Hemp Growing

This approach increased the production pool as little as possible while also ensuring sufficient enrichment of the NH4 + and NO3 – pools with 15N-NH4 + and 15N-NO3, respectively, to facilitate high measurement precision . Due to significant variability of initial NH4 + and NO3 – pool sizes in each soil sample, differing amounts of tracer solution were added to each sample set evenly across the soil surface. To begin the incubation, each of the four sub-samples received the tracer solution via evenly distributed circular drops from a micropipette. After four hours , two sub-sample incubations were stopped by extraction with 0.5M K2SO4 as above for initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations. Filters were pre-rinsed with 0.5 M K2SO4 and deionized water and dried in a drying oven at 60°C to avoid the variable NH4 + contamination from the filter paper. Soil extracts were frozen at -20°C until further isotopic analysis. Similarly after 24 hrs , two sub-sample incubations were stopped by extraction as previously detailed, and subsequently frozen at -20°C. At a later date, filtered extracts were defrosted, homogenized, and analyzed for isotopic composition of NH4 + and NO3 – in order to calculate gross production and consumption rates for N mineralization and nitrification. We prepared extracts for isotope ratio mass spectrometry using a microdiffusion approach based on Lachouani et al. . Briefly, to determine NH4 + pools, 10mL aliquots of samples were diffused with 100mg magnesium oxide into Teflon coated acid traps for 48 hours on an orbital shaker.

The traps were subsequently dried, spiked with 20μg NH4+ -N at natural abundance to achieve optimal detection, vertical grow system and subjected to EA-IRMS for 15N:14N analysis of NH4 + . Similarly, to determine NO3 – pools, 10mL aliquots of samples were diffused with 100mg magnesium oxide into Teflon coated acid traps for 48 hours on an orbital shaker. After 48 hours, acid traps were removed and discarded, and then each sample diffused again with 50mg Devarda’s alloy into Teflon coated acid trap for 48 hours on an orbital shaker. These traps were dried and subjected to EA-IRMS for 15N:14N analysis of NO3 + . Twelve dried samples with very low spiked with 20μg NH4+ -N at natural abundance to achieve optimal detection.In addition to the soil biogeochemical variables described above, farmers were also interviewed to determine specific soil management practices on their farms. Farmers were asked to describe the number of tillage passes they performed per field per season; the total number of crops per acre that the farm produced during one calendar year at the whole farm level; the degree to which the farm utilized integrated crop and livestock systems on the farm; crop rotational complexity for each field; and the frequency of cover crop plantings for each field. To calculate the frequency of tillage, we tallied the total number of tillage passes per season for each field. To calculate crop abundance, the total number of crops grown per year at the whole farm level was divided by the total acreage farmed. To capture the use of ICLS, we created an index based on the number of and type of animals utilized. Specifically, the index was calculated by first adding the number of animals used in rotation on farm for each animal type and then dividing by the total number of acres for each farm. These raw values were then normalized, creating an index range from 0 to 1 .

Lastly, to quantify crop rotational complexity, a rotational complexity index was calculated for each site using the formula outlined by Socolar et al. . Cover crop frequency was determined using the average number of cover crop plantings per year, calculated as cover crop planting counts over the course of two growing years for each field site.In order to identify farm typologies based on indicators for soil organic matter levels, we first used several clustering algorithms. First, a k-means cluster analysis based on four key soil indicators—soil organic matter , total soil nitrogen, and available nitrogen —was used to generate three clusters of farm groups using the facoextra and cluster packages in R . The cluster analysis results were divisive, nonhierarchical, and based on Euclidian distance, which calculates the straight-line distance between the soil indicator combinations of every farm site in Cartesian space , and created a matrix of these distances . To determine the appropriate number of clusters for the cluster analysis, a scree plot was used to signal the point at which the total within-cluster sum of squares decreased as a function of the increasing cluster size. The location of the kink in the curve of this scree plot delineated the optimal number of clusters, in this case three clusters . To further explore appropriate cluster size, we used a histogram to determine the structure and spread of data among clusters. A Euclidean-based dendrogram analysis was then used to further validate the results of the cluster analysis. In addition to confirming the results of the cluster analysis, the dendrogram plot showed relationships between sites and relatedness across all sites. To visual cluster analysis results, the final three clusters were plotted based on the axes produced by the cluster analysis. One drawback of cluster analyses is that there is no measure of whether the groups identified are the most effective combination to explain clusters produced by soil indicators, or whether they are statistically different from one another.

