Hemp Growing

Florida himself acknowledged that creative cities tend to have higher levels of inequality as the economy is increasingly bifurcated into a creative class and a service class . People in creative cities who do not belong to the creative class cannot fully enjoy the benefits of its use-value-rich amenities. The increasing exchange value in hip neighborhoods—or, in cities such as Seattle, all neighborhoods—contributes to higher rents and displacement of lower income and marginalized people . Furthermore, while creative cities make a show of celebrating racial and ethnic diversity, the reality is often a superficial multiculturalism lacking substantial engagement with institutional racism and the inequalities it produces . In creative cities, the downsides of increasing exchange value are borne even more heavily by marginalized people. This diminished use value is just easier for a creative city’s more affluent residents to ignore than the traditional downsides of growth such as noise, traffic and air pollution—pervasive downsides that P-Patches help ameliorate for Seattleites. For the last 30 years, the political economy of Seattle has enabled continued investment that has helped solidify the status of the city’s community gardens, but nothing about this political economy ensures that the gardens are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents—or even that they remain accessible to these communities at all. The city’s gardens do produce a lot of food, 2×4 flood tray with some of it directly feeding low-income gardeners in the P-Patch program and other gardens such as the Danny Woo International District Community Garden, which serves primarily Asian-American residents of nearby affordable housing.

As described in chapter 3, the City ensured that as its P-Patch program expanded, new gardens accessible to low-income residents were prioritized, and P-Patch gardeners also grow tons of fresh produce for the city’s food banks. Food bank donation is a longstanding tradition in the P-Patches, but it is not a requirement for participants and is contingent upon the available time and generosity of current gardeners. In good years, the total amount of produce donated by P-Patch gardeners exceeds 40,000 pounds; however, as Seattle has become increasingly unaffordable, the number of people relying on food banks has also increased. Even before the pandemic, food banks were distributing more than 22,885,000 pounds of food a year . From 2007 to 2011, average monthly visits to food banks in Seattle doubled from 61,401 to 122,197 . The rate of food insecurity in Seattle grew from 7% in 2007 to 13% in 2019 . The fresh, organic produce that flows from P-Patches to low-income gardeners and other food-insecure Seattleites is not insignificant, but the rate of growth in food bank donations is not keeping up with the rate of growth in rents and attendant growth in food insecurity. Food provision is one of the key benefits that urban gardens can offer low-income residents, but others matter as well. Low-income neighborhoods tend to suffer from more blight, higher crime rates, and lower neighborhood social cohesion, and gardens have been extolled for their potential to improve low-income neighborhoods along these dimensions. However, if the neighborhoods become unaffordable for low-income people, then those residents have to move, and the neighborhoods’ improvements are moot for them. In Seattle, over the last two decades since garden advocates won preservation victories and significant resources to expand the P-Patch program, real estate values have also increased dramatically citywide .

Staggering increases in median home values—up 93% from 2012 to 2018—have priced many people out of formerly affordable neighborhoods or out of the city entirely . As one outcome of this extreme housing market, the Laotian gardeners who helped build Bradner Gardens Park in the 1990s can no longer afford to live in the surrounding neighborhood. Overall, the program has evolved toward benefitting low-income residents because of its public mission and some of its partnerships, and P-Patch gardeners have long celebrated their racial and ethnic diversity although it does not seem that a lot of effort was put into cultivating leadership from minority communities. The social movement mobilized to prevent program cuts in the early 1990s and preserve threatened P-Patches thereafter was led by gardeners who were active in the P-Patch nonprofit. Unlike the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, this organization was seen as a legitimate representative of gardeners’ interests, but the movement the organization built was not framed around or led by gardeners of color, immigrants, or low-income people. This movement has been extremely effective at preserving community gardens and ensuring that public resources continue to support these spaces; today, P-Patch advocates quickly organize to protect any sites that become threatened . The P-Patch nonprofit has many of the features known to contribute to social movement success: skilled and experienced leadership, an engaged constituency, legitimacy in the eyes of decision-makers and the public, and sophisticated framing that resonates with their target audiences. However, this movement has been organized narrowly around preserving the P-Patches—resisting one of the symptoms of unrestrained urban growth, rather than challenging the logic of growth overall or any of its other ill effects.

As Seattle real estate values continue to balloon, displacement continues apace, and the framing for preserving P-Patches does not address the detrimental impacts of growth on poor gardeners, residents of color, or others vulnerable to the ongoing displacement.Evidence from the three case-cities indicates that a local government’s ability to support urban agriculture is tied to its economic and fiscal situation. Of course, the status of the locality within the ongoing global competition to attract growth matters for the amount of resources available to invest in urban gardens. Since cities are continuously engaged in this competition, their status is always subject to change, and potential change in the city’s economic fortunes remains a top concern of elected officials and growth elites regardless of the city’s current success or failure in attracting urban growth. The history of all three cities shows that framing urban agriculture as a valuable tool to improve or insure a city’s economic standing has been an effective strategy for winning favorable policy and public investment. The appeal to growth interests has taken on different forms in the different economic and political contexts of each city, and in all three cases these economic rationales have consequences for the city’s gardens and/or for its marginalized residents. In Seattle, as the city was beginning to experience urban growth due to its strong technology sector, P-Patch advocates refined their efforts to legitimize community gardens by framing them as a neighborhood amenity that ameliorates some ill effects of urban growth, building a case to value gardened land alongside housing and commercial development and furthering the commodification of nature as a selling point for the city’s livability. This refined framing presents urban agriculture as a palliative for the alienation from nature and fellow humans that often occurs with urbanization . However, it does not address other social impacts of rising property values—particularly the affordability crisis that displaces the city’s low-income residents. In Philadelphia, where economic downturn and disinvestment left 40,000 lots across the city vacant, PHS and other growth coalition members successfully argued that this land was a liability for the city, and that repurposing it for greening would help revitalize blighted neighborhoods and attract new capital investment. They were right; Philadelphia has turned its fortunes around and is now experiencing renewed urban growth, flood and drain table including rapidly increasing land values and gentrification in some of the city’s neighborhoods. With the floodgates opening to capital flows, gardens are getting swept away. Now, Soil Generation and its allies are trying to push back on the commodification of nature as a symbol of investment readiness that can flip vacant land from liability to asset, shifting the focus to the community members who have stewarded these spaces and arguing that they deserve to retain them—an outcome that would necessitate both the gardens and the gardeners being able to stay in place. In order for this to occur, the city’s Land Bank must implement its directives in a way that prioritizes community land uses in gentrifying neighborhoods, an uphill battle given the immense amounts of capital held by growth entrepreneurs vying for ownership of these spaces. Soil Generation’s ongoing organizing and framing around community control works to put power behind this struggle, and they have accomplished some early victories in framing the Land Bank’s mandate and revising the disposition process; however, it remains to be seen what the movement will ultimately achieve in terms of garden preservation and affordable housing. In Milwaukee, the city is still struggling to win greater capital investment and urban growth, and land is seen as a lifeline for this effort. Urban nature in the form of gardens and farms has been commodified as a tool for training and employing residents, a potential pathway to economic development that can ameliorate some of the worst impacts of capital flight that the city has experienced. Despite its poor fiscal situation, the cash-strapped city government still shows willingness to devote some resources and recruit public and private partners to invest in urban agricultural spaces. However, like PHS’s framing in Philadelphia, Milwaukee’s commodification of urban nature as training ground and space of economic production leaves open the ongoing possibility of replacing gardens and farms with any more profitable use that might come along.

