots yet ultimate manifestation as reproducing capitalist inequalities. Lucan et al.’s study of farmers markets in the Bronx took issue with limited hours of operation, seasonality, affordable common produce, and availability of predominantly healthy foods among farmers markets compared to nearby stores . Accepting Electronic Benefit Transfer payments is a basic prerequisite for farmers markets to be considered accessible to low-income consumers, a concept pioneered by the GrowNYC’s Greenmarket program . While farmers markets in all 50 states now accept food stamps , the price of offerings such as a bunch of kale still exceeds the price of nearby fast food options that may offer a more filling but less nutritious meal option. Some states are moving in the direction of matching EBT funds through various “market match” policies, a step towards improving food distribution and access at farmers markets .The concept of a foodshed in the distribution literature, “like its analogue the watershed, can serve as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action” . Foodshed analysis “provides a way to assess the capacity of regions to feed themselves” through proximate location of food production, distribution and consumption . Applying this concept, Peters et al. found that 34% of New York State’s total food needs could be met within an average distance of 49 miles. The foodshed, embedded in the local food systems and short food supply chain concepts, is a useful organizing principle for city planners to consider when designing effective food distribution networks, such as the example highlighted in integrating a farm into a housing development project in the South under the title of a “civic agriculture community,” facilitating proximate, affordable distribution channels. This exemplifies planning with a foodshed lens by specifying areas at the neighborhood scale for semi-commercial agriculture, neighborhood CSA, residential kitchen gardens, and residential development in order to build food access and ease of distribution into the neighborhood fabric. If urban farmers aren’t able to easily distribute their produce to consumers, either through sales or other forms of distribution, questions of improving food access are jeopardized as well, revealing the interconnectedness of the food systems framework from production to distribution to consumption.

Planning for improved urban food distribution includes ideas such as food hubs, agri-hood developments, public storage and transportation options, food aggregating facilities or organizations, mobile food distribution, or state investment in public markets . Mobile food distribution options are modeled and shown to increase access in Buffalo, NY, in Widener et al.’s theoretical analysis . Agri-hoods have gained increasing mention in local news outlets as a real estate trend in “Development Supported Agriculture , and as many as 200 currently exist or are under construction across the country” . They facilitate distribution by colocating food producers and consumers on strategically planned sites, providing shared infrastructure resources, and making land access affordable for farmers by cross-subsidizing with real estate development. Cooper’s report on food hubs in the south, a form of aggregating supply to enable expanded market access, highlights grassroots solutions developed by and for farmers of color, yet “major challenges [remain] associated with developing and maintaining food hubs within a racial equity framework” . Here again, the Google Alerts provide useful insights from gray literature and local news outlets into recent and effective strategies for city planners, be it food hubs, mobile food distribution options, online platforms for gleaning, second harvest, crop swaps, or distributing excess produce from backyard gardens. These are also areas that stand to benefit from additional scholarly research in terms of quantifying impact on consumption, food insecurity, and nutrition, expanding evaluations of urban food systems to include nonmonetary and informal distribution mechanisms. Integrating the access and distribution literature from above, we identified three themes that speak to the efficacy of urban agriculture in meeting food access goals: economic viability, policy and planning models, and civic engagement.In this section, we consider the economics of urban agriculture and the “economic marginalization” that prevents many operations from meeting all the social and environmental benefits of urban agriculture within a for-profit or capitalist-oriented production scheme. The urban food justice and food sovereignty movements in the U.S. are limited in practice in achieving their more radical or transformative goals due to the fact that they are operating within “a broader framework of [capitalist] market neoliberalism” .

The challenge has not been growing enough food per se, but rather “producing and distributing food in ways accessible and affordable for the growing urban poor” while sustaining UA operations in a capitalist, production- and profit-oriented society. Daftary-Steel, Herrera and Porter declare that an urban farm cannot simultaneously provide jobs to vulnerable individuals, provide healthy food to low-income households and generate sustainable income and/or profits from sales. Therefore, what forms of urban agriculture are economically viable in today’s political economy? Operations that provide jobs, job training and professional development but sell mostly to high-end consumers , operations that are volunteer-driven or publicly funded and operations that cross-subsidize healthy food donations with revenues generated from other services besides food production or from crowd-sourced funding . When it comes to economic viability, many urban farming operations openly acknowledge that they are dependent on grants and donations to sustain their operations, which is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, as long as an organization can prove itself worthy in receiving grants and donations, it may represent economic viability and long term sustainability. On the other,weed trimming tray if the organization is wrapped up in a charismatic individual leader or fails to receive ongoing grant injections beyond one or two initial successes, it will not achieve long-term economic viability.Examples include redistributive business models, barter and exchange networks, food aggregators, food recovery organizations, cooperatives, food hubs, and “agrihoods” . Food hubs are reframed as both tools for provision of market access and self-determination for black farm cooperatives in the South in Cooper’s report with potential to subvert historic racism and economic marginalization of black farmers. Key to this and other food policy reports in the gray literature is elevating voices and fostering dialogue led by communities of color.While food, and urban agriculture, used to be “strangers to the planning field” or “puzzling omissions” from American Planning Association resources prior to the early 2000s , there has been an increase in academic work in the past 10 years dealing with urban food systems planning. In this section we consider the policy landscape of various city and state efforts to incentivize and create space for urban agriculture. Policy is needed to lower costs for low income consumers and urban farmers seeking land, provide strategic location of distribution sites, and encourage year-round produce supply, often enabled by greenhouse systems in urban farms. Are current policy incentives enough to create expanded food access and community food security from urban farms? Horst et al. would argue no; rather, an explicit commitment to food justice and an “equity lens” is needed for policymakers and planners to create UA spaces that benefit low income and minority communities equally if not more than already advantaged groups. Due to the current landscape of “disparities in representation, leadership and funding, and insecure land tenure,” unless these problems are explicitly addressed, “even the most well intentioned initiatives will perpetuate or even reinforce the injustices that practitioners and supporters aim to address” .

This sentiment is echoed in Morales’ chapter in Cultivating Food Justice, which calls for “applied research to discover and advance policy objectives related to the antiracist and economic objectives espoused by the Growing Food and Justice Initiative” . This suggests that only by foregrounding issues of race and economic inequality can cities create UA spaces that address food insecurity. In asking the question “Can cities become self-reliant in food?” Grewal and Grewal find that, in a best-case scenario, the City of Cleveland can achieve almost 100% self-reliance in fresh produce needs, poultry and eggs, and honey, but only with huge amounts of planning support . Blum-evitts puts forth a foodshed assessment tool to allow planners to assess local farm capacity in relation to local food needs . Theoretical work such as this is important to advance ideas of what is possible and motivate efforts to make change, although it must constantly stay in dialogue with what is happening in practice and expand beyond a productivist focus on local food systems. Urban farms are, after all, producing a lot more than food, and “increasing food production in cities does not guarantee that people experiencing food insecurity will access that food” . UA is re-valued along a broader spectrum of “products” or outputs in Figure 12 below.Creating urban agriculture incentive zones is one possible approach to policy and planning, likely to benefit the propertied class via tax breaks . Policies such as California’s AB 551, the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone act, have come under criticism for not going far enough to build a just food system, relying on private rather than public spaces to support UA. It is unclear whether incentive zones will be widely adopted by cities and counties in California, and whether they will meaningfully address food access or food sovereignty, especially when the length of time required to devote a piece of land to urban agriculture is only 5 years. In cases where tax incentives are used to promote urban agriculture, primary beneficiaries of the policy are often the privileged class of property owners rather than low-income households or non-property-owning urban farmers. Cities with some sort of food policy regulating, allowing for or promoting urban agriculture include the City of Baltimore , City of Somerville, Detroit, Portland, Madison, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Minneapolis, New Orleans,Milwaukee, Boston, and Chicago12. Many policies allow for commercial sales of urban-produced food within the city as “approved sources” ; allow for value-added processing and sale of urban produced foods in people’s home kitchens ; create tax incentives for property owners to convert land into urban farms ; amend zoning regulations ; or set up urban beekeeping pilot projects .

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The food hub project is in progress and could be expedited with funding and community support

Posted on September 20, 2023 by hemp2022

Dig, transplant, bed down, repeat. Six inch spacing, four rows per planting bed. Finish the row, water it in, keep moving. Lopez Harvest sells lettuce mix, a specialty blend of “Island Greens,” chard, microgreens, arugula, herbs, and various seasonal vegetables and specialty crops to most of the for-profit food retail and business operations on the island. Christine, the farm owner, sends out a “pick list” to all customers a week in advance, takes orders by a certain day, and harvests and delivers all orders herself. This is her answer to the question “what does it take to be a successful small-scale farmer on a small island?” She sells her surplus produce directly to retail and restaurant, finding this to be more profitable than selling at the seasonal weekly Farmer’s Market or direct to consumers. She raises additional vegetables for personal consumption, reducing her own need to purchase store-bought foods, and facilitates a meat-share program where costs and benefits from raising meat chickens are shared among participating households. These non-monetary and cooperative forms of exchange are important to the economic viability of her operations. Christine now receives additional revenue from her participation in a beginning farmer mentoring program, where she earns up to $1,000 annually for mentoring younger farmers in their first year of operation . Her farm is on shared land purchased by three couples, and was acquired with family support, a common method for overcoming high barriers to entry for farmland access . While some rows of her field are planted to commercial crops, others are in rye-vetch cover crop mix gaining fertility for next year, or mustards to deter wire worms. The cover crop is mowed down and incorporated into the beds,procona London container with some beds serving as experiments for no-till practices where she has also tried occultation techniques to germinate and kill weeds prior to transplanting. This is difficult to enact on her land due to heavy clay soils that need some disturbance to be made ready for tender transplants and is a work in progress.

Commercial crops are rotated onto previously cover cropped beds, a dance between production of plants and soil. In Christine’s mind, “good farming is good for the climate;” she adopts practices when they prove beneficial for her land, crops, soil, and business model, and it just so happens that many of these practices are anointed in academic research as climate mitigating strategies. Christine exemplifies a successful independent, woman-owned business model. She receives seasonal labor support through the LCLT intern program and through informal work trade agreements with friends and neighbors. Christine is a vocal contributor at the monthly farmer coffees, sharing what she’s learned about effective weed control strategies , and a gifted farme reducator. She collaborates with WSU San Extension on a research project to reduce wire worm pest pressure in lettuce crops and is also a collaborator on the Western SARE bio-char cocompost grant, participating in the field trial and soil/crop data collection processes. Christine recognizes the attractiveness of entering into farming cooperatively or with farm partners but struggles with the difficult proposition of supporting multiple households with limited farm revenue streams and land use restrictions. When it comes to sharing land in her current situation, she would love to be able to build and provide more farm worker housing, but is restricted from doing so by county zoning policies that prevent more than two houses from being built on a parcel designated as “farmland7.” The county zoning codes are ripe for reform, but notoriously difficult to get right in terms of regulatory verbiage that protects farmland from becoming housing developments yet allows for ample and affordable farm worker housing. Currently grappling with her own problems of farmland succession, scaling back, and transitioning her land, Christine hopes that the land can continue to be farmed, while still allowing her and her partner to extract their equity and support their own retirement. On the way to working out these details, Christine continues to get up early each morning of the summer, turn on the irrigation system and harvest high-quality vegetables, sharing her beautiful food production space and boundless stores of knowledge with those seeking it in her community.Meike Meissner and Mike McMahon moved to Lopez Island with their three children in spring 2018, after signing on to a 15-year long term affordable lease of Stonecrest Farm through LCLT.