To address this gap, we used ANOSIM to evaluate and compare the differences between clusters identified with the cluster analysis above. We calculated the global similarity in addition to pairwise tests of each cluster. To formally establish the three farm types and also make the functional link between organic matter and management explicit, we used the three clusters that emerged from the k-means cluster analysis based on soil organic matter indicators, and explored differences in management approaches among the clusters. We then created three farm types based on this exploratory analysis. Specifically, we first analyzed management practices among sites within each cluster to determine if similarities in management approaches emerged for each cluster. Based on this analysis, we used the three clusters from the cluster analysis to create three farm types categorized by soil organic matter levels and informed by management practices applied. Using the three farm types from above, we then analyzed whether our classification created strong differences along soil texture and management gradients using a linear discriminant analysis . LDA is most frequently used as a pattern recognition technique; because LDA is a supervised classification, class membership must be known prior to analysis . The analysis tests the within group covariance matrix of standardized variables and generates a probability of each farm sites being categorized in the most appropriate group based on these variable matrices . To characterize soil texture, we used soil texture class . To characterize soil management, we used crop abundance, tillage frequency, vertical grow system and crop rotational complexity—the three management variables with the strongest gradient of difference among the three farm types. A confusion matrix was first applied to determine if farm sites were correctly categorized among the three clusters created by the cluster analysis. Additional indicator statistics were also generated to confirm if the LDA was sensitive to input variables provided. A plot with axis loadings is provided to visualize the results of the LDA and display differences across farm groups visually. The LDA was carried out using the MASS R package. To build on the results of the LDA, we performed a variation partitioning analysis to determine the level of variation in soil organic matter indicators explained by the soil texture variables, soil management variables, and their interactions . VPA was performed using the vegan package in R . Using indicator variables for soil organic matter levels, we performed a k-means cluster analysis to develop a meaningful classification of farms. Scree plot results indicated that three clusters produced the most consistent separation of field sites. As shown in Figure 1, the two dimensional cluster analysis produced a strong first dimension , which explained 86.7% of the separation among the 27 field sites. Total N, total C, POXC, and soil protein variables strongly explained this separation of farm types, as shown by the lack of overlap among the clusters along the Dimension 1 axis. Histogram results provide a visual summary of linear difference among the three clusters and further confirms minimal overlap among clusters; however, Cluster I and Cluster II fields showed low dissimilarity between values 0 and -2 . Results from the average distance-based linkages of the dendrogram analysis similarly further established the accuracy of field site groupings determined by the cluster analysis. These results indicated that Cluster II sites were more closely related to Cluster III sites compared to Cluster I sites . ANOSIM showed strongly significant global differences among the three clusters , where a value of 1 delineates 0% overlap between clusters.

Overall, ANOSIM verified the farm types obtained from the cluster analysis. In addition, ANOSIM pairwise t-tests that compared each individual cluster in pairs confirmed strongly significant dissimilarities between Cluster I and Cluster III sites . ANOSIM pairwise t-tests also indicated that Cluster I sites were significantly divergent from Cluster II sites; however, Cluster I and Cluster II showed less dissimilarities than Cluster II and Cluster III sites . ANOSIM pairwise t-test results were in congruence with the results provided by the histogram . Classification of farm sites using k-means clustering closely matched differences in on-farm management approaches . It is important to note that while general trends between clusters and management emerged, the management practices analyzed here do not fully encompass the management regimes of each farm field site, and are intended to be exploratory rather than definitive. Several general trends emerged across the three farm types . For instance, Farm Type I, comprised of six field sites, consisted of fields with higher crop abundance values and fields that more frequently planted cover crops compared to Farm Type III. These sites used lower impact machines and applied a lower number of tillage passes compared to Farm Type II and III. In contrast, Farm Type II, also comprised of six field sites, and Farm Type III, comprised of fifteen field sites, represented fields on the lower end of crop abundance values and sites that applied cover crop plantings at a lower frequency than Farm Type I. Farm Type III on average applied a higher number of tillage passes and on average were on the lower end of ICLS index compared to both Farm Type I and Farm Type II. In general, Farm Type II used management approaches that frequently overlapped with Farm Type III, and less frequently overlapped with Farm Type I. Overall, farm types significantly differentiated based on indicators for soil organic matter levels . For all four indicators displayed in Figure 2, differences among the three farm types were highly significant . As visualized in the side-by-side box plot comparisons for all four indicators for soil organic matter levels, Farm Type I consistently showed the highest mean values across all four indicators, while Farm Type III consistently showed the lowest mean values across all four indicators. Farm Type I had mean values of 0.21 mg-N kg-soil-1 for total soil N, 2.3 mg-C kg-soil-1 for total organic C, 787 mg-C kg-soil-1 for POXC, and 7.4 g g-soil-1 for soil protein; compared to Farm Type I, Farm Type III had means values 43% lower for total soil N, 48% lower for total organic C, 58% for POXC, and 66% lower for soil protein. Compared to Farm Type I, Farm Type II had mean values 38% lower for total soil N, 26% lower for total organic C, 28% lower for POXC, and 30% lower for soil protein than Farm Type I. Standard errors for all four indicators are shown in Figure 2.This on-farm study found significant differentiation among the organic farm field sites sampled based on soil organic matter levels—and created a gradient in soil quality among the three farm types. While we found that differences in soil quality were generally aligned with trends in management among sites, soil texture—rather than management—emerged as the stronger driver of soil quality. Though initially, we found that net and gross N cycling rates were not significantly different across farm types, gross N cycling rates showed considerable variation among farm types.