The preceding chapters have revealed how the main community garden programs and proponents in each city highlighted some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits over others, influencing the priorities for how community gardens were developed and managed over time. In addition to assessing what benefits community gardens are providing to surrounding neighborhoods, we can better understand their impact on a city by investigating where community gardens are located, and thus to which neighborhoods their benefits are accruing. As noted throughout this study, many of the benefits for which community gardens are celebrated are particularly important for low-income communities and marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The free or low-cost fresh produce these spaces can yield will matter most for food-insecure households, often associated with high-poverty neighborhoods and those with a higher proportion of Black and/or Latino residents . Urban blight, crime, and inadequate green space are also more common in neighborhoods with these characteristics, so the value of community gardens as safe, attractive, and healthy green space is also especially salient in such areas . Community gardens can support important cultural practices as well, since ways of growing food and medicine are meaningful traditions for virtually every culture. In this regard, the ability for immigrants to access community gardens is another key consideration for understanding whether urban agriculture’s touted benefits are available to those who need them most.As with any alternative food initiative, there is no guarantee that the benefits of urban agriculture will accrue to those who are most in need. Assessing the socio-demographic dynamics of urban agriculture development in New York City, Reynolds notes that while low-income communities, immigrants and people of color often bring significant knowledge, energy and enthusiasm to the development and maintenance of gardens, these groups tend to have less access to the resources, networks and cultural capital required to build and defend community gardens in the urban landscape. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, in order to attract resources and legal status for their gardens, community garden programs must legitimize themselves according to some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits at the expense of others. In all three cities, urban agriculture advocates have made claims about the role of gardens in helping people in need, but they have also emphasized arguments about the economic benefits of community gardens. Economic benefits like neighborhood development and elevated property values can be in tension with serving the needs of the marginalized, whose interests are often left behind in the flow of capital through cities . On the one hand, community gardens may be easier to establish where vacant land is more abundant, that is, in neighborhoods with depressed property values—often those with higher proportions of people in poverty, immigrants, and/or residents of color. On the other hand, marginalized communities may have a harder time marshalling the resources needed to defend community gardens from rising property values and increased neighborhood development, if and when these potential economic benefits of urban agriculture materialize. This tension is ubiquitous in urban agriculture . However, researchers have to date paid little attention to the role that citywide community gardening organizations can play in mitigating neighborhood inequalities by amassing and equitably distributing the resources needed to build, maintain, and defend urban agricultural spaces.

The argument that the city could not be trusted helped to whip up opposition to the proposed move, and it also resonated with one council member who reportedly didn’t care about PPatches but was moved by the argument about fairness. Ultimately, Council members did approve a plan to move the garden, but only on the condition that gardeners were given a better replacement site and logistical and material support for the move. These concessions made a big difference for the future direction of the Interbay P-Patch, which is a thriving community garden and destination for neighborhood residents today. In both of these cases, Seattle’s garden advocates were able to strike a nerve for the general public by framing the city’s plans as a betrayal of the self-government expectations they held, and by arguing that these moves needed to be resisted in order to hold the government accountable to its citizens. Ultimately, in both cases, council members originally opposed to the gardeners’ requests ended up voting in their favor. The garden advocates’ leveraging of Seattle’s civic conventions is evident in analysis of documents and interviews from the three cities, which shows that the code for fairness or justice was more than twice as common in Seattle as in Philadelphia and more than three times as common as in Milwaukee. The bulk of these codes applied to documents in the period of October 1995 to September 1996, when the Bradner and Interbay resistance efforts were broadening from insider strategies into outsider strategies involving criticism of the city and mobilization of both gardeners and the public. These examples demonstrate how social movement mobilization was effective in Seattle and accomplished long-term preservation for many of the city’s gardens. However, seedling starter trays the movement mobilized in the mid-1990s was framed around a symptom—development threats to specific gardens—and not around the underlying economic dynamics driving garden displacement.

While all of the gardens on public land are effectively permanent thanks to movement organizers’ victory in passing Initiative 42, gentrification has continued apace in Seattle; among the many low-income residents who have been displaced due to rising housing costs are gardeners who can no longer afford to live near the sites they helped to build, including Bradner Gardens Park. In this way, the local garden preservation movement in Seattle draws a clear contrast with that in Philadelphia, where garden loss is framed in connection to the broader context of structural racism, neighborhood disinvestment, and growth machine logic that threatens vulnerable people as well as vulnerable spaces.A city’s civic conventions form an important piece of the organizational environment in which community gardening programs develop and define themselves. Yet what is possible for urban agriculture in any given city is also contingent upon its political-economic context. As urban political ecologists would describe it, ideas about appropriate uses for urban space combine with material flows and conditions, as well as ideas governing the legitimacy of governments themselves, in order to determine the actual production of urban socio-nature . In this regard, the distribution and character of urban agriculture in any city is influenced by local economic pressures, the sources and extent of public resources, and political factors at larger scales such as the laws and activities of state and federal governments. These elements of urban political economy can be seen as the municipal government’s own organizational environment, which the government and its representatives must attend to in order to maintain their legitimacy, resource flows, and survival.

Whether in pursuit of land tenure for community gardens or other public investments in quality of life, residents and community organizations inevitably bump up against large-scale structural constraints—no matter how much access and influence they have with local decision-makers—as they try to change local policy to meet their goals. In recent decades, American governments at all levels from local to national have been affected by the spread of neoliberal ideology, encouraging a turn toward privatization and new forms of commodification, reduction in taxes and public services, and government intervention to support market processes through deregulation and “entrepreneurial” initiatives . Local governments differ on many fronts, as reflected in the civic conventions they pay homage to, but in the US context they have all been forced into a fiscal squeeze by the reduction of federal funding, and they have confronted this challenge with the shared goal of increasing property values, the local population, and with them the overall prosperity of their local economy . All three case-cities are participants in a globalizing competition to attract capital and “win” at urban growth, and although they vary in their recent histories of “winning” and “losing” the competition for growth, all three cities show how urban growth machine logic and the political-economic pressures on municipalities influence the ways in which urban agriculture has been legitimized as a long-term land use. One common thread is the commodification of nature that runs concurrently with the commodification of land. In each of the case-cities, urban agriculture advocates have taken a different approach to building an economic argument that bolsters the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use. The commonality—bolstering urban agriculture’s legitimacy with an economic rationale—reflects how pervasively market logic is applied to land use in American cities, while the differences between the cases demonstrate variations in how land is commodified based on the local growth coalition’s status in the competition for capital.