Meike and Mike got their farming start in California, where they both worked at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. They grew their experience in the American West, participating in a rangeland internship in Montana and establishing an award-winning contract grazing operation in Colorado. Thinking holistically and with climate change in mind, Meike and Mike practice a combination of farming and conservation work. They are both trained in managed grazing through Holistic Management International, an offshoot of the Savory Institute, and believe in the value of animals as regenerative elements for degraded rangeland. Upon moving to Lopez, they have faced inevitable start-up obstacles in establishing pasture-raised heritage pigs, rotationally grazed beef cattle, chickens, and kitchen processing facility. The pasture areas have been so degraded from repeated haying that there is little nutritious forage available for their cattle operation, which they would like to be 100% grass-fed and finished, with no supplemental hay fed to their animals. Before this is possible, they must regenerate the available forage and bring back high-nutrient plant biomass on their land, through a creative, locally tailored approach to grassland ecosystem restoration. In the meantime, they are leasing other land for rotational grazing of their beef cows. Adding to the quandary is decades of selective cattle breeding in the United States to maximize high-protein feed-to-meat conversion as quickly as possible. Venturing into the field of epigenetics, Meike laments the fact that there are few cattle breeds in the U.S. particularly well suited to convert poor forage to high quality meat,cut flower transport bucket which would represent another opportunity for minimizing external inputs in the form of supplemental animal feed.Meike spoke at length about her abhorrence of using anything the comes wrapped in plastic and avoiding petroleum products in farm operations wherever possible. When it comes to removing and controlling weeds in their home garden without chemicals, tillage, or black plastic cover, there is a seeming dearth of options remaining; however, a return to natural methods and materials such as hugelkulture beds, permaculture principles, and sheet mulching with cardboard, wood chips, and tons of compost offer promising potential. Meike and Mike think in terms of returning all waste products as inputs to some other farm process. Dead weeds become organic material for building soil, inedible food items become high nutrient components of their pigs’ diet. They are on a challenging path toward land regeneration first, ideally unlocking food production and economic viability down the line.Two of the three farms highlighted in the section above acquired farmland in the first place due to wealth transfers from previous careers or family members. The value proposition of purchasing farmland and paying off debts through limited farm incomes is otherwise extremely difficult and disadvantages low income and minority groups who have been excluded from generational land and wealth accumulation. There is not yet a “social safety net” in place to enable farming as an equal-opportunity, financially viable or desirable career pathway, in terms of guaranteed income, health care, and time off to support personal well being. This is preventing the easy transition of farmland from current to new farmers and causing hesitancy among young people seeking to make an early career as a farmer in the San Juan Islands, ultimately challenging the sustainability of agriculture on the islands as a “way of life.” In order to avoid a situation where only the wealthy can afford to farm sustainably, policy mechanisms must be put in place to democratize land access.

Promoting and facilitating cooperative ownership and buy-in to farmland is something the county has yet to address effectively; it is challenging, and yet a promising action step for enabling successful farmland transition for a more diverse array of new farmers . Opportunities exist on the production side of the Lopez food system in the form of local knowledge accumulated over decades of implementing sustainable and regenerative, agroecological practices, that is ripe for sharing and transferring to new and beginning farmers through mentorship programs or the establishment of a more formalized “farmer training program” on the islands. Additionally, on the land acquisition front, the LCLT long-term affordable lease model piloted with the Stonecrest Farm purchase could lead to other transfers of farmland at low cost to new farmers . On a small island such as Lopez, there are opportunities to share and collaborate on distribution activities especially for complementary products. However, the limited number and size of markets could prohibit entry into a channel that is already dominated by one farmer or food business; therefore, diversifying and coordinating with other farmers is an opportunity to streamline distribution activities. Opportunities exist for farms growing fruit to partner with and distribute alongside farms growing vegetables, meat or dairy products, which would be expedited by access to enabling infrastructure such as a shared refrigerated truck, aggregated cold storage, and designated food delivery person to transport products from farms to customers and retail locations. Ideally a shared transport system could be optimized to reduce vehicle miles traveled for food distribution, and a transport vehicle could be a hybrid or electric model to meet local goals of carbon emissions reductions in all facets of the food system. Efforts to streamline distribution exist in the form of the proposed San Juan Island Food Hub, which would provide institutional support for aggregating and distributing farm products between islands, improving transparency between producers and food purveyors. According to a 2015 Food Hub Feasibility Study led by the Ag Guild and ARC, there is a strong desire and opportunity for a San Juan County Food Hub to provide an online platform for ordering, aggregated cold storage, and aggregated purchase opportunities that would help meet the unmet demand for local food products in restaurants, grocery stores, and other food businesses9. Most farmers currently do not have the time and capital to transport their produce to other islands but stand to benefit from accessing these additional markets.While food security is a stated goal of the project, it is unclear how increased access and affordability to low income consumers would be accomplished, other than through assumed improvements to local economic development and job creation. A specific plan for meeting the needs of low-income residents in the activities of the food hub would be a valuable improvement to the current planning process. The Lopez Farmer’s Market is an opportunity for farmers willing to participate weekly throughout the summer, as farmer participation has dwindled in recent years and there is interest in attracting more farmers to sell at the market. Finally, the close-knit Lopez community breeds the trust and interpersonal relationships that facilitate many non-monetary forms of exchange, whereby farmers can trade food products directly for other goods and services they may need from island residents, in mutually beneficial trades that create solidarity and sovereignty from financial institutions. It is challenging to establish a successful CSA distribution on Lopez, requiring farmers to think creatively about how to structure weekly shares in a way that provides products that many residents do not grow for themselves, and accounts for the shorter-term seasonal demand of summer visitors.Using data gathered from interviews and observations of current farmland operations on Lopez and referring back to Ostrom’s ten variables, it becomes clear that farmer self organization to sustain the local food system is very likely . Nevertheless, the propensity for farmers to self-organize does not guarantee that the more complex and overarching political and economic challenges will be resolved through grassroots self-organizing; farmers must integrate and collaborate with other circles of the polycentric governance structure in which they are nested to adopt necessary reforms. The ARC, for example, is a Citizen Advisory Committee tasked with advising the County Council on issues affecting the Agricultural environment comprised of 15 voting seats, at least 50% of which must be farmers.

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Ferry service costs $47 round trip from Anacortes to Lopez per vehicle and driver in the summer season

Posted on September 19, 2023 by hemp2022

Temporally, there is a substantial “lag time” in realizing positive climate impacts due to the 100-year residence time of atmospheric CO2;however, additional motivators for shifting towards an agroecological food system exist in the shorter-term including advancement of social, economic, health, and food justice goals. More complex representations of the food climate nexus exist showing cascading interactions between the food system, climate system, and potential adaptation/mitigation measures. The IPCC Land Use report includes a figure showing complex interlink ages between the climate system, food system, ecosystem , and socio-economic system, operating at multiple scales, from global to regional . Ultimately both complex and more simple diagrams are pointing towards opportunities for food systems actions to reduce and remove atmospheric GHG concentrations. However, doing so without compromising important social justice goals requires coordination and inclusive local food system planning. Debates in the agroecological food system research center around how best to achieve food systems and related social change and are discussed further in section 1.2.1 below. Emissions inventories quantify the greenhouse gas impact of food systems using various assumptions and “boundaries” between food and other sectors, such as transportation, buildings, and electricity generation. Estimates range from 8-9% of total greenhouse gas emissions attributable to “agriculture” in California and the United States , to 33% of total emissions attributable to the “global food system,” including fertilizer manufacture, food storage, and packaging . As Niles et al. state in a recent paper, “It is estimated that agriculture and associated land use change account for 24% of total global emissions , while the global food system may contribute up to 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions . As a result, food systems—not just agricultural production—should be a critical focus for GHG mitigation and adaptation strategies” . And yet, current research on climate change mitigation in the food sector focuses on the production element,rolling bench without fully exploring other system elements in terms of leverage points, synergies, and trade offs in mitigation and adaptation efforts.

It is important to consider a holistic accounting of greenhouse gas emissions from the industrial food system, including the manufacturing of nitrogen fertilizers and herbicide/pesticide chemicals; fuel for powering farm equipment; dietary preferences; and processing, packaging, and refrigeration processes, in order to optimize emissions reductions and carbon removal and maximize adaptation co-benefits of mitigating the climate crisis through transforming the food system . Critical food systems scholars and organizations aligning with the agroecology paradigm point out several dimensions of necessary action-research to build towards a climate friendly food system, including regenerative food production, minimizing corporate influence, preventing further consolidation of corporations, promoting re-localization of food systems activities, and rebuilding a policy climate with accountable elected officials acting in the best interest of society, environment and democracy . Relocalizing food systems is credited by scholars of agroecology as “an important factor in seeking solutions to the multiple crises” that cities are currently facing, including “environment, climate change, health, social inclusion and waste management” . Agroecology scholarship spans governance scales and nations, the urban and the rural, and is best understood through the lens of the food system , weaving together production and other system elements . The agroecological food system paradigm is framed by some scholar-activists as standing in direct contrast to the dominant industrial paradigm and the Law of Exploitation; it is “centered on the Earth and small-scale farmers, and especially women farmers… ecological food systems are local food systems. Sustainability and justice flow naturally from the Law of Return and from the localization of food production. The resources of the Earth… are managed as a ‘commons,’ or shared spaces for communities” . Other scholars such as Elinor Ostrom and David Bollier employ different philosophical and epistemological approaches to suggest management approaches grounded in cooperation and the commons. Ostrom famously posited eight principles for managing a commons, in direct response to Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her efforts. Bollier’s book “Think Like a Commoner” frames an alternative political economy, a paradigm of “working, evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship that combine the economic and the social, the collective and the personal. It is humanistic at its core but also richly political in implication, because to honor the commons can risk unpleasant encounters with the power of the Market/State duopoly” .