The Farmer First approach recognizes multiple knowledge forms and challenges the standard “information transfer” pipeline model that is often applied in research and extension contexts . We used an open-ended, qualitative approach that relied on in-depth and in-person interviews to study farmer knowledge. Such methods are complementary to surveys that use quantitative methods for capturing a large sample of responses . Because they are more open-ended, qualitative approaches allow for more unanticipated directions ; however, as Scoones and Thompson point out, removing local knowledge from its local context and attempting to fit it into the constrictive framework of Western scientific rationality is likely to lead to significant errors in interpretation, assimilation, and application. While interviews are not able to capture the quantity of farmer input that surveys do, in-depth interviews allow researchers to access a deeper knowledge base that has inherent value—despite limitations in scalability and/or transferability—as participants respond in their own words, using their own categorization, and perceived associations . Such in-depth interviews are therefore essential to research on farmer knowledge and local knowledge .In-person interviews were conducted in the winter, between December 2019 – February 2020; three interviews were conducted in December 2020. We used a two-tiered interview process, where we scheduled an initial field visit and then returned for an in-depth, semi-structured interview. The purpose of the preliminary field visit was to help establish rapport and increase the amount and depth of knowledge farmers shared during the semi-structured interviews. Farmers were asked to walk through their farm and talk more generally about their fields, their management practices, pipp drying racks and their understanding of the term “soil health.”

The field interview also provided an opportunity for open dialogue with farmers regarding management practices and local knowledge . Because local knowledge is often tacit, the field component was beneficial to connect knowledge shared to specific fields and specific practices. After the initial field visits, all 13 farmers were contacted to participate in a follow up visit to their farm that consisted of a semi-structured interview followed by a brief survey. The semistructured interview is the most standard technique for gathering local knowledge . These in-depth interviews allowed us to ask the same questions of each farmer so that comparisons between interviews could be made. To develop interview questions for the semistructured interviews , we established initial topics such as the farmer’s background, farm history, general farm management and soil management approaches. We consulted with two organic farmers to develop final interview questions. The final format of the semi-structured interviews was designed to encourage deep knowledge sharing. For example, the interview questions were structured such that questions revisited topics to allow interviewees to expand on and deepen their answer with each subsequent version of the question. Certain questions attempted to understand farmer perspectives from multiple angles and avoided scientific jargon or frameworks whenever possible. Most questions promoted open-ended responses to elicit the full range of possible responses from farmers. In the interviews, we posed questions about the history and background of the participant and their farm operation, how participants learned to farm, and to describe this process of learning in their own words, as well as details about their general management approaches.