By drawing attention to the ways that commodification of nature contributes to the production of uneven urban environments, urban political ecology enhances understanding of growth machine dynamics and their impact on the use value available to residents.In a similar vein, urban political ecologists employ the metaphor of urban metabolism to show how the constant reconfiguration of socio-natural space opens up opportunities for transforming relations of power. Addressing the tension between earlier Marxist and more recent actor-network theory approaches within the field of urban political ecology, Heynen highlights the “egalitarian potential that is embedded within a robust conceptualization of urban metabolism” . According to political ecologists, the tendency of nature to reproduce itself freely runs counter to the private property foundations of capitalism, and urban agriculture holds radical potential as an opportunity for people to produce and consume outside of the market, nourishing non-capitalist material flows . However, because the land on which urban agriculture occurs is commodified, I argue that this radical potential is limited in important ways. Urban growers and the spaces they cultivate do contribute to the creative dynamism of socio-natural circulation: they work to reshape the ecology of cities, sustain bodies left undernourished by the capitalist food system, and promote a wider reimagining of urban relations; however, these material and discursive metabolic flows are still subject to the gravity of capitalist property relations and the mutually reinforcing interests of urban growth coalition members. Asserting the ongoing relevance of Marxist readings of urban political ecology, I show in this chapter how urban political economy serves as an inescapable force influencing land use policy and the decision-making of elected officials. As noted above, in all three cities I investigated, community garden organizations ultimately succeeded in legitimizing urban agriculture as a land use by building narratives that emphasize the potential economic benefits of growing food on vacant lots, a commonality which demonstrates just how strong urban growth and market logics are as governing principles in US cities. Yet there is more to learn from comparing the commodification of nature across the three cases. The economic rationales for urban agriculture developed along distinct trajectories that illustrate how variations in organizational legitimation strategies, local economic conditions, and state-level political contexts combine in the construction of different discursive frames and physical manifestations of urban nature. Comparatively, botanicare trays the local governments in Milwaukee and Philadelphia have faced more acute financial strain in recent decades than the City of Seattle. Milwaukee and Philadelphia have both struggled in the globalized competition for urban growth, while Seattle has largely succeeded. Compounding the effects of reduced federal funding, capital flight has limited the public resources available for social services and urban agriculture investment in both Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Many of the cascading challenges and social maladies are similar for all cities coping with capital flight, but Milwaukee and Philadelphia have diverged in how they construct the role of land in reversing the city’s fortune. In Milwaukee, land is a lifeline that needs to be reserved for potential property tax revenue, while in Philadelphia, land is a liability that has burdened the city budget and deterred development. In Seattle, where the local growth coalition has been winning in the competition to attract capital and the creative class, land has served as a selling point for the city’s livability.

The City of Seattle currently has the most public resources available to invest in its community gardens—but upon close inspection, the benefits still accrue unevenly.Despite their general reluctance to allocate land for permanent gardens, city recently did sell vacant lots to this particular program for its community garden and gathering spaces, recognizing the public good that the program is accomplishing in a neighborhood with significant need . Because urban agriculture has been legitimized as a land use and city leaders appreciate potential benefits that the gardens provide, officials have helped gardeners find funding where possible. In addition to the funding from CIP grants described in chapter 3, the Common Council has allocated over $600,000 for beautification and food access initiatives in recent years, some of which has been used to support community gardens. Given the city’s dire fiscal situation, such an amount of money that indicates the impact that urban agriculture organizations have made on the city’s priorities. Without the resources to provide more from the municipal budget, supportive city officials have partnered with other organizations in the region to leverage additional funding for Milwaukee’s community gardens and other green spaces. One source of funding is directly tied to the notion of urban agriculture as a source of employment. In partnership with the county’s federally funded workforce development office, Employ Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee runs a summer youth employment program called Earn & Learn. Employ Milwaukee pays the wages for young people ages 14-24 who work for local government, nonprofit, and faith-based organizations and gain marketable skills in the process . Groundwork Milwaukee and some individual community gardens participate in Earn & Learn, employing youth to maintain gardens and other green spaces or to prepare and sell food from local urban farms. The organizations could not afford to pay the youth from their own budgets, but they are able to supervise them and provide job training that is considered a valuable workforce development experience by the county, the federal government, and the corporate and philanthropic donors that support Earn & Learn. As governments have reduced their own budgets and the scope of social service provision, the Earn & Learn program is typical of the kind of public-private partnerships that are expanding as the public sector becomes increasingly reliant on nonprofits to fulfill a public service. Furthermore, the fact that “workforce development” is considered a public service at all demonstrates the restructuring of relationships between the public, private and third sectors that has occurred through the influence of neoliberal ideology. With limited resources for the public services of food provision, urban beautification, and community programming, the City of Milwaukee seems to be doing what it can to support these areas as an ancillary benefit of the Earn & Learn workforce training, which is ultimately funded to benefit the private sector. The City of Milwaukee has found another financially motivated partner to support community gardens and other open space investments in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewer District . Like 850 other municipalities in the US, Milwaukee uses a combined sewer system which drains storm water along with sewage and industrial wastewater, creating the risk for sewer overflows during heavy rainfall that presents a “priority water pollution concern” for the federal government . Due to climate change, the Great Lakes region is facing an increased likelihood of heavy rainfall events—and therefore more frequent combined sewer overflows . Because of the potential for being fined by the Environmental Protection Agency when overflows occur, local water utilities with combined sewer systems, especially those in the Great Lakes region, have a serious financial interest in increasing their capacity for storm water management.

Rejecting the notion that urban agriculture is a legitimate land use mainly for its revitalization potential, Soil Generation is framing the need for preservation as an issue of community control over land use decisions. The City of Seattle’s original funding for the P-Patch Program was legitimized as support for recreation, but the program and its advocates have maintained legitimacy over time by documenting and emphasizing other benefits more in keeping with the departments in which the program has been housed—that is, providing food for people in need and a network of community-building spaces that bring diverse people together . While urban agriculture has been legitimized as a land use in all three case-cities, the different framings do not all translate equally well into making claims about the need to preserve community gardens in the face of more profitable potential land uses. For example, the economic development potential of urban agriculture confers legitimacy on such spaces, but does not preclude replacement with another form of development that would likely yield more jobs. Legitimacy is built up over time; once urban agriculture has come to be associated with particular benefits in a given locale, shifting the narrative proves more difficult. Furthermore, shifting an organization’s emphasis becomes more difficult once that organization has gained legitimacy and built up ties and commitments with other organizations in its environment. The challenge of gaining legitimacy to begin with was more difficult for MUG than for Philadelphia Green or the P-Patch program and its supporting nonprofit, how to dry cannabis because MUG lacked any affiliation with an existing, already-legitimized organization.