Bollier goes on to use words and phrases such as “bottomup, do-it-yourself styles of emancipation,” “new forms of production,” “open and accountable forms of governance,” “healthy, appealing ways to live,” and “pragmatic yet idealistic” to describe the paradigm of the commons. Inherent in both agroecology and the commons literature is the goal of returning to producers and individuals the power to self-determine systems of production and governance. Agroecological scholars increasingly engage in articulations of a vision for food system transformation, ranging from a radical overthrow of the status quo to more gradual shifts to current practices . Agroecological research is described as “transdisciplinary, participatory, and change-oriented” , and agroecology is commonly defined as a “science, practice and movement” . However, there is debate among food system scholars around how change is enacted. Some argue that agroecology is the best way to “feed the world,” and in fact, small agroecological farmers are already producing the majority of food consumed by the growing human population on a small percentage of total agricultural lands . Others argue that the land requirements of feeding a growing population through agroecological, regenerative1, and/or organic farming practices would be so large that land use change would exacerbate rather than ameliorate negative climate impacts associated with food production. These “land sparing vs. land sharing” and “feed the world debates” co-exist with debates around how to enact local food system reforms. I engage primarily with the local food system reform; my findings and contributions do not speak directly to the larger global land use and world hunger debates. Rather than arguing for radical and immediate food system revolution, the three cases presented in this dissertation illuminate opportunities for the current food system to improve along dimensions of sustainability, climate resilience, and education, presenting social and ecological benefits of local food system shifts. The cases advance an argument justifying and valorizing the existence of small farms, more easily able to provide social, ecological, and educational benefits to communities than environmentally destructive industrial farms. These benefits are not guaranteed or inevitable, however, when food systems relocalize or small farms focus on regenerative practices; they require public investment, civic engagement, and participatory action-research to sustain, safeguard, and enable their existence. 1.2.2 Local food systems are inherently complex, social-ecological systems . Food systems researchers bring to the fore “questions such as food…nourishing bodies, soils as living organisms, urban gardens as life-sustaining infrastructure… while taking issues as money, location, skin colour, gender, and social status seriously… Food issues cannot be treated as purely socio-political, neither as mere ecological or agronomic… They are co-constructions of water, people, investment flows, soil organisms, and more.

Agroecology captures this co-construction” . This excerpt nicely unites the theoretical frames of agroecology and SES,dry rack cannabis which both endeavor to explain and characterize human-nature interactions. Building a local food system requires an understanding of interdisciplinary topics and collaboration with diverse stakeholders , implicating systems of education in developing personal as well as institutional capacity for working in interdisciplinary, highly collaborative, environmentally literate teams. The chapters that follow investigate food systems research questions in the contexts of the San Juan Islands in Washington State, and the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. While all chapters engage with food systems holistically, each chapter enters into the food systems research question from a different element of the system. The second chapter focuses on the production side, introducing a case study of small-scale sustainable farming at the community scale on Lopez Island. The third chapter presents a food access and distribution research project taking place in the East Bay, investigating pathways through which urban produced foods do make it into the hands of food insecure consumers. The fourth chapter uses the lens of education to present an evaluation of a food and climate change curriculum, illustrating how climate change education and food systems research can work together to achieve common goals . The conclusion synthesizes key findings from all three chapters, pointing out what bigger picture food system questions are answered as well as questions requiring further investigation in the arena of relocalizing climate-friendly food systems. Small farms and farm-based education are ideal prototypes to investigate and disseminate work in this direction. Key strands of literature running throughout the paper include the literature on agroecology and emerging research on its application to the urban context- urban agroecology . Chapter 2 engages with the agroecological paradigm for food systems reform in a rural context, and Chapter 3 turns over new questions in the urban East Bay context. The chapter draws on scholarship from a recent RUAF magazine titled “Urban Agroecology,” that proposes UAE “not as a goal, yet an entry point into, and part of, much wider discussions of desirable presents and futures… [it is] a stepping stone to collectively think and act upon food system knowledge production, access to healthy and culturally appropriate food, decent living conditions for food producers and the cultivation of living soils and biodiversity, all at once” . Agroecology and UAE have important implications for how food systems education should be conducted , which are implicit in the pedagogical foundations underpinning the food and climate curriculum in Chapter 4.

The chapters, with their diverse research questions and publication outlets, push back against a food system that destroys human and environmental health alike, and seek out climate friendly alternatives through collaborative, participatory research projects. The research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 make the case for diverse values and benefits associated with relocalizing sustainable and equitable food systems centered around small diversified farms, in places where this type of food system transformation is sought. Rather than arguing for the complete overthrow of the current industrial food system, the primary contribution of these cases is to argue that shifts to current practices are both necessary and possible yet must be supported by appropriate and enabling governance structures. There are social, ecological, and educational benefits to adopting agroecological food system practices, but it is difficult to enact these practices holistically and systemically across food system elements in the current U.S. political economy. The cases offer lessons or “pilots” that are relevant to the operations of large-scale farms and industrial processes as well as small scale, agroecological operations: through adding plant diversity and minimizing soil disturbance, for example, numerous benefits can be achieved for farmers , for local ecology, and for global climate change. Therefore, findings implicate the policy and planning domain in terms of action needed to sustain and scale positive food system reform impacts, on a variety of levels and with attention to social justice implications. The findings also make important contributions to methods of climate change communication and education: effective CCE will manifest differently in different contexts and must allow for each audience to express the environmental concerns that are most pressing, immediate, and relevant in that context. Through considering food systems and climate systems holistically, opportunities for public health benefits, local environmental improvements, and educational growth can be realized. There is an added incentive on Lopez to adopt self sufficient and soil regenerating farming practices at the community scale due to its geographic isolation in combination with rocky, relatively poor soil quality. This “island incentive” is important to factor in when considering the widespread adoption of sustainable agriculture on Lopez; as the San Juan County Agricultural Strategic Action Plan reports, “islanders naturally place a high value on food security and may benefit from their isolation to preserve genetic diversity, for example, by establishing an organic seed industry” . As food supply chains in today’s globalized food system are increasingly threatened by natural and climate-exacerbated disasters, all communities will soon have increased incentives to invest in sustainable food production as a form of resilience, food security, and climate adaptation.

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Frequency of pesticide use is greatest during middle age

Posted on September 18, 2023 by hemp2022

Only one member of each household selected was eligible to enroll. Overall 1,038 potential participants were contacted by mail and/or telephone, after screening 817 were eligible, and 403 were enrolled and completed the interview on residential pesticides. After limiting to ages 50 and older, 359 PEG participants qualified for this analysis. Eligibility criteria for control recruitment in the CGEP study were the same as for PEG and we again relied on tax assessor’s parcel listings to randomly select residences. But for CGEP, population control subjects were recruited through home visits made by trained field staff, who determined eligibility and enrolled the controls at the door step. This was done in an effort to increase enrollment success and representativeness of the sample population compared to the general population in the three target counties. Recruitment of CGEP participants is ongoing, as of January 2011: 6891 homes were visited, 1355 individuals were found possibly eligible and 601 enrolled. At the time of analysis 314 interviews with data on home pesticide use were available for our analysis. Limiting to individuals age 50 and older, the sample used for our analysis contained 297 CGEP participants. All studies used telephone interviews to obtain data on pesticide exposure. Interviews for PEG and CGEP were conducted by trained staff at the University of California, Los Angeles. PEG interviews were conducted from November 2001 to November 2007 and CGEP interviews used for this analysis were conducted from March 2009 to December 2010. Interviews for SUPERB were conducted by trained staff at the University of California, Davis. The SUPERB study collected data in three tiers, but only data from the telephone interviews administered in the first year of Tier 1 will be used here. SUPERB Tier 1, year 1 interviews were conducted from October 2006 to May 2008. In all three studies we recorded product names, purposes of use, and frequency of indoor and outdoor pesticide use, professional pesticide applications, and applications of pet flea/tick treatments. The questionnaires used for all three studies asked comparable, if not the same questions for each of the above items of interest . Only SUPERB collected information on the area and rooms treated, the size of treated indoor and outdoor areas,drying racks and information on cleaning after and ventilation practices during and after indoor applications.

Prior to the SUPERB interview, participants were given a list with pictures of current pesticide products in order to facilitate the recall of product names and brands. Most data collected for SUPERB pertained specifically to insecticide usage in the last year. SUPERB also contained a small subset of questions pertaining to indoor and outdoor pesticide use frequency from ages 18–50, for this age period it was possible for participants to report use of any type of pesticide. PEG and SUPERB recorded self-reported information on pesticide storage and personal protection methods used during application. The emphasis of PEG and CGEP was less on recent but more on lifetime residential pesticide usage. Thus, product names, purposes of use, and frequency of use of specific pesticides were collected for four periods of the participant’s lifetime: young adult , adult , middle age , and senior . It is important to note that not all participants had reached the age of 65 at the time of interview, therefore questions regarding the 65 and older period often had a smaller sample size than the three younger age periods. PEG and CGEP participants did not receive additional materials to aid with their recall of product names and brands. We relied only on the product names recalled by participants and the purpose of using the reported pesticide. If a participant could not remember data was recorded as missing. Relying on pesticide product information and years of use reported by PEG/CGEP participants, we utilized the California Department of Pesticide Registry online database to identify the pesticide products’ active ingredients [19]. The CDPR database contains information on pesticide formulations sold in California as far back as 1945. This extensive database allowed us to identify active ingredients for pesticides that participants reported using throughout their lifetime in a time specific manner. When participants did not provide sufficient information to accurately identify the correct product, active ingredient information was treated as missing. When the product was identifiable, among active ingredients, the one with the highest concentration was considered the main active ingredient. A chemical class was then assigned to the corresponding main active ingredient of a particular product. Chemical class information was primarily identified from CDPR and the Pesticide Action Network Pesticide Database . For analysis, we assigned active ingredients to one of the following chemical classes: pyrethroids, organophosphates, nitrogen containing lactones, carbamate, halogenated, metals/inorganic compounds, organochlorine, and botanicals .