Farmers were encouraged to share specific stories and observations that related to specific questions. Next, we asked a detailed set of questions about their soil management practices, including specific questions about soil quality and soil fertility on their farm. In this context, soil quality focused on ecological aspects of their soil’s ability to perform key functions for their farm operation ; while soil fertility centered on agronomic aspects of their soils’ ability to sustain nutrients necessary for production agriculture . A brief in-person survey that asked a few demographic questions was administered at the end of the semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted in person on farms to ensure consistency and to help put farmers at ease. The interviews typically lasted two hours and were recorded with permission from the interviewee. Interviews were transcribed, reviewed for accuracy, and uploaded to NVivo 12, a software tool used to categorize and organize themes systematically based on research questions . Coding is a commonly used qualitative analysis technique that allows researchers to explore, understand, and compare interviews by tracking specific themes . Through structured analysis of the interview transcripts, we identified key themes and constructed a codebook to delineate categories of knowledge. Once initial coding was complete, we reviewed quotations related to each code to assess whether the code was accurate. The final analysis included both quantitative and qualitative assessments of the coded entries. For the quantitative measure, we tallied both the number of coded passages regarding different themes or topics, and the number of farmers who addressed each theme. In addition, we examined the content of the individual coded entries to understand the nature of farmer knowledge and consensus or divergence among farmer responses for each theme. 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, 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, pipp horticulture 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, 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 the broader 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 . 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.

Tomatoes are likely a better proxy for other vegetable crops , though each will have its unique requirements . As we imagine a shift towards dry farm agriculture in California, it is also important to consider how land that is suitable for dry farming is currently being used. Combining areas that are suitable for tomato dry farming with and without irrigation, we compiled a list of the top ten crops by area that are currently grown on these lands . Some of them are currently being dry farmed with some regularity in the state and could signal particularly easy targets for a shift to low-water practices. Others are dry farmed in other Mediterranean climates and suggest an important opportunity for management exploration in lands that might be particularly forgiving to experimentation. The remaining crops are some of the most water intensive in the state and would therefore lead to substantial water savings if the land could be repurposed. While unrealistic in the near future, calculating potential water savings from a complete conversion of suitable lands to dry farming allows for comparison with other water saving strategies. Even assuming that an acre-foot of irrigation is added to each acre of dry farm crops every year , if all the land listed in Table 3 were converted to dry farming and irrigated to the statewide averages listed in the table , California would save 700 billion gallons of water per year, vertical grow system or nearly half the volume of Shasta Lake, the largest reservoir in the state.

Given the overlap between suitable dry farm areas and high priority groundwater basins, these potential water savings are especially valuable as water districts scramble to balance their water budgets in light of SGMA. Perhaps the largest caveat to these potential water savings–and any analysis of dry farm suitability that relies solely on environmental constraints–is the economic reality in which conversions to dry farming currently occur. As discussed above, while a dramatic reduction in irrigation inputs might be feasible from a crop physiological perspective, whether farms can remain profitable through such a transition is an entirely different question. Given a dramatically increased supply of dry farm tomatoes, the profits that current dry farmers rely on could easily crumble. When considering other, less charismatic crops that could be good candidates for dry farming , customers’ likely hesitance to pay as steep a premium for high quality produce as they do for tomatoes also casts doubt on the viability of a large-scale dry farm transition given current profit structures for farmers.Our suitability map shows potential for vegetable dry farming to be practiced on California croplands that are currently irrigated, though its expansion is inherently limited. Even if markets could be adapted to support an influx of dry farmed vegetables, our map indicates that climatic constraints will largely require dry farming to be practiced in coastal regions or other microclimates that can provide cool temperatures and sufficient rainfall. However, the Central Coast’s tomato dry farming offers principles–but not a blueprint–for low water agriculture in other regions.

Based on themes from our interviews, these principles show a cycle of water savings that connect reduced inputs, management diversification, and market development . The cycle begins with lower irrigation , which can be accomplished in concert with soil health practices that build soil water holding capacity and increase long-term fertility. Reduced weed pressure and lower biomass production can then lead to reducing other inputs, such as labor and fertilizers, while also allowing for further water savings. The combination of reduced inputs and soil health practices then gives rise to a product that is unique in its water saving potential, and may also be of unusually high quality. By encouraging consumers to appreciate the products, or through novel policy support, farmers can develop markets that will provide a premium for these low-water products–or payment for the practice itself–which in turn creates an opportunity to expand the practice, further lowering inputs.As we ask how policies may impact dry farm production systems, we find a forking path in what types of expansion may result from different policies. An increase in production can be accomplished through both scaling size and scaling number . Both options can tap into the water saving cycle to decrease water usage; however, the search for just, agroecological transitions has pointed time and again to the need for scaling number . On the Central Coast, small, diversified farms have used this water saving cycle to both cut water use and develop a specialty product that allows growers to farm in areas with high land values by increasing their land access, profits, and resilience to local water shortages. Through these principles, small-scale operations have differentiated their management from both industrial farms and even other small farms in the region by creating a system based in localized knowledge, soil health practices, and thought-intensive management.