When seeking policy change to increase land tenure for gardens, MUG, Philadelphia Green and the P-Patch Program all erred on the side of insider advocacy, having built close relationships with city agencies . When insider strategies were not enough, the P-Patch nonprofit had relatively more flexibility than these groups to parlay its organizational legitimacy into social movement organizing. Since the PPatch nonprofit had gained legitimacy as a forum for supporting gardeners, rather than as a garden site administrator, its primary legitimizing audience was the gardeners themselves, and the organization depended relatively less on approval from city officials. Framing appeals for collective action as looking out for the interests of its primary, already-engaged audience, the PPatch nonprofit was able to take up the function of a social movement organization with relative ease . Finally, let us consider how the various organizations’ efforts to legitimize their operations have impacted the physical institutionalization of urban agriculture within each city’s landscape. For example, most Milwaukee residents and visitors are just as likely to encounter young people selling cottage goods made from produce they grew as they would be to encounter the space in which the products were grown. Given the relative scope of Philadelphia Green’s different projects, residents and visitors in Philadelphia are far more likely to see lots with the “clean-and-green” treatment than they are to see community gardens. Meanwhile in Seattle, the P-Patch gardens have been gradually developed into public gathering spaces rather than just growing spaces, and residents and visitors are increasingly likely to encounter them as inviting, park-like places. Thus, the organizations have legitimized urban agriculture around some benefits rather than others, not only discursively through media coverage, publicity, and political engagement, but also materially through the manifestations of their work that reinforce particular ideas about urban nature.

Organizational sociologists and social movement scholars have long emphasized the influence of external factors on organizational practices and outcomes . Yet an aspect of the organizational environment that has not received much attention in the literature is the locality’s civic conventions . Civic conventions are shared beliefs about expected and acceptable forms of interaction between the government and the polity, an institutionalized understanding of “how we do things around here” . This chapter will demonstrate how civic conventions are especially influential for hybrid organizations as they attempt to expand into a new organizational function which positions them differently with respect to civic action. Deploying the concept of civic conventions, I contribute to the literature on hybrid organizational forms by exploring the dynamics at work when service providers take on social movement work, rather than the reverse scenario described by Minkoff . Unlike hybrid organizations that begin as movement organizations and later take up service provision as a form of civic action, urban agriculture groups initially work to organize communities in the civic action of transforming land and must then take up social movement work later, when the transformed land becomes threatened. In doing so, garden organizations must navigate idiosyncratic local expectations regarding civic and political engagement. Organizations that build their legitimacy around social movement activities may be able to push the boundaries of local civic conventions, but organizations that are legitimized for community service provision face an extra challenge in gaining legitimacy for new activities, and thus pressure to conform to extant civic conventions is stronger.

Building connections between organizational theory and the literature on social movements, I argue that the local civic conventions can be understood as a combination of political and discursive opportunity structures, working together to shape the terrain on which hybrid organizations cultivate civic participation of various forms among some or all of their members. When they first form, urban garden organizations must work to establish legitimacy for themselves as community-based service providers. In order for a garden organization to be viewed as legitimate, the gardeners must be seen as contributing to the public good rather than as benefitting unfairly from public resources such as land and water. Even when urban garden organizations become familiar and widely accepted in a city, the use of urban land for agriculture is almost always viewed as a temporary practice . Once gardens are established, they often become quite meaningful to the gardeners and those living nearby; this emotional connection makes the loss or removal of the garden a difficult prospect. Facing an impending removal or changing economic conditions that increase gardens’ vulnerability to development, garden organizations must work to build a new kind of legitimacy for urban agriculture as a permanent fixture of the urban landscape. This effort requires new framing processes and political strategies, often including social movement mobilization. The strategies that can be pursued at this point will depend somewhat on the local civic conventions, as well as the existing frames that have been used to legitimize garden organizations.In this chapter, I highlight the role of civic conventions throughout the life of urban garden organizations and the movements they spur to preserve urban agriculture as a land use. When urban garden programs are building their initial legitimacy, when gardens are about to be replaced with a different land use, or when garden advocates propose a change in local policy that would increase the long-term security of growing spaces, they can build strategies that draw on local civic conventions to amass broader support from the general public . I discuss two main ways that civic conventions can promote garden legitimation at these different points in time. First, civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance can help build the legitimacy of urban agriculture as garden organizations are getting started and seeking out basic resources and support—in other words, as the garden programs are seeking to gain legitimacy as community-based organizations. Like other resident activities and use-value rich land uses, urban agriculture tends to have its strongest base of support at the grassroots level. If the municipal government is generally receptive to resident preferences and interests, this convention creates a relatively easy way for resident demands for urban agriculture to be incorporated rationally into local policy. In Seattle and, how to cure cannabis to a lesser extent, in Milwaukee, civic conventions which held that city officials should be receptive to bottom-up governance created many opportunities for residents to express their desire to use vacant land for growing food directly to key decision-makers, and the cities’ main garden organizations and policies gained legitimacy through this process.

Conversely, in the case of Philadelphia, civic conventions carry far less expectation for bottom-up governance. In this city, cynicism about government runs high in part because of a complex, opaque bureaucracy that seems to discourage formal resident input. In this case, when cultivated lots were being sold without gardeners’ prior knowledge or input, lack of access to decision-making and perceived injustice became rallying cries for broader mobilization around community control of land and urban planning. Comparing the social movement dynamics in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle, in this chapter I show how civic conventions present a landscape of discursive and political opportunity structures that hinder or make possible certain strategies for achieving an organization’s desired policy outcomes. Civic conventions that exist as widely shared ideas about what is unacceptable for, expected in, or salient to the local policy making process can be considered an aspect of the local discursive opportunity structure. That is, these conventions are cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate in the context of local policy making . When civic conventions are built into the local governance infrastructure, such as the mandates of various agencies or the procedures for urban planning, these formalized conventions are an aspect of the local political opportunity structure. That is, civic conventions involve legal and institutional arrangements that can present openings for social movements to pursue particular policies or decisions . Civic conventions in the form of policy infrastructure create important leverage points for organizations to apply political pressure, while conventions in the form of ideas are important to movement formation and mobilization. Civic conventions are not uniform across the three cities I investigated, yet as this chapter will demonstrate, these features of the local context have played a role in shaping the nature of mobilization to support urban agriculture in all three cases. The political opportunity structure in Milwaukee supported efforts to legitimate gardens through insider strategies to craft and enact supportive policy, while the discursive opportunity structure seemed to suggest less need or opening for widespread mobilization. Philadelphia’s civic conventions created essentially the opposite opportunity structure, in which advocates have successfully organized to build pressure from the outside with narratives about the injustice and inefficiency of the city’s existing policies. In Seattle, both the discursive and political opportunity structures supported the gardeners’ efforts to preserve their sites; periods of both insider and outsider strategies have contributed to the robust, secure, and thoroughly institutionalized network of gardens Seattle has today.The civic conventions in Milwaukee include a tradition of bottom-up governance that has translated from ideas to infrastructure over time. As a result, urban agriculture organizations have enjoyed a political opportunity structure favorable to voicing their interests directly to city officials, securing policy improvements and some public resources for their projects, without having to depart from their legitimized role as community benefit organizations. However, as Chapter 4 will explain, public resources in Milwaukee are severely constrained, meaning the city government has ultimately been unable to invest much in garden development or preservation, no matter how legitimate they consider urban agriculture to be. Additionally, the local civic conventions foster an expectation of bottom-up engagement while assuming good governance overall; these civic conventions do not broadly extend to an expectation that citizens should engage in ongoing activism and social movement activities to pressure their government for accountability. In other words, the discursive opportunity structure is less favorable to mobilization in defense of threatened gardens. Overall, Milwaukee’s civic conventions have created opportunities for community-based organizations to use insider advocacy strategies through the existing infrastructure for bottom-up governance, without presenting as much opportunity for organizations to organize a robust social movement to pressure city officials for longer-term garden tenure or greater community control over land use. Historically, Milwaukee was the center of “sewer socialism,” a political movement organized around public investments in physical infrastructure. Between 1910 and 1960, the Socialist Party was highly successful in Milwaukee politics, winning public support in large part because of honest-government platforms and improvements that Socialist officials achieved in sanitation, water and energy systems, and community parks—including the preservation of the Milwaukee lakefront for perpetual public access . Unlike Socialist Party politics elsewhere, Milwaukee’s Socialist movement was less ideological and more pragmatic. The civic conventions that developed in Milwaukee as a legacy of this era include ideas about good governance, but not as much identification with confrontational “usvs.-them” politics as may be expected for a city with a strong Socialist history.