In some cases a product’s chemical composition changed over time, thus we assumed subjects were exposed to all possible active ingredients in a product during the reported years of usage. Depending on the composition of the product, some were assigned more than one main ingredient and chemical class. We used data from all three studies to evaluate pesticide use throughout a person’s lifetime. We generated frequencies and percentages to describe the prevalence of various pesticide usage and exposure related behaviors. Most variables were multinomial rather than normally distributed. We also compared pesticide use within age groups by education and race. In many instances breaking our study population into smaller subgroups for comparison purposes created small cell sizes, necessitating the use of Fisher’s exact test. Another goal was to compare pesticide use during younger and older adulthood. In order to pool data from all three studies, it was necessary to reorganize the data, defining younger adulthood and older adulthood in each study in a slightly different manner prior to pooling; i.e., as <45 vs. ≥45 for CGEP and PEG and <50 and ≥50 years of age in SUPERB. Because our data on use of pesticides during younger and older adulthood was dichotomous we employed the Phi coefficient to compare pesticide usage across age groups. Data analysis was conducted using SAS 9.2 . Overall 89% of participants from all three study populations used indoor and/or outdoor pesticides at some point during their lifetimes, 72% of participants from all three studies reported ever using pesticides outdoors and 74% ever using pesticides indoors at any point during their lifetime. Our data on ever use frequency are comparable to previous studies that investigated residential pesticide use. In an older study by Savage et al. for the EPA region IX, which contains California and other western states, 62% of all participants reported ever using pesticides in the yard, 28% reported using pesticides in the garden, and 83% of households reported ever using pesticides inside their home within 12 months of being interviewed. A more recent study conducted by Colt et al. in Los Angeles, Detroit, Iowa, and Seattle reported that 94% of subjects had ever used insecticides in or around their current or former residences during a 30 year period prior to interview. In our study we found that 18% of individuals had used indoor pesticides only during their lifetime, 16% had used outdoor pesticides only,cannabis drying and 56% had used both. We speculate that many factors may contribute to this pattern of use, such as type of dwelling and urban versus suburban or rural address.

Unfortunately our three studies did not collect any or comparable information about such factors. We also examined frequency of pesticide use by race and education in each of the four age periods, young adult , adult , middle age , and senior . We found that there was no statistically significant difference of outdoor pesticide frequency of use by race. For indoor pesticide frequency of use, the only statistically significant finding was that nonwhites, ages 16–24, appeared to use indoor pesticides more frequently than whites ages 16–24. When examining frequency of outdoor pesticide use by education the only statistically significant difference in use during lifetime was seen after age 65 , such that individuals with <12 years of education appeared to use outdoor pesticides more frequently. Individuals with <12 years of education used indoor pesticides significantly more frequently throughout most of their adult lives In PEG and CGEP, lifetime frequency of pesticide use, both indoors and outdoors, increased with increasing age .We speculate that increased use of pesticides during middle age may be a reflection of changes in lifestyle during middle age. For example, individuals in middle age may be more likely to own their homes, whereas young adults may still live with family or rent an apartment. A homeowner may be more likely to apply residential pesticides in his/her home compared to an apartment tenant who does not have or take care of yards and gardens and may rely on a landlord to eliminate pests. Relying on information from all three studies we found that 50% of participants had ever used outdoor pesticides during younger adulthood and 63% had ever used outdoor pesticides during older adulthood . More than half of all participants had ever applied pesticides indoors during both younger and older adulthood . Outdoor and indoor pesticide use during younger adulthood was positively correlated with pesticide use during older adulthood . Our findings suggest that people are likely to use pesticides throughout their lifetimes, albeit at relatively low frequency. While the overall frequency of pesticide use was low, as people age there seems to be an increase in use. Our results also show that use of pesticides at younger ages may be related to use of pesticides at older ages. However, further studies are necessary to examine whether general attitudes toward pesticide use, which may be influenced by occupation or education, influence an individual to adopt and continue residential pesticide use throughout lifetime. Additionally it appears that at certain ages, race and education may also influence frequency of pesticide use. Higher use frequencies among older adults are important since pesticides may act more strongly as neurotoxins due to the nervous system’s inability to properly handle and repair damage from toxins during this stage of life. Future risk assessment for pesticides may need to take into account a possible increased vulnerability for older adulthood exposures as well as considering the accumulation of effects from even low-level exposures over a person’s lifetime. According to reports in our PEG and CGEP studies, organophosphates, halogenated pesticides, botanicals, and organochlorines were used more often outdoors, while pyrethroids, carbamates, and aromatic, nitrogen containing lactones were the most common active ingredients in pesticides used indoors. Metal/inorganic pesticides were used both in- and outdoors in similar proportion . However it is important to acknowledge that chemical classes found in consumer use pesticides have changed over the years due to the introduction of new chemicals and regulations limiting use of certain chemicals. For example pyrethroids have only become more common in the past twenty-five to thirty years, while regulations restricted the use of many organochlorines especially for residential and indoor uses. Therefore many individuals in our sample would likely not have used pyrethroids as young adults but also would have decreased their residential use of organochlorines and organophosphates as older adults.Both indoors and outdoors, pesticides were most commonly applied as sprays when participants were asked to report method ever used or method used in the last year . Ever usage of bait and granule varies greatly between indoor and outdoor pesticides; however use of bait and granule is more similar for indoor and outdoor use if we consider their use only in the last year. Participants also reported other application methods for indoor pests, e.g., foggers, gel, and stakes, and for outdoor application, e.g., powder, candles, foam, strips, and traps . Some of the differences in methods used over lifetime versus used in the past year may be due to the fact that PEG and CGEP collected data on any type of pesticide over lifetime, while in SUPERB use in the last year focused specifically on insecticide use. Relatively few participants reported the use of foggers in all three studies. In the case of PEG and CGEP it is possible that participants may have reported foggers as sprays. In SUPERB foggers were clearly separated from sprays. Foggers are a major source of potential insecticide exposure to residential users as they release far more chemical into the environment than the other methods of application mentioned here.

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We chose these counties to serve collectively as a reasonable approximation of the statewide market

Posted on September 15, 2023 by hemp2022

By July 2018, only 49% listed prices for 1 ounce of flower and 89% listed prices for 500 milligrams of oil.The decrease in prevalence of 1-ounce packages might be associated with the introduction of regulations in January 2018 requiring that all cannabis be pre-packaged and pre-labeled, such that after January 2018, retailers might incur extra inventory risk by prepackaging cannabis in 1-ounce packages.The increase in prevalence of 500-milligram oil packages, on the other hand, might be best explained by the opening and expansion of the adult-use market.Vape pens, which are comparatively easy to use and do not require additional paraphernalia or prior experience with cannabis , may have greater appeal to “cannabis novices” than dried flower.In the interest of space, we do not list individual sample sizes for each price average in each round of data collection.During the first two weeks of October 2016, we collected prices, retailer locations and other information from each of 542 cannabis retailers on Weed maps in seven counties around California.We call this initial group of 542 retailers the “seven-county sample.” The seven counties cover a wide range of geographic and economic conditions in California.According to the U.S.Census Bureau , their basic demographics as of 2016 were in the aggregate similar to the demographics of California as a whole.The seven counties are shown in table 1.Summary statistics provided in table 1 support the notion that the demographic and economic characteristics of the sample are similar to those of California as a whole.Within the sample, the collective population is 42% Latino, 33% non-Latino white, 16% Asian and 8% black and the per capita income is about $30,600.Collectively, as of 2016, the seven counties included approximately half of the state’s population.In January 2017, March 2017 and August 2017, we collected three new rounds of prices from the seven county sample.In each of these three rounds,drying racks we collected prices from all of the retailers in the original October 2016 group that still listed price data on Weed maps or Leafly.

In order to continue tracking as many of the original 542 retailers as possible, we attempted to follow businesses that moved to new locations or that temporarily closed and then re-opened.We coded retailers by county, city and phone number.When a retailer’s listing disappeared, we searched for other listings under the same name or phone number.When we found the same retailer or a branch of the same retail chain elsewhere in the same county, we kept the retailer in the data set.If a retailer disappeared and then reappeared in a later round of data collection, we kept it in the data set.If a retailer removed its online price list, or moved its only location outside the original seven counties, we removed it from the data set for that data collection round.Between January 2017 and August 2017, we observed significant attrition from the initial group of 542 retailers in the October 2016 seven-county sample.By August 2017, 389 of the original 542 retailers remained in the data set.As shown in tables 2 and 3, average prices for these retailers changed little during this 11-month period.We call this “attrition” because the data collection method was consistent over this time period.In our 2018 rounds of data collection, we impose the additional condition that retailers must be licensed, thus changing the data collection method.Thus, for 2018 data collection rounds, the percentage of retailers dropping out of the data set from the original October 2016 sample of 542 retailers should not be thought of as “attrition.” Some retailers may have removed their online price lists from both Weed maps and Leafly but continued to operate.Attrition from the initial 542 retailers thus should not be interpreted solely as a measure of how many cannabis retailers left the legal cannabis segment.In January 2018, mandatory licensing laws went into effect, thus rendering illegal under state law any cannabis retailer without a temporary license from the Bureau of Cannabis Control.We verified licensing status by cross-referencing all Weed maps and Leafly listings in California with the publicly available lists of temporary licenses granted by the Bureau of Cannabis Control.If both a Weed maps and a Leafly listing were found, we used the Weed maps data and dropped the Leafly data.

In computing averages for our last three data collection rounds , we calculated “legally marketed” minimum and maximum price averages at California cannabis retailers that listed prices on Weed maps and that had obtained temporary licenses to sell cannabis in compliance with state regulations at the time of each data collection round.For comparative purposes, we also collected a sample of about 90 unlicensed retailers in 20 counties from Weed maps or Leafly, distributed similarly to the licensed retailers.We chose these retailers from within a set of 20 representative counties, approximately in proportion to the relative populations of those counties.We selected retailers for this “20-county unlicensed sample” arbitrarily from the first page of search results on Weed maps for retailers in each of the 20 counties, but we did not use mathematical randomization to select the counties or the listings we chose within counties.These data may not be fully representative of legal cannabis price ranges for several reasons.First, as discussed above, not all legal retailers use Weed maps or Leafly, and prices may not be representative of all prices.The price data we collected also may not fully represent the range of products in the market, which may have varied in different rounds of data collection.As is suggested by the changing prevalence of 1-ounce flower packages and 500-milligram oil cartridge packages, product assortments may have changed within each of these categories.This problem plagues price data in many different industries, but changes in product assortments and price listings may have been especially rapid in the emerging cannabis market.The differences in price ranges we report here should not be interpreted as measures of price dispersion, because we are not observing maximum and minimum prices for exactly the same products at different retailers and thus are not comparing “apples to apples,” as is traditionally required to measure price dispersion.However, concrete differences in product attributes — such as potency or grow type for minimum-priced or maximum-priced cannabis — may also vary between retailers, and may correlate with price differences , even if price differences between agricultural products do not necessarily correlate with sensory characteristics.For instance, the minimum price for one-eighth ounce of flower at a particular retailer might represent a price for outdoor-grown cannabis with a THC concentration of 15%, whereas the minimum price for one-eighth ounce of flower at another retailer might represent a price for indoor-grown cannabis with a THC concentration of 20%.