The three cases demonstrate different ways that the value of urban growing spaces can be socially constructed through organizational activities and discourse. Garden organizations legitimize urban agriculture to legitimize themselves, and their strategic decisions to attract the resources they need for survival have a broader impact on the path along which urban agriculture develops—both spatially and socially—in the city. The current chapter will trace the different ways in which gardening organizations in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have established and maintained legitimacy for themselves and for the unconventional land use of urban agriculture, both building appreciation for community gardens and sustaining the requisite labor to maintain these spaces for long periods of time. For one thing, sustaining labor requires systematizing the operation of urban gardens and farms, many of which are started ad-hoc by small groups of residents whose efforts may be episodic. Building legitimacy for urban growing spaces rests in part upon presenting consistently well-maintained sites, so that non-gardening residents are more likely to see the sites as a benefit than they are to resent them as a nuisance. The potential for growing spaces to be seen as legitimate only if their appearance conforms to prevailing ideas of appropriate urban nature reflects a wider dynamic that urban political ecologists have noted, wherein the same physical elements can be seen as either assets or liabilities depending on their arrangement, location, and cultural context . Beyond the aesthetics, urban gardens and farms are more likely to be seen as legitimate land uses if claims about their benefits are supported with evidence. In all of the case-cities discussed here, vertical farming pros and cons garden organizations systematically gathered evidence over time that showed urban agriculture sites providing certain benefits for nearby residents and the city at-large.

The major community gardening organizations in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee have developed systematic processes to manage labor and to maintain a narrative about the value of their organizations’ work. In each city, organization leaders framed the value of urban agriculture around particular benefits and then supported this narrative through organizational decisions and data collection. In Milwaukee, urban agriculture’s employment potential was foregrounded, while in Philadelphia the role of greening in neighborhood development was emphasized, and in Seattle garden advocates built a narrative around the food production and community-building benefits of urban agriculture. Importantly, given that urban agriculture cannot provide all of its potential benefits simultaneously, the choices made by organizational leaders in pursuit of some benefits meant less emphasis was placed on others. Over time, as these organizations amplified the narratives that maximized their own resource acquisition and legitimacy, local perceptions of urban agriculture and its physical manifestation across the city were increasingly shaped by the organizations’ touted benefits. With these benefits reinforced in the minds of political leaders and the general public, and less attention given to other potential benefits, in every case urban agriculture has institutionalized discursively and materially toward certain benefits over others. In all three of these cases, the legitimacy of urban agriculture was bolstered by some degree of support from officials in the local government; however, city officials are also broadly committed to the logic of urban growth and increasing exchange value, especially those who have power over land use decisions.

At junctures when development pressure threatens the use of urban land for agriculture, a narrative legitimizing gardens around particular benefits is rarely enough to solidify their value as the highest and best use of developable land. In the face of such challenges, social movement mobilization becomes essential. Social movement activity requires significant time and resources, and the main garden organizations in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have not sustained social movement activities for the long-term to the same extent that they have invested in the systematic processes that legitimize their organizational activities. Nevertheless, at critical junctures when gardens have been threatened, each of these organizations has confronted the need for movement-building, or movement-like activities, in order to secure threatened land. In these instances, an organization’s existing commitments, its legitimacy, and the particular narrative used to legitimize urban agriculture often constrain organizational options in pushing for preservation. As this chapter will demonstrate, decisions made by the leaders of large garden organizations have an outsized influence on the public narrative legitimizing urban agriculture in their city. Critically, if organizational leadership is not developed from within the communities most in need , then the local urban agriculture system is unlikely to be tailored to their interests, because the needs of the urban growth machine—which are at odds with the needs of the poor—will impose themselves without fail on any question of urban land use. Existing research shows that local food initiatives and other interventions to make cities more “sustainable” are still likely to manifest as uneven development that further privileges some neighborhoods and groups over others .

While many of the potential benefits of urban agriculture are promising vehicles to alleviate symptoms of inequality, such an outcome is not automatic; instead, benefits sometimes accrue to more privileged groups while further disadvantaging those at the margins . Furthermore, organizational leaders may be more focused on treating the symptoms of injustice, rather than changing the underlying structural causes, if they do not have lived experiences of inequality and marginalization . Even if movements and organizations do pursue structural policy change, they may still reproduce unequal power dynamics in day-to-day practices and interactions . Thus, the extent to which organizational leadership comes from poor urban residents, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized groups will impact the organization’s outcomes through both the movement strategies pursued and the organization’s everyday activities. The following sections will show how organizational decisions have been key to the successful legitimation of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle, while noting that the issue of developing leadership from within marginalized communities is still being worked out within urban agriculture organizations, just as within the broader alternative food and environmental movements. The chapter will highlight how organizational goals and decision-making affect the local narrative constructed regarding the benefits of urban agriculture and, ultimately, its role in the urban milieu. In so doing, this chapter strengthens the connections between urban political ecology and sociological theories regarding legitimacy, institutionalization, and social movements, by analyzing how community-based organizations’ pursuit of legitimacy over time reflects their relationships with the organizational environment and extends narratives of legitimacy into that environment, as well as the physical environment, which then shape possibilities for social movement framing and mobilization.As in many other US cities, interest in urban agriculture and growing food increased in Milwaukee amidst the economic downturn of the 1970s. Residents cultivated vacant land in Milwaukee through the Shoots n Roots program, established by the city in the early 1970s and taken over by the Milwaukee County University Extension from 1978 onward, as well as through more loosely organized activities on lots across the city. When a community garden in the rapidly appreciating Riverwest neighborhood was lost to development in the late 1990s, the displaced gardeners decided to form an organization to protect other sites like theirs. This is how Milwaukee Urban Gardens originated. In its early years, air racking the organization was largely funded by a local benefactor who made a substantial anonymous donation that covered office expenses and one staff person’s salary for about 5 years. During this time, the organization’s goal was to build a name for itself, draw attention to the need to preserve local urban gardens from development threats, secure funding from additional sources, and purchase land for gardens—in other words, to gain legitimacy and attract the resources to sustain itself. However, without a robust donor base or relationships with large grant making foundations, the organization struggled to raise the additional money needed for land purchases.

Operating on such a small budget, MUG was only able to preserve land opportunistically rather than based on the biggest threats facing existing gardens. Of the 5 sites that MUG eventually came to own, 3 of them were donated and only 2 were existing gardens. MUG worked to find interested residents and build new community gardens on the donated sites, but these gardens tended not to last. In 2010 MUG convened a land use policy task force in partnership with the Milwaukee Food Council. MUG’s director at the time, Bruce Wiggins, was a retired urban planner with experience in Philadelphia and Kansas City who prioritized addressing the city’s policies towards urban agriculture as a way to improve prospects for garden preservation. While Milwaukee had never made urban agriculture illegal, as many other cities had, gardening activities were still technically constrained in the industrially zoned areas with most of the large vacant lots, so the land use policy task force worked to get the zoning laws changed. Under Wiggins’ leadership, MUG was also able to negotiate longer leases for many of the gardens in its network located on city-owned lots. Longer leases didn’t mean preservation, but for gardeners, having assured access to a site for three years rather than one season at a time increased motivation to invest time and labor into the space and its soil. In its early years, MUG struggled to gain legitimacy as a land trust, but in the process of networking with other organizations and engaging with the public, the organization gradually shifted its goals and eventually gained legitimacy by meeting needs more salient to the community. While MUG was trying to gain legitimacy as a land trust, building its local brand through media coverage, events and advertisements, the organization began to receive requests for different kinds of garden support. Gardeners at existing sites wanted help with maintenance, and some people sought MUG’s help finding or starting a garden near them. As raising large enough sums to purchase land was proving difficult, the organization reoriented its activities toward providing technical support and education about gardening to bolster the function of a growing network of self-organized gardens, influencing land-use policy and planning, and eventually managing leases with the city for gardens on city-owned parcels. In 2013, MUG’s shift from garden preservation to garden support was solidified by their merger with Groundwork Milwaukee, an organization centered on environmental programming activities and job training for at-risk youth. The two organizations had been sharing office space with other nonprofit groups at the Milwaukee Environmental Consortium, and they collaborated on projects such as installing a cistern and solar pump for sustainable water access at a MUG-owned garden in 2011. Seeing how much their activities were aligned, the organizations’ leaders decided to join MUG with Groundwork Milwaukee in order to save money on overhead. As MUG’s 2012 annual report explained, “The BIG NEWS for the upcoming year is an agency merger with our sister organization, Groundwork Milwaukee. The anticipated merger will allow MUG to be MORE EFFECTIVE and produce efficiencies that will grow more and better gardens throughout Milwaukee’s neighborhoods” . When the two organizations merged in 2013, and MUG became a program of Groundwork Milwaukee, Antoine Carter had been working as the Membership and Outreach Manager for Groundwork Milwaukee. Since 2011, Carter had coordinated youth activities such as running a young farmers’ CSA and building infrastructure for local community gardens. When Carter became the Program Manager for MUG shortly after the merger, he brought with him the experiences of garden-based youth development and community engagement, plus the perspective of someone who had grown up in the disadvantaged Near North Side of Milwaukee—a first for the organization’s leadership. In 2014, at a University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee panel discussion on “Home and Garden: Can Urban Agriculture Save our Neighborhoods?” Carter introduced MUG as “Milwaukee’s best kept secret” and detailed examples of the gardens that Groundwork Milwaukee was helping to install, explaining how these various sites were transforming their neighborhoods—bringing different groups together in one space, healing community trauma, and inspiring young men like him . Under Carter’s leadership, MUG continued to coordinate garden leases and help residents start new gardens, while placing a greater emphasis on community engagement and programming—especially activities and job training opportunities for Groundwork Milwaukee’s “Green Team” of paid youth work crews. While MUG had struggled to gain legitimacy as a land trust, the organization found a meaningful role providing garden support and event programming; in the effort to maintain this legitimacy over time, MUG amplified a particular narrative around the benefits of urban agriculture in Milwaukee.

In the context of intertwined, increasingly urgent social and environmental problems, I argue that knowledge of how community groups secure long-term use of urban land for gardens has practical as well as theoretical significance. My research underscores the political and economic constraints that community-based organizations face and the potential pitfalls of framing the value of urban agriculture in various economic terms. In chapter 2, my analysis begins with an examination of the role that organizational structure and decisions have played in determining the trajectories of urban agriculture in each city. Once their garden programs were initiated, the main urban agriculture organizations in each city sought legitimacy for their activities as a requisite for maintaining their funding and land-use permissions. I show that in pursuit of legitimacy for their specific programs, these organizations also had to build legitimacy for urban agriculture more broadly; that is, they had to justify the unexpected presence of gardens and farms on urban land. As they interacted with funders, city officials and the media in pursuit of necessary resources, leading garden advocates in each city learned what these gatekeepers were most concerned about and framed their work accordingly. Selecting from among the many potential benefits of urban agriculture to frame its value in ways that would resonate with such gatekeepers, how to cure cannabis the organizations legitimized urban agriculture for some of its potential benefits rather than others.

These frames would then influence organizational activities, grant applications, and policy deliberations going forward. I find that in all three cities, the main garden organizations came to emphasize an economic framing—employment in Milwaukee, blight removal in Philadelphia, and neighborhood amenity creation in Seattle—while placing relatively less emphasis on potential social and ecological benefits. I demonstrate how the different organizations’ economic frames have succeeded to varying degrees in convincing city officials that garden sites deserve long-term land access, funding, and other forms of public support. At the same time, I note how these frames leave unquestioned the assumption that economic concerns should have primacy over social and ecological ones, setting the stage for future conflicts as the political-economic system has continued to produce inequality and environmental degradation. In discussing Philadelphia, I highlight the role that Soil Generation has played in producing a counter-narrative that reframes the value of urban agriculture as a facet of community self-determination. Soil Generation’s framing subverts economic arguments and calls attention to the need for more just urban land use policy writ large. This chapter reveals how an organizational imperative— gaining and maintaining legitimacy—can inadvertently structure the subsequent framing process that is so important for a social movement’s scope, strength, and success. Thus, I provide new insights into the challenges that community-based organizations are likely to face when they attempt to hybridize into social movement work, and I offer practical lessons for urban agriculture enthusiasts seeking to build and legitimize new garden programs.