By analogy, if one were to collect minimum and maximum prices for all wine at retailers around California, the minimum-maximum range could not be used to measure price dispersion in a traditional sense; in order to measure dispersion, one would have to compare, for instance,cannabis drying the price of the same Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay at different stores.For our research, comparing prices for identical products across retailers would not have been feasible, given the Weed maps format and our data collection methods.Our approach here, in reporting cannabis price ranges, is to make no assumptions about quality and assume that minimum and maximum prices are simply prices for different types of products.It would be interesting, in future work, to explore dispersion by collecting and comparing data on standard product types across retailers.Beyond requiring product standardization, an analysis of cannabis price dispersion with respect to geographic areas would also likely require a larger data set than ours.Hollenbeck and Uetake comment that regulatory barriers to entry can facilitate the exercise of monopolistic behavior by retailers.Dispersion measures, as proxies for competition, might help illuminate regulatory impacts.As more tax and sales data are released by government agencies, it might soon become possible for researchers to collect data sets of sufficient size and precision for dispersion to be measured.Table 2 shows average minimum and maximum prices over the course of the 21-month data collection period for the three product types that we studied, along with the number of observations in each period.In the last four rounds of data collection , we generally observe only relatively slight differences in both average prices and upward or downward movements among the three retailer groups.Both statewide and within the seven-county sample, average minimum and maximum prices for one-eighth ounce of flower and for 1 ounce of flower differed by 2.5% or less, but averages differed by up to 8.8% for 500-milligram cartridges.In table 3, we report prices over the 21-month period for the non-attrited sample of the original retail store locations whose prices we collected in October 2016.These retailers may not be representative of overall state averages, particularly after the substantial attrition from the original group of retailers that we observed beginning in November 2017.However, this set of observations avoids potentially confounding factors introduced by the changing sample composition over time.Table 3 shows substantial attrition from the original seven-county sample of 542 retailers that listed prices on Weed maps in October 2016.By July 2018, 21 months after the first round of price collection, only 74 non-attrited retailers from the original sample remained active on Weed maps or Leafly.Local police crackdowns and municipal bans in some counties surely contributed to this 86% attrition rate, which should not be interpreted as representative of statewide attrition from Weed maps or evidence of the general rate of business closures.What is more interesting, perhaps, is the basic observation that only 270 licensed cannabis retailers were listed on Weed maps in all of California in July 2018, whereas in November 2017, near the end of the unregulated market, about 2,500 California cannabis businesses operated without the need for a license.

This observation suggests, at least, that many medicinal cannabis retailers that had been operating legally in 2017 had not yet obtained licenses and entered the new legal market as of mid-2018.Figures 1, 2 and 3 show average minimum and maximum prices for one-eighth ounce of flower, 1 ounce of flower and 500-milligram oil cartridges for each round of data collection, both for legally marketed cannabis and for the 20-county unlicensed sample.In the 2016 and 2017 price data, before mandatory licensing, regulation and taxation, we observe relative stability in California cannabis price ranges for all three product types.In 2018, after licensing, regulation and taxation, we observe three patterns.First, we observe falling prices for all products between February and May 2018, which may be related to retailers’ need to liquidate untested inventory that would become illegal as of July 2018.Second, we observe generally rising prices between May and July 2018, which may be related to the introduction of mandatory testing rules.However, because of the limitations and uncertain representativeness of the Weed maps sample, as well as changes to our sampling methods in different rounds, we do not have a basis for inferring a causal relationship between testing rules or other regulatory events and our minimum and maximum price averages.Third, we observe rising maximum prices for 500-milligram oil cartridges over our last four data collection rounds.At all retailers statewide that listed prices on Weed maps or Leafly, we observed a 33% increase in maximum prices from November 2017 to July 2018.Table 2 shows that the latter pattern can be observed, with some variation, in prices both in the original seven counties and in all of California.We do not know to what extent the maximum price increases for cartridges might be attributed to the introduction of new, higher-end products with differentiated sensory or functional attributes as the market has evolved; to differentiated packaging attributes; to price increases generated by increased high-end demand; to supply-side factors; or to other market effects.In general, the price patterns we observe demonstrate little evidence of seasonality, even though wholesale cannabis prices are known to vary seasonally because of the annual outdoor harvest and consequent increase in outdoor cannabis supply in the fall and winter months.We collected eight rounds of price data from the legal California retail cannabis market during a 21-month period of regulatory transition, as cannabis was being decriminalized, legalized and regulated in stages.Given the differences between the data sets we collected and the unknowns about Weed maps that we have discussed above, readers should be especially cautious in interpreting the movements we observe as “trends.”

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What are the best practices for harvesting, drying, and curing cannabis to ensure product quality and potency?

Posted on September 14, 2023 by hemp2022

Harvesting, drying, and curing are critical stages in the cannabis cultivation process that greatly impact the quality and potency of the final product. Here are best practices for each of these stages:

Harvesting:

  1. Timing: Harvest cannabis grow system at the optimal stage of maturity. Most strains are ready for harvest when the majority of trichomes have turned cloudy or amber, and the pistils (hairs) have darkened and curled.
  2. Hand Trimming: Hand-trim the buds to remove excess leaves and stems. This improves the overall appearance and smokability of the final product.
  3. Avoid Contamination: Wear clean gloves and use clean tools to prevent contamination with mold, mildew, or pests during the harvest process.
  4. Selective Harvesting: Harvest in stages, starting with the colas (top buds) and allowing lower buds more time to mature if needed.
  5. Harvest in Low-Light Conditions: Harvest in a dark or low-light environment to minimize light-induced degradation of cannabinoids.

Drying:

  1. Dark and Well-Ventilated Space: Hang the trimmed buds in a dark, well-ventilated room with controlled temperature and humidity. Aim for temperatures around 60-70°F (15-21°C) and humidity between 45-55%.
  2. Drying Racks: Use drying racks or lines to ensure proper air circulation around the buds. Avoid overcrowding, which can lead to mold and uneven drying.
  3. Humidity Monitoring: Regularly monitor humidity levels and make adjustments if necessary. A dehumidifier or humidifier may be needed to maintain optimal conditions.
  4. Slow Drying: Aim for a slow and gradual drying process, typically taking 7-14 days. This preserves terpenes and cannabinoids while preventing harshness in the final product.
  5. Bud Integrity: Handle buds gently to prevent damage and loss of trichomes during the drying process.
  6. Bud Burping: “Burp” the containers by opening them for a few minutes daily during the drying process to release excess moisture and prevent mold growth.

Curing:

  1. Sealed Containers: After drying, transfer the buds to airtight containers, like glass jars. Fill the containers about 2/3 full to allow for air circulation.
  2. Temperature and Humidity: Maintain a curing environment with temperatures around 60-70°F (15-21°C) and humidity levels between 55-65%. Use hygrometers to monitor conditions.
  3. Regular Burping: Open the containers for a few minutes daily during the first week of curing to release excess moisture and prevent mold. Gradually reduce burping frequency over time.
  4. Long-Term Curing: For the best flavor and aroma, cure cannabis for at least 2-4 weeks, though some strains benefit from longer curing periods (several months).
  5. Monitoring: Continuously monitor the buds for signs of mold or mildew. Remove any affected material promptly.
  6. Storage: Store cured cannabis in a cool, dark place,marijuana grow system away from direct light and heat. UV-resistant glass jars are ideal for long-term storage.
  7. Quality Control: Regularly sample the cured product to assess aroma, flavor, and potency, allowing you to fine-tune curing times and conditions.
  8. Packaging: Use moisture-resistant packaging for the final product to maintain quality.

Consistently following these best practices for harvesting, drying, and curing cannabis will help ensure that your product retains its quality, potency, and desirable characteristics for the best possible consumer experience.

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Can you explain the importance of lighting systems in indoor cannabis cultivation, and what are the options available?

Posted on September 13, 2023 by hemp2022

Lighting systems are a critical component of indoor cannabis cultivation, as they play a pivotal role in simulating natural sunlight,clone rack promoting plant growth, and ultimately maximizing yields and quality. The choice of lighting system has a significant impact on your cultivation operation’s success. Here’s an explanation of the importance of lighting in indoor cannabis cultivation and the options available:

Importance of Lighting in Indoor Cannabis Cultivation:

  1. Photosynthesis: Cannabis plants require light for photosynthesis, the process by which they convert light energy into chemical energy (sugars) to fuel growth. Proper lighting is crucial for healthy and vigorous plant development.
  2. Control and Consistency: Indoor growers have the advantage of controlling the light cycle, allowing for consistent and predictable growth patterns. This control is essential for flowering and vegetative phases.
  3. Yield and Quality: The type and quality of light directly impact yield and cannabinoid/terpene content. By selecting the right lighting system, you can optimize both quantity and quality.
  4. Energy Efficiency: Modern lighting systems are designed to be energy-efficient, reducing operational costs over time compared to traditional lighting methods.

Options for Lighting Systems in Indoor Cannabis Cultivation:

  1. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) Lights:
    • Metal Halide (MH) Lamps: MH lamps are used during the vegetative stage of growth because they emit a bluish spectrum of light, which is ideal for promoting vegetative growth.
    • High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) Lamps: HPS lamps are used during the flowering stage due to their reddish-orange spectrum, which encourages bud development and flowering.
    • Pros: HID lights are known for their high light output, making them suitable for larger cultivation areas. They have a long track record in the industry.
    • Cons: They consume more energy and generate more heat compared to some other options, requiring additional ventilation and cooling.
  2. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs):
    • Full-Spectrum LEDs: These fixtures provide a balanced spectrum of light that can be adjusted to cater to both vegetative and flowering stages.
    • Pros: LEDs are energy-efficient, generate less heat, and have a longer lifespan. They also allow for precise spectrum control, which can optimize plant growth and cannabinoid production.
    • Cons: Upfront costs for quality LED systems can be higher, although the energy savings over time can offset this expense.
  3. Fluorescent Lights:
    • T5 Fluorescent Lamps: These are suitable for seedlings, clones, and the early vegetative stage. They produce less heat and are energy-efficient.
    • Pros: Fluorescent lights are affordable, low in heat output, and can be placed close to plants without causing heat stress.
    • Cons: They have limited penetration and are less suitable for flowering stages or larger cultivation areas.
  4. Ceramic Metal Halide (CMH) Lights:
    • CMH lights offer a spectrum that falls between MH and HPS lamps, making them suitable for both vegetative and flowering stages.
    • Pros: CMH lights are energy-efficient,cloning tray produce a balanced spectrum, and have a longer lifespan than traditional HID lights.
    • Cons: They can be more expensive than MH or HPS setups.
  5. Induction Lights:
    • Induction lights are energy-efficient and have a long lifespan. They provide a wide spectrum suitable for both vegetative and flowering stages.
    • Pros: Low heat output, long lifespan, and energy-efficient.
    • Cons: Limited availability and higher upfront costs.

The choice of lighting system should be based on your specific goals, budget, and the size of your cultivation facility. It’s important to consider factors such as energy efficiency, spectrum control, heat management, and the overall cost of ownership. Additionally, some growers use a combination of lighting types to provide the best spectrum throughout the plant’s life cycle. Regular monitoring and adjustment of lighting conditions are also necessary to optimize plant growth and cannabinoid production.

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One agriculturalist reported receiving death threats after selling water to cannabis cultivators

Posted on September 12, 2023 by hemp2022

The November 2016 state legalization of recreational cannabis prompted Siskiyou to examine a possible licensure and taxation system for local growers . Amidst sustained, vocal opposition, the proposal stalled for several reasons that further aggravated cultural and racial tensions: A key proponent of licensure was discovered to be running an unauthorized grow, three Hmong Americans died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to heaters in substandard housing, and a cannabis cultivation enterprise run by two Hmong-Americans attempted to bribe the sheriff. These developments were interpreted not as outcomes of restrictive regulations and criminalizing strategies, but as proof that, in the words of one supervisor, regulation was impossible until the county could “get a handle on the illegal side of things.” The sheriff encouraged this interpretation, arguing in an interview that statewide legalization was “just a shield that protects illegal marijuana” and efforts to regulate it would always be subverted by criminals. This anti-regulatory logic prevailed in August 2017 when the county placed a moratorium on cannabis commerce. Still, the sheriff argued for stronger powers, citing an “overwhelming number of cannabis cultivation sites,” which, according to the Sheriff’s Office, continued to “wreak … havoc [with] potentially catastrophic impacts” across the region . Just 1 month later, at the sheriff’s urging, the Siskiyou Board of Supervisors declared a “state of emergency” aimed at garnering new resources and alliances to address the cannabis cultivation problem. Soon, the Sheriff’s Office enlisted the National Guard, Cal Fire and the California Highway Patrol in enforcement efforts, and, by 2018, numerous other agencies joined, including the Siskiyou County Animal Control Department, California Department of Toxic Substances Control, State Water Resources Control Board, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and a CDFA inspection station. These alliances multiplied the civil and criminal charges cultivators might face . Ironically, California’s cannabis legalization has enabled a kind of multi-agency neoprohibitionism at the county level,industrial shelving manufacturers one that reinforces older criminal responses with new civil-administrative strategies and authorities.

The need to “get a handle” might be regarded as a temporary emergency measure, but it may also propagate new criminalizing methods and institutional configurations. The more enforcement occurs, the bigger the problem appears, requiring more resources and leading to a logic of escalation symmetrical to the much-critiqued War on Drugs . And the more cannabis cultivators are viewed as criminal, the less likely they are to be addressed as citizens, residents and farmers.Given concerns about biased county policy and enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office held the first Hmong American and Siskiyou County Leader Town Hall in May 2018 to “foster a closer, collaborative relationship with members of the Hmong-American community,” exchange information about Hmong and Siskiyou culture and educate attendees on county policies . According to public records, racial tensions surfaced at this meeting when some white participants expressed that “our county” had been “invaded” and that Hmong-Americans were not fitting into local cultural norms . Meeting leaders — both government officials and Hmong-Americans — however, identified cultural misunderstanding, rather than criminalization and racialized claims by whites on what constitutes local culture, as the core problem to be addressed. “Misunderstanding” was an inadequate framing, given that Hmong-Americans had attempted to make themselves understood by attending public meetings, forming advocacy groups, signing petitions, demanding interpreters and administrative hearings, and registering to vote since their arrival in Siskiyou. At the 2018 town hall, and numerous prior meetings, they emphasized their status as legitimate community members — veterans, citizens, consumers of county goods, local property owners, “good” growers and medical users — not nuisances, criminals, foreigners or outsiders. In interviews and public forums many Hmong-American cultivators expressed a desire to comply with the rules. Their efforts, however, they said, were frustrated not only by linguistic and cultural differences, but also understaffed and underfunded permitting, licensing and community services agencies. 

Hmong-American cultivators routinely told us about their desires to settle down, build homes and plant other crops. “I’m growing watermelons, pumpkins and tomatoes,” one cultivator told us, but he was waiting for a permit to build his house, a process another interviewee reported took 3 years. Though the town hall meeting sought to address cultural misunderstanding, this framing overlooks how misunderstanding — of Hmong-Americans or cannabis producers generally — is produced by criminalizing enforcement practices. Properties given as gifts in the Hmong-American community were seen as evidence of criminal conspiracy, not generous family assistance; land financing networks evidenced drug trafficking organizations, not kin-based support and weak credit access; repetitive farm organization patterns suggested “organized crime” , not ethnic knowledge-sharing circuits. When Hmong-Americans, leery of engagement with government agencies and unfriendly civic venues, self-provisioned services, including firefighting teams, informal food markets and neighborhood watches, these actions were taken to confirm suspicions that they could not assimilate. Now that some Hmong-Americans are considering, or already are, moving away in response to county efforts, the sheriff’s prior description of them as temporary residents seems prophetically manufactured. These stigmatizing views of Hmong-American cultivators affect all cannabis growers. Anti-cannabis pressure creates a precarious state of impermanence — a season’s crop might be destroyed, infrastructure confiscated and investments of limited resources lost at any moment, disallowing longer-term investments. The impermanence makes noncompliance and deleterious environmental and health effects more likely, thereby perpetuating perceptions of cannabis cultivators as nuisances and dangers. As enforcement makes private land cultivation more risky, cultivators move “back up the hill,” namely onto ecologically sensitive public lands, thus substantiating characterizations of cannabis growers as criminal polluters. These stigmas even spread to county residents who do not grow cannabis themselves but if perceived to assist cannabis cultivation can face social sanctions.

Meanwhile, well-resourced cultivators have an advantage over small-scale producers. They can protect their crops from visibility and complaints by concealing them on large plots of land or inside physical infrastructures ; and for white growers there is the anonymity of not being marked as ethnically different and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Greater access to capital, land and racial privileges insulates some from visibility and criminalization, resulting in uneven development and disparities in California’s expanding cannabis industry. Additionally, jurisdictions like the Siskiyou municipalities of Mt. Shasta and Weed are welcoming regulated cannabis commerce, thus capitalizing on its expulsion from the rest of Siskiyou and benefiting entrepreneurs with social capital and network access to successfully navigate complex public regulatory systems.After a century of cannabis’s criminal exclusion in California, state voters have elected to integrate cannabis farmers into civil regulation. An important facet of evolving cannabis regulations is local determination. As one interviewee pointed out, a 1-acre farm might be permitted in rural San Joaquin County but would not make sense in downtown San Diego. Yet, when cannabis cultivation is disqualified from consideration as agriculture by localities,industrial sliding shelves as it has been in Siskiyou County, it can be substantively recriminalized and placed beyond the regulatory reach of civil institutions. Prohibitionist strategies that blur lines between civil and criminal enforcement lead to penetrating forms of visibility and vulnerability that produce inequity and disparity. The result, as this case illustrates, can be a narrow, exclusive definition of agriculture that affirms dominant notions of land use and community. The definition of cannabis cultivation as agriculture by the CDFA creates an opportunity for service providers and regulators — including agricultural institutions, public health departments and environmental agencies — to craft programs and policies that openly address the negative impacts of production. Owley advises that “if we treat cultivation of marijuana the same as we treat cultivation of other agricultural crops, we gain stricter regulation of the growing process, including limits on pesticide usage, water pollution, wetland conversion, air pollution, and local land-use laws.” Presently, however, many agencies are being enlisted in locally crafted criminalizing efforts, thus limiting their ability to work cooperatively with cultivators and address issues through customary civil abatement processes.

Though unregulated cannabis cultivation can pose threats to public health, safety and welfare, police enforcement is only one of many possible ways to address it. Siskiyou’s cannabis cultivators experience familiar agricultural challenges around access to land, water and credit. These challenges are amplified without technical assistance or institutional support. If recognized statewide as farmers, these cultivators would be better positioned to access agricultural training and support services, thus addressing ecological and social concerns around cannabis production. Additionally, new cannabis cultivators might be considered “beginning” farmers according to the CDFA, and minority farmers, including Hmong-Americans, who experience poverty at twice the national rate , would be considered “socially disadvantaged” under the California Farmer Equity Act of 2017 . Farmers with these designations would, in fact, be prioritized for technical assistance and support from farm service providers — if, that is, they were recognized as farmers. Uniformly treating cannabis cultivation as agriculture would also help enable the collection of accurate and robust data by researchers. This information base is necessary if agricultural institutions are to take an assistive and educational orientation toward cannabis farmers. Continued enforcement tactics that amplify distrust, frustration and confusion will further hinder data collection , leaving little basis to understand basic dynamics of complex, interdisciplinary systems like agriculture . In a criminalized situation, it is inevitable that information is metered and brokered by community leaders in ways that inhibit full understanding of cannabis cultivation. We suggest, for all these reasons, that a decisive break with enforcement-led, prohibitionist trajectories is needed and that agricultural institutions lead civil policy development and support farmers who cultivate cannabis. Agricultural service providers could play a leadership role in addressing the pressing needs of farmers — both those impacted by and engaging in cannabis cultivation. Yet, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension advisors, for instance, consistently report that they are currently prohibited from engaging with cannabis issues . Additionally, many county-based agricultural commissions, Siskiyou County’s included, feel that cannabis is not an agricultural enterprise and therefore do not see its cultivators as their clientele. Without leadership from agricultural institutions and agencies, the expanding cannabis cultivation industry is left to develop unevenly across the state — with wealthy private interests capitalizing in some locales while vulnerable and unregulated growers may retreat, to avoid criminalization, into ecologically sensitive areas. UC ANR and CDFA have an opportunity to fulfill their missions and facilitate, for a burgeoning farming population, greater parity in farmer rights, capacities and resource access. Young children are particularly vulnerable to adverse health effects that may result from pesticide exposures. For example, in utero and/or postnatal chronic exposures to organophosphorous pesticides have been associated with poorer neuro development in children, and altered fetal growth , and shortened gestational duration. Animal studies have also shown that neonatal exposures to other contemporary-use pesticides such as pyrethroids are associated with impaired brain development, changes in open-field behaviors, and increased oxidative stress. Pesticides have been measured in residential environments, most notably in indoor dust.Poor housing conditions in low-income homes, such as overcrowding and housing disrepair, are associated with pest infestations and increased home pesticide use in both urban and agricultural communities, potentially increasing pesticide residues indoors. Additionally, the presence of farm workers in the home and/or proximity of homes to nearby fields in agricultural communities have been associated with higher indoor pesticide concentrations. Several studies indicate that pesticide residues persist indoors due to the lack of sunlight, rain, temperature extremes, microbial action, and other factors that facilitate degradation. Semi- and non-volatile pesticides have chemical properties that increase binding affinity for particles and the tendency to adsorb onto household surfaces such as carpet or dust, also prolonging their persistence indoors. For example, pyrethroid pesticides have low vapor pressures, and high octanol/water and water/organic carbon partition coefficients which facilitate partitioning into lipids and organic matter and binding to particulate matter in dust. Because of this, several studies suggest that house dust is an important pathway of pesticide exposure for children.Young children are particularly vulnerable to inadvertent ingestion of pesticide-contaminated dust due to their frequent hand-to-mouth activity and contact with indoor surfaces. California has intense agricultural pesticide use, including OP insecticides. Due to their potential health effects in children, formulations of the OP insecticides, chlorpyrifos and diazinon, were voluntarily phased out for residential uses between 2001 and 2004.