Chapter 3 considers the organizational environments within each city, particularly the locally shared expectations around governance and policy making, or “civic conventions,” which have differently constrained or enabled various kinds of garden advocacy, movement organizing, and land-use governance in each locale. In this chapter, I build on the concept of civic conventions theorized by Beamish and others by reconceptualizing civic conventions as a facet of both political and discursive opportunity structure at the urban scale. My analysis of interview and archival data shows that local civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance in Milwaukee and Seattle have supported the legitimation of urban agriculture as a land use by bringing resident interests to the attention of policymakers and by facilitating the development of garden projects in line with broader public priorities. In contrast, in Philadelphia many gardens have remained informal because gardeners see no benefit in engaging with the city government. Local civic conventions hold that the government is often ineffective, and gardeners are also wary of top-down interventions that could threaten their use of the city’s vacant land. Compared to Milwaukee and Seattle, garden informality and suspicion of the government in Philadelphia may have hindered gardener organizing efforts and the public legitimacy of gardens; however, in the last decade, widely shared cynicism about Philadelphia’s city government has provided a discursive opportunity structure in which urban agriculture advocates have effectively framed the loss of gardens in terms of perceived injustice and lack of access to decision-making. This frame, advanced by Soil Generation and its coalition partners, has become a rallying cry for broader mobilization around community control of land and resistance to gentrification.

A similar discursive opportunity structure exists in Seattle, where local civic conventions include a distaste for back-room deals and a narrative regarding the need for ongoing public participation in order to hold city officials accountable. In the 1990s, garden advocates effectively leveraged this narrative to mobilize broad public support for their land use initiative and win the long-term preservation of P-Patches. In this chapter, I highlight the importance of local civic conventions for organizational advocacy and social movement organizing by illustrating how civic conventions in the form of policy infrastructure have created important leverage points and interfaces between community-based organizations and the local government, while civic conventions in the form of widely shared ideas are important to movement formation and mobilization. Chapter 4 considers the organizational environment of local governments as they make decisions about land use policy and budget priorities. Comparing the political-economic conditions of each city, such as the availability of public resources and policy at larger scales of government, I demonstrate how the evolving role of gardens in the urban milieu has interacted with distinct growth strategies and political processes at work in each locale. Across all three case-cities, the globalizing competition to attract capital and “win” at urban growth looms large in city officials’ decision-making. Although the cities vary in their recent histories of “winning” and “losing” the competition for growth, all three cases show how urban growth machine logic and the political-economic pressures on municipalities influence the ways in which urban agriculture has been legitimized as a long-term land use. In Milwaukee and Philadelphia, capital flight has limited the public resources available for social services and urban agriculture investment. Many of the cascading challenges and social maladies are similar for all cities coping with capital flight, but Milwaukee and Philadelphia have diverged in how they construct the role of land in reversing the city’s fortune. In Milwaukee, due to state laws limiting the city’s tools for revenue generation, land is a lifeline that needs to be reserved for badly needed property tax revenue. In Philadelphia, reflecting the narrative advanced by PHS, vacant land is seen as a liability that has burdened the city budget and deterred development. In Seattle, indoor grow methods where the local growth coalition has been “winning” in the competition to attract capital and the creative class, land has served as a selling point for the city’s livability. Seattle currently has the most public resources available to invest in its community gardens—but upon close inspection, the benefits still accrue unevenly. In this chapter, I illustrate how pervasively market logic is applied to land use in American cities and how variations in this commodification are connected to the local growth coalition’s status in the global competition for capital. Urban political ecologists have proposed that urban agriculture offers radically transformative potential by nourishing non-capitalist material flows . However, I demonstrate through the varied examples of Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle that urban agriculture’s radical potential is limited so long as the gardened land remains commodified. Gardens without permanent status are vulnerable to removal in favor of a more economically productive use; furthermore, whether or not gardens are permanently preserved, they may be used as tools to attract high-income residents and new capital investment, displacing low-income residents and perpetuating rather than mitigating urban inequality. In chapter 5, I present a spatial-historical analysis of the accessibility of gardens for marginalized communities in each city. Using a unique dataset developed through my review of historical documents, I demonstrate how the changing locations of gardens reflect the different priorities emphasized by each organization as they pursued legitimacy, and I show how these different priorities led to different outcomes in the proximity of gardens to low-income residents, immigrants, and people of color. Specifically, my spatial analysis indicates that the main citywide programs in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have generally developed gardens closer to marginalized communities than to more privileged ones. Overall, gardens in each city have been located closer to neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and greater proportions of Black and Hispanic residents than to more affluent, whiter neighborhoods. In the 1990s and 2000s, Seattle’s P-Patch program sought to counteract concerns about fairness in the use of public resources by prioritizing new garden development in lower income areas, an effort that worked to flip the relationship between income and garden proximity over time such that communities with higher poverty rates are now likely to be closer to the nearest garden than otherwise similar communities with lower poverty rates. However, over time Seattle’s gardens appear to be growing less accessible for immigrant communities.