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The HLC was performed in four randomly selected houses per month by adult male volunteers

Posted on September 8, 2023 by hemp2022

Moreover, farm workers may be more susceptible to extreme heat illness due to risk factors such as low-income, male gender, migration status, type of work at the farm, and pre-existing illness, including potentially related cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and diabetes . These negative impacts of heat on agricultural workers are significant and continue to increase due to a warming climate and growing demand for agricultural labor in fertile agricultural areas of the U.S., particularly during the harvesting months, which coincide with the most extreme conditions. Research shows that the physical work capacity of an agricultural laborer lowers as the air temperature, humidity, and sunlight increase . Thus, as more agricultural laborers are hired to compensate for lost work productivity, a greater number of vulnerable outdoor workers are negatively impacted by heat and require essential coping resources .Despite a burgeoning literature on COVID-19, more research is needed to address the burden of COVID-19 in concert with anomalous heat, labor productivity, and laborers’ health and livelihoods. We discussed potential pathways of how heat can impact COVID-19 morbidity and mortality and vice versa. We argue that this twin burden further impacts labor productivity and farm worker livelihoods in an insidious cycle, exceeding the sum of each illness independently. More research integrating the two topics is warranted. Many largely unanswered questions remain to be examined by researchers. For example, under what circumstances does COVID-19 lead to increased heat health challenges? Specifically, to what extent does mask-wearing, social distancing,vertial sliding shelves and individualized water consumption lead to COVID- 19 heat stress? To what degree may there be a connection between long-haul COVID and heat susceptibility and associated consequences in labor productivity? What other factors may impact heat health challenges?

More research is needed also to address the impacts of heat stress on COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. For example, to what extent does heat stress induced immunodeficiency facilitate COVID-19 infection? To what extent is heat stress likely to reduce mask wearing and therefore increase COVID-19 infection rates? To what degree does extreme heat lead to increased use of air-conditioning, subsequent concentration of aerosols in an enclosed space and ultimately, to potentially increased COVID-19 prevalence? What other heat-related health factors might exacerbate COVID-19 morbidity and mortality? The dearth of data on these topics calls for new empirical field research combining surveys and interviews with climatological data. Beyond the knowledge gap and opportunity for researchers on the topic, direct policy implications result from this dual burden. The similarity of socio-economic and labor impacts of COVID-19 and heat stress, allows policymakers to design and implement policies for both with a broader impact on farm workers’ well being. For example, unemployment benefits, if implemented for farm workers, can have a broader positive impact on the target population as they recover from either or both health conditions. Consideration of the expansion of worksite policies such as expanding paid sick leave for impacted workers could also be useful. Lessons learned from implementing policies related to heat stress may provide guidance for policies related to COVID-19. Therefore, public health policies and workplace, acclimatization protocols can be informed in ways that ameliorate suffering from both COVID-19 and cognate infectious diseases as well as heat stress. These strategies must be place-based to assess and lessen both burdens as they intersect with outdoor labor conditions, farm worker related health needs, and cultural aspects of policy implementation and farm worker outreach. Intervention points or policy levers can be leveraged suitably. For example, the timing of worksite vaccination campaigns can be planned to coincide with workplace heat prevention acclimatization protocols, raising awareness among workers and employers about the dangers of both stressors.

Understanding the intersection of COVID-19 and climate change via heat stress results in an opportunity for policy makers to design and implement policies that may have greater impact when addressing the health and socio-economic impacts of both occurrences.Malaria remains one of the most serious vector-borne diseases, affecting hundreds of millions of people mainly in the sub-Saharan Africa including Ethiopia. Yet unprecedented success has been achieved over the past two decades in reducing the disease burden, averting an estimated 663 million malaria cases in Africa between 2001 and 2015 . Vector control is one of the key elements in achieving the remarkable reduction in malaria, with long-lasting insecticidal nets and indoor residual spraying estimated to have averted 68% and 10% of the cases, respectively . Similarly, morbidity and mortality due to malaria has remarkably declined in Ethiopia over the past decade as a result of large-scale distribution of LLINs and high coverage of IRS, together with nationwide implementation of artemisin in-based combination therapy . Based these gains, the country has set goals to eliminate malaria by 2030 and the elimination program is being implemented in 239 selected low malaria transmission districts encompassing six different regions . More than 11 million LLINs have been distributed through mass campaigns in 2018 alone to further reduce malaria cases and accelerate the progress towards elimination . However, malaria transmission continues to occur and still remains a significant public health problem in Ethiopia despite the progress made in scaling up of the control measures . This transmission could be attributed to several factors including the spread of insecticide resistance and preference of malaria vectors to bite outdoors and in the early evening when people are indoors but unprotected by existing tools . The current indoor-based malaria vector control interventions such as LLINs offer protection from anthropophagic and endophagic vectors, but have little impact on vector species predominantly feeding on animals and humans outdoors . In Ethiopia, the primary vector of malaria is An. arabiensis.

This vector species has a peculiar feature in that it can readily feed on humans to sustain intense malaria transmission , but often enough on animals to evade the effect of LLINs and IRS, and to maintain residual malaria transmission . Such dual feeding preference of An. arabiensis could pose another challenge to malaria control and elimination efforts as malaria transmission may continue even with a high coverage of the current vector control interventions . Moreover,vertical farming supplies the feeding behavior of An. arabiensis could vary in different eco-epidemiological settings depending on several factors including host availability and the genetic structure of the vector itself . In addition to the vector behavior, human habits and sleeping patterns could also be vital determinants of malaria transmission since exposure to malaria vector bites occurs when unprotected people and vector biting activities overlap in time and space . Addressing the challenge of residual malaria transmission on malaria elimination efforts requires better understanding of both the local vector and human behavior. Moreover, quantifying the magnitude of human exposure to infectious mosquito bites which occurs indoors and outdoors is crucial to evaluate the likely success of the current vector control measures . However, most vector surveillance activities in Ethiopia focused mainly on vector behavior with less or no attention to human behavior that also contributes to residual malaria transmission. The aim of this study was to assess vector behavior, patterns of human exposure to mosquito bites and residual malaria transmission in southwestern Ethiopia. The study was carried out in Bulbul kebele , which is located in Kersa district, Jimma Zone 320 km southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa . The inhabitants mostly rely on subsistence farming, with maize and teff being the main cultivated crops in the area. Most houses are mud-walled with roofs made of corrugated iron sheets. Malaria transmission is seasonal in Bulbul area. The transmission peaks from September to October, following the major rains from June to September. Minor transmission occurs in April and May, following the short rains of February to March. Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax are the two predominant malaria parasite species co-occurring in the area and are transmitted mainly by An. arabiensis .Adult mosquito collections were carried out monthly from January to December 2018. Host-seeking mosquitoes were collected both indoors and outdoors using human landing catches , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention miniature light traps and human-baited double net traps . Indoor resting mosquitoes were collected using pyrethrum spray catches .For each house, two collectors seated on stools with their legs exposed from foot to knee to capture mosquitoes as soon as they land on the exposed legs before they commence blood-feeding using a flashlight and mouth aspirator .

There were two collection shifts: one team worked from 18:00 to 24:00 hr during each collection night, followed by the second team from 24:00 to 06:00 hr. Each hour’s collection was kept separately in labeled paper cups. A supervisor was assigned to coordinate the collection activities and watch volunteers not to fall asleep during the collection nights. All collectors were provided with anti-malarial prophylaxis to avoid a risk of contracting malaria during the collection period. Mosquitoes were identified to species the next morning. The CDC light traps were set indoors beside human-occupied bed nets in other four randomly selected houses monthly and paired with outdoor HDNT. Details of the HDNT are described elsewhere . Both traps were set from 18:00 to 6:00 hr during each collection night. The PSC was conducted monthly in twenty randomly selected houses from 06:00 to 09:00 hr following standard protocol . All collected mosquitoes were identified morphologically to species or species complexes using a dichotomous key described by Gillies and De Meillon . Female Anopheles mosquitoes were further classified as unfed, freshly fed, half-gravid and gravid. Each mosquito was kept individually in a labeled 1.5 ml Eppendorf tube containing silica gel desiccant. Samples were stored at −20°C freezer at Jimma University Tropical and Infectious Diseases Research Center Laboratory until used for further processing.This study indicated that An. pharoensis was the most abundant anopheline species in the study area followed by An. arabiensis and An. coustani. Previous studies reported that An. arabiensis was the predominant species in different malaria endemic settings of southwestern Ethiopia . The higher abundance of An. pharoensis over An. arabiensis in this study could be attributed to difference in mosquito breeding habitats. The present study area is located in the Omo-Gibe River Basin with abundant aquatic vegetations that might have favoured An. pharoensis. Anopheles pharoensis prefers to breed in vegetated swamps unlike An. arabiensis which typically breeds in small, sunlit temporary water pools . Anopheles arabiensis exhibited exophagic behavior, seeking hosts mostly outdoors rather than indoors. Similar findings were also reported from different parts of Ethiopia . Anopheles arabiensis was shown to be preponderantly exophagic even before the scale up of indoor based vector control interventions in Ethiopia , suggesting that the exophagic behavior of this species might be genetically determined . Moreover, the long-term use of the current vector control interventions might have further enhanced the proportion of outdoor biting fraction of An. arabiensis as observed elsewhere in Africa. For instance in western Kenya, An. arabiensis was more likely to bite outdoors when compared with data collected before the scale-up of LLINs . Likewise, An. pharoensis showed exophagic behavior in the study area. Similar findings were also reported for this species from different parts of Ethiopia . In the absence of personal protection by LLINs, human exposure to An. arabiensis bites occurred mostly indoors despite the outdoor host-seeking preference of this species. This is due to coincidence of humans and the peak biting activities of An. arabiensis since most people spend their time indoors when this species is mostly active . A similar phenomenon was documented for other malaria vector species in Africa . For instance, An. funestus and An. quadriannulatus did not show preference to bite indoors in Zambia, yet a substantial proportion of human contact with both species was shown to occur indoors in the absence of LLIN use in the country . This highlights the need to consider human behavior to determine the actual magnitude of human exposure to mosquito bites which may occur indoors and/or outdoors. For LLIN non-users, 56% of human exposure to An. arabiensis bites occurred at times when using LLINs is feasible, indicating that the maximum possible personal protection that could be provided by LLIN is 56%.

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CFT was one of the lead growers’ groups in developing a relationship with health advocates

Posted on September 7, 2023 by hemp2022

Tobacco manufacturers preferred to maintain the quota and price support systems, because the system gave them considerable flexibility and control over the market with the fall back of the price support system for growers. Manufacturers argued that the cost of eliminating the program and compensating quota holders would have exceeded the amount gained for manufacturers by lower prices achieved without a price support system. The disparate positions of growers and manufacturers over the regulation of the tobacco market was the root of a series of conflicts between 1997 and 2004 which distanced tobacco companies from their traditional grower allies.At the same time, health groups nationwide began to push for the inclusion of tobacco within the regulatory purview of the federal Food and Drug Administration . Health groups, particularly the Washington DC-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the voluntary health organizations leveraged the distance between tobacco growers and tobacco manufacturers over a quota buyout to garner growers’ support for FDA regulation of tobacco products in exchange for support of a quota buyout. Building tobacco control alliances with growers increased the impression among tobacco growers that their interests were divergent from those of manufacturers. Public health groups had already begun a partnership with tobacco growers at the urging of President Bill Clinton to find ways to limit smoking while protecting tobacco producing communities, resulting in the March 1998 Core Principles document signed by prominent grower and public health organizations.The first serious consideration of a tobacco quota buyout took place within the context of the 1997 proposed “global tobacco settlement” of multi-state lawsuits against the tobacco companies seeking compensation for Medicaid expenditures of tobacco-related illnesses. This “global tobacco settlement” took the form of the U.S. Senate’s consideration of the controversial “McCain bill,” commercial racking system which was eventually defeated, setting the foundation for the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998.

The McCain bill would have included both FDA regulation of tobacco and a quota buyout plan as well as de facto immunity from future lawsuits for the manufacturers. Tobacco companies secured the support of many tobacco growing organizations to join them in opposing the McCain bill and its quota buyout provisions by promising a $28 billion payout to growers under a separate settlement.The McCain bill failed to pass and was replaced by the private Master Settlement Agreement , which included a separate settlement between manufacturers and tobacco growers to compensate growers for potential loss of revenue associated with the MSA’s provisions, known as Phase II. However, under the MSA’s Phase II payments to tobacco growers, the growers were to receive only $5.2 billion, not the promised $28 billion. This failure by tobacco manufacturers to stand by their agreement with growers led to the first major break of the manufacturer-grower organization alliance. In early 2000, tobacco farmers filed a classaction lawsuit against cigarette manufacturers, DeLoach vs. Philip Morris, alleging that the tobacco companies misled farmers when they encouraged them to oppose the removal of the quota system and accused manufacturers of rigging the federal price support system to keep prices low. This suit was settled by Philip Morris and other major tobacco companies in 2003 and by RJR in 2004, after 175,000 tobacco farmers had joined the suit, providing approximately $254 million to those growers .In March 2000, Philip Morris exacerbated existing tensions with growers by announcing that it had developed a direct contract system for purchasing burley tobacco, under which they would arrange to buy a set amount of tobacco from a specific grower at a set price, circumventing the Tobacco Price Support System by setting the price and purchasing the tobacco prior to the tobacco reaching federally-controlled auctions. The direct contract system provided little protection and high risks for farmers compared with the federal tobacco program, and the expansion of this program would undermine the quota and price support system further by manipulating both supply and demand outside the system.

Philip Morris began executing this system in 2000 over opposition by most growers and grower organizations. Despite the decreasing importance of domestic tobacco farming to the tobacco industry, tobacco growers represented an important source of legitimacy for the tobacco manufacturers’ political goals. Therefore, despite the increasing divergence between the two groups, maintaining a seemingly close relationship was beneficial to the tobacco companies because, as one Philip Morris representative put it in 1990, “local growers have more credibility in legislatures than do hired guns.”The importance of the relationship also extended outside of merely legitimizing their lobbying efforts, resonating in the public sphere as an important public relations tool. Thus it was in the tobacco industry’s best interest to maintain an appearance of commonality with tobacco growers, despite the underlying tensions over quotas. Nationwide and in Virginia, the net effect on farmers was that many immediately stopped producing tobacco. Moreover, the remaining production was consolidated on fewer but larger farms. Finally, some Virginia production of flue-cured tobacco, free from the geographical constraints of the quota system, moved to regions with lower production costs such as North Carolina.Tobacco control advocates capitalized on the growing animosity between growers and tobacco companies over the quota buyout and concerns among tobacco growers about declining demand for U.S.-grown tobacco.One outcome of this growing rift between farmers and the tobacco industry was the creation of the Southern Tobacco Communities Project , an attempt by tobacco control advocates to discover areas of common interest. An implied goal of the health groups in the STCP discussions was to alter the historical hostility of tobacco farmers towards tobacco control issues. The predecessor of the STCP was the Virginia Tobacco Communities project, a 16-month project from 1994 to 1996 initiated by health advocates, including the Institute for Quality Health, American Cancer Society and Virginia Department of Health with a similar purpose, seeking common ground with tobacco farmers and farming communities.The University of Virginia’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation provided independent facilitation between these health groups and the tobacco growing community representatives that they reached out to. VTC leveraged the mission of the Virginia House Joint Subcommittee Studying Alternative Strategies for Assisting Tobacco Farmers, which had been established prior to the formation of VTC, as a vehicle to reach out to tobacco farmers. VTC members attended Subcommittee sessions and used the time to build informal contacts in the farming community, and VTC’s participation in the Subcommittee lent the project credibility among farmers.VTC’s primary strategy was to create an ongoing dialogue between diverse interests through roundtable meetings, intended to react to and analyze the chances in tobacco communities.A total of five round table meetings were held and resulted in an exchange of knowledge between advocates and tobacco growers. Ultimately, VTC presented four main legislative recommendations to the Virginia House Joint Subcommittee Studying Alternative Strategies for Assisting Tobacco Farmers: 1) improvements in production and marketing of tobacco; 2) improving access to information about profitable supplemental on-farm enterprises; 3) improving access to financing for small business development; 4) increasing access to education for employment in specific non-tobacco growing work sectors.Additional lessons and findings from the VTC appear in Table 52. The VTC project led to the creation of the Southern Tobacco Communities Project in 1997 funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and,indoor farming equipment like VTC, was managed by the Institute for Quality Health, a division of the University of Virginia’s Department of Health Services.

The program was facilitated by the Institute for Environmental Negotiation, a part of the University of Virginia whose mission was to promote conflict resolution and consensus building, building on the work that had previously been done by the VTC.STCP brought together regional leaders from public health and tobacco interests with the goal of promoting health in rural southern communities.The STCP collaborative project eventually led in 1998 to release of the “Core Principles Statement,” a memorandum of understanding that outlined areas of agreement between the farmers and health advocacy groups. Health advocates would push for the continuation of the tobacco quota system and for funds to be secured for tobacco community diversification. Farming interests agreed to support tobacco control goals supported by federal taxes, FDA regulation of tobacco products, and marketing programs aimed at reducing youth smoking rates.After the Master Settlement Agreement was announced, Southern farmers and grower organizations began a dialogue with health advocates under the auspices of STCP concerning how to best utilize the incoming MSA funds for their respective interests that was initiated by STCP. An agreement was reached to introduce a bill, HB 2635, that embodied the understanding of the parties: 50% of the incoming MSA funds would be directed towards tobacco-dependent communities, to be administered by the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission and Fund ; 10% of the funds would be used for youth-prevention oriented tobacco control work, eventually conducted by the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation after its formation in 1999 ; the remaining 40% of the funds were not earmarked and their distribution was to be left to the Virginia legislature. STCP considered the negotiations surrounding the use of MSA funds as a major success that balanced the needs of tobacco farming communities and public health advocates.However, this position ignores the fact that no MSA funds were directed towards general tobacco control advocacy, because the establishment of the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation used all the MSA funds earmarked for tobacco control for youth-targeted efforts. Therefore, the use of the MSA funds as negotiated by STCP was not as effective in promoting public health goals as it might have been had MSA funds been utilized to fund tobacco control efforts for all Virginians. The meetings that led up to this agreement included many of the representative groups from STCP. The tobacco farmers were represented at the meetings by the Farm Bureau, the FlueCured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corporation, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative, the Tobacco Growers’ Association, and the National Black Farmers Association.Some traditional tobacco industry allies, like the Farm Bureau described their new relationship with their former foe as a strange result of circumstance. One Farm Bureau member observed to the press at the announcement of the formation of STCP, “You’ve seen how dogs and cats are sometimes found to depend on each other. There’s a little bit of that going on here.” However, Al Glass, a Farm Bureau director, noted at the same time some of the advantages of the meetings, saying that health advocates have “learned a lot about tobacco farming. They always saw Joe Camel and the Marlboro man – they never saw an economic community scattered through ten states.”A leader among the farmers was Clarence D. Bryant III of Virginia, the founder of the Concerned Friends of Tobacco , a group that has organized in 1993 to combat a federal cigarette taxation proposal by President Bill Clinton to fund his health care reform package.Bryant served as one of the farmers’ representatives and was a farmer himself. Bryant characterized the growers’ interest in working with STCP as a way to secure funds for farmers, to serve as “insurance to protect us, because everything was being created [by the MSA] between the industry and the states and we were caught in the middle.”One reason for farmers’ interest in STCP according to Andrew Shepherd, a representative of the Virginia Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corporation, was the increasing importation of foreign tobacco, which lead to a decline in domestic purchasing and hit farmers in the pocketbooks.Bill Novelli, President of the Washington, DC-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids , noted that both growers and health advocates had realized their notions about tobacco farming had evolved from thinking of the growers as being in lockstep with the manufacturers “regardless of the consequences” to realizing the inherent friction in the relationship. Additionally, Novelli said that “the public health community has come to better understand that tobacco producers, their families, and the people in their communities have a very different set of values than do the tobacco companies.”Shepherd noted that “meetings between [health advocates and growers], away from the rhetoric of politicians … led to the realization that many of us on both sides had similar concerns.”JT Davis, a member of the Concerned Friends for Tobacco organization, also felt upbeat about the meetings, stating, “This is truly a unique win-win situation. Direct, face-to-face discussion invariably results in new, more accurate understandings.”

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