Across all three cities, garden proximity to Asian Americans and foreign-born residents has been mixed, despite the significant labor that immigrants have contributed to the development and maintenance of each program’s gardens. In Philadelphia, high rates of garden attrition reflect the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s emphasis on greening as a tool for economic development. Indeed, numerous gardens have disappeared in neighborhoods where housing costs have increased and poverty rates have decreased, while garden proximity to neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents has decreased over time. The examples of Seattle and Philadelphia show how programs can achieve clear outcomes by prioritizing a certain benefit that they want urban agriculture to provide in their city. In contrast, Milwaukee’s historical garden distribution does not show significant changes in accessibility over time, other than a gradual increase in the distance to the nearest garden for all neighborhoods. In this chapter, I show how decisions at the organizational level can impact urban forms and the distribution of growing space across the urban landscape, and I highlight the apparent impacts of the different strategies observed for marginalized groups. Finally, I summarize my major findings and discuss their implications for social scientists as well as urban agriculture advocates and planners. As cities become increasingly important sites of contestation over governance and resource allocation in the 21st century, understanding how community-based organizations interact with local government is critical— not only how these organizations secure resources from public sources, but also how they win policy victories in the face of elite opposition. In developing and defending community gardens, the urban agriculture organizations that are the focus of this dissertation provide instructive cases in the potential power that everyday people have to influence urban land use patterns. At the same time, they demonstrate various ways that organizations are constrained by their environments: insufficient funding led Milwaukee Urban Gardens to shift from preservation to programming; in Philadelphia, two organizations with vastly different relationships to the city’s elite have put forth competing narratives for urban agriculture’s value; and in Seattle, the PPatch program’s public nature has forced its accountability to democratic priorities but has also left blind spots around outcomes like gentrification that were not widely anticipated. In an era of compounding socio-environmental crises, efforts to build recognition, legitimacy, and security for urban agricultural space have implications for the broader conversation around urban sustainability and environmental justice . My analysis highlights the multiple ways that legitimacy figures in the process of contesting urban land, providing empirical support for theories that conceptualize an ongoing interplay between organizational legitimacy and the social forces shaping organizational outcomes . Extending these theories, I discuss how an organization’s pursuit of legitimacy as a community service provider comes to structure its possibilities for hybridizing into a social movement organization, and I highlight ways in which the organizations studied here also shaped the local legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use by influencing public discourse and the physical landscape to remake human-environment relationships in urban space.Investigating movements that advocate for gardens and the institutions that support and regulate urban agriculture is valuable, both because of farming’s potential to meet important human social and material needs and because of the paradoxical political and economic forces that are exposed when urban land is set aside to be farmed rather than developed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As already elaborated, this framework for farmer knowledge formation offers a useful guide for mapping mechanisms for how farmers learn and codify local knowledge, and also provides necessary groundwork to connect farmer knowledge to farm management . Here, we synthesize six key insights from the study. These key insights in combination with the framework are particularly important to consider when engaging with farmers in alternative agriculture in future studies. Farmer knowledge accumulation, at least among organic farmers in this study, is mostly observational and experiential. Most farmers considered themselves separate from scientific knowledge production and though scientific knowledge did at times inform their own knowledge production, they still ultimately relied on their own direct observation and personal experiences to inform their knowledge base and make decisions. This finding underscores the importance of translating theory into practice in alternative agriculture. Without grounding theoretical scientific findings or policy recommendations in practice, whether that be day-to-day practices or long-term management applied, farmers cannot readily incorporate such “outsider” knowledge into their farm operations. Farmers thus provide an important node in the research and policymaking process, whereby they determine if scientific findings or policy recommendations apply to their specific farming context—through direct observation, personal experience, and experimentation. Understanding the mechanisms of farmer knowledge formation and precisely how farmers learn is essential to integrating farmer knowledge into the scientific literature. As outlined in the farmer knowledge formation framework, farmer ecological knowledge is accumulated over time based on continuous systematic assessment through direct observation, personal experiences, or experimentation. This iterative feedback approach to learning among organic farmers is akin to the scientific method and parallel in approach to adaptive management in agriculture . As highlighted in the results, it is possible for a farmer to acquire expert knowledge within one or two generations of farming alternatively. Documenting this farmer knowledge within the scientific literature—specifically farmer knowledge in the context of relatively new farmers in the US—represents a key way forward for widening agricultural knowledge both in theory and in practice . This finding is significant because it underscores the importance of farmers not as subjects of science but as actors within the scientific community. This study provides one example for documenting farmer knowledge in a particularly unique site for organic agriculture. Future studies may expand on this approach in order to document other contexts with recent but deep agricultural knowledge on alternative farms. For example, when farmers were asked to talk about soil management specifically, several farmers struggled with this format of question, because they expressed that they do not necessarily think about soil management specifically but tend to manage for multiple aspects of their farm ecosystem simultaneously. This result aligns with similar findings from Sūmane et al. across a case study of ten different farming contexts in Europe, and suggests that farmers tend to have a bird’s eye view of their farming systems. Such an approach allows farmers to make connections across diverse and disparate elements of their farm operation and integrate these connections to both widen and deepen their ecological knowledge base.For most farmers, maintaining ideal soil structure was the foundation for healthy soil. Farmers emphasized that ideal soil structure was delicately maintained by only working ground at appropriate windows of soil moisture. Determining this window of ideal soil moisture represented a learned skill that each individual farmer developed through the iterative learning process elaborated in Figure 1. This knowledge-making process was informed by both social mechanisms gained through inherited wisdom and informal conversations and ecological mechanisms through direct observation, personal experiences, and experimentation . As farmers developed their ecological knowledge of the appropriate windows of soil moisture, their ethos around soil management shifted. In this way, over time , these farmers learned that no amount of nutrient addition, reduced tillage, cover cropping, or other inputs could make up for damaged soil structure.

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

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

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

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

To the west of the structure manioc and piñuela plants were growing as well. It is likely that additional plants were thriving within the house-lot gardens at Cerén besides what was encountered using plaster cast recovery methods and large carbonized branches, but water flotation collection strategies were not yet implemented at the time of these investigations. It is common for volunteer plants to develop surrounding home gardens that may be tolerated and cared for by residents. As discussed further below, the more extensive agricultural fields in this ancient village exhibited many plants that may have been volunteers in disturbed environments and were subsequently tolerated and perhaps even encouraged. Further excavations could confirm the same cultivation strategies within the house-lot gardens as well, revealing wild species that could contribute towards nutritional, medicinal, and ornamental needs of the village occupants. These house-lot gardens were likely conceptualized and managed at the scale of the household, in comparison to the more expansive agricultural fields which could have been incorporated into larger statelevel organization . Each house-lot garden space at Cerén is organized differently and composed of its own set of plant species, suggesting that each household managed such spaces. The agriculturalists at Cerén chose to surround their homes with a variety of important plant species so that their daily needs could be fulfilled by simply stepping outside of their doorway, as can be seen with the variety of food products noted above that encompassed the village center. The soil within these village gardens would have been easily fertilized and replenished through household refuse along with human and animal waste . Additionally, the array of fruit trees could have provided shade for the house compounds and ample space for daily activities. Rural commoners, such as those living at Cerén, could have enjoyed practices that were usually associated with the elite through their gardens by growing desired plants within their own land. For example, Theobroma cacao seeds, rinds, branches, and other plant parts were identified in areas surrounding both Households 2 and 4 and ceramic vessels were recovered that contained cacao residue. Cacao was a prized plant in Mesoamerica, with its value translating into both beverages and as a form of currency . Cacao resources are typically associated with ceremonial activities, which are generally believed to have been practiced mainly by elite individuals . Yet, Cerén demonstrates that rural households in Mesoamerica had access to valued and prized plant resources. The above depictions of Cerén allows one to envision the small village as a comfortable place to reside. Privacy was not a priority in that walls or barriers were not created to block visibility of households and human activities within them. The visibility and openness of the Cerén household gardens is apparent through visual recreations of the settlement . This is not to say that the ancient inhabitants were open with all aspects of their lives. Sharp tools like obsidian blades were consistently stored up high in the thatch roofing, out of reach from children who could easily injure or cut themselves. Food that was stored within ceramic vessels was almost entirely found within structures and was neatly organized into various jars containing maize, manioc, beans, cotton, and squash , demonstrating that collected food items were hidden in that they were not readily visible to a passerby. The Cerén people certainly kept many of their belongings in specific locations so that they would not be visible to just anyone—but their gardens were evidently not hidden or demarcated with proprietary intentions. Gleason defines gardens and fields as spaces that are cultivated and bounded. However, no evidence has been found for fences surrounding house gardens or even fields at Cerén.