However, it cannot be taken as a given that this water saving cycle will continue to uplift the small scale operations on which it started. Recent work highlights the potential for biophysical and sociopolitical conditions to combine to shrink–rather than grow–the use and viability of agroecological systems . In the case of dry farm tomatoes, socio-political attention is already beginning to target the biophysical need to decrease water consumption. If well-intentioned policy interventions designed to decrease irrigation water use build markets that value the fact of dry farming, rather than the high quality fruits it produces , growers will be able to scale the size of dry farm operations without needing to rely on the highly localized knowledge required to produce high quality fruits. As large grocers scale up dry farm produce sales without worrying about quality-based markets that may quickly saturate at industrial scales, the agroecological systems that originally produced dry farm tomatoes may be edged out of the market. On the other hand, if policies build guaranteed markets for small farms growing dry farm produce, dry farming may grow by scaling out to more small-scale operations. Policies focused on water savings may then favor industrial or small-scale farms, depending on how interventions shape the “Market Development” aspect of the cycle. We therefore examine this cycle not only as a means to save water, but ask if and how it can enhance the viability of nonindustrial farming operations as the food system adapts to restricted water availability. We consider the relevant policy recommendations outlined in Blesh et al.’s analysis of how institutional pathways can act synergistically with farmer networks to enable agricultural diversification , asking which have the potential to point future dry farming towards scaling size vs scope.To better situate these policy options in the local context, we first look to the outcomes of institutional intervention in organic strawberry production in a very similar region on the Central Coast, and consider the analogous options for dry farm tomatoes. Similar to dry farm tomatoes, organic strawberry production was launched into the spotlight by government-mandated input curtailments . For strawberries, the development of an organic strawberry production system also coincided with the adoption of an organic certification process by the US Department of Agriculture. Growing public interest in organic strawberries and the methyl bromide ban led to the rapid expansion of industrial-scale organic strawberry production– blatantly scaling size of production . As production increased, organic strawberry markets saturated and prices crashed, pipp racking leaving an economic landscape where only the largest operations could remain viable selling strawberries at market prices . At this point, agroecological growers had to redouble their efforts to target local consumers with direct marketing strategies, as the organic label no longer added the necessary value to profitably sell their product.In an analogous case for dry farm tomatoes, it is easy to see the immediate appeal of establishing a “dry farm” label that can incorporate the social value added to dry farm tomatoes into the price of the product without relying on consumers trusting and paying a premium based solely on higher qualities. However, by divorcing dry farm practices from quality premiums and trusting relationships with customers, a dry farm label would make it much easier for large-scale growers to enter the dry farm market. These larger operations–which may struggle to produce high quality fruits or maintain direct relationships with customers but can still decrease water usage enough to produce a certified dry farm tomato–could easily grow dry farm produce at large enough scales to edge smaller growers out of the label. As has been seen in the organic program, industrial growers could also lobby for an official relaxation–a literal watering down–of label standards . This sidestep of the dry farm practices described in the above interviews would not only further advantage large scale farmers, but would also undermine the very water savings that they are meant to encourage. Administrative costs involved in enrolling in payment-for-practice programs can be a cumbersome barrier to entry, while low payouts at small scales dissuade small farmers who implement the practice from enrolling .

These patterns are currently seen in programs offering cost shares for cover cropping, where farm size is significantly larger for participants than non-participants .Given farmers’ interest and current experimentation with dry farming non-tomato vegetables, expanding the set of crops that can be dry farmed and adapted to local conditions is a clear target for future policies. Support for research and participatory breeding programs/variety evaluation could spur development of locally-adapted dry farm varietals. By compensating farmers for experimentation with diversified dry farm rotations and development of locally adapted varietals, policymakers can also absorb some of the risk inherent to on-farm experimentation and encourage innovation on the farms that are most familiar with the practice, while simultaneously lowering barriers for farmers new to the practice. To create a policy environment where experimentation feels more accessible to farmers, minimum lease terms could be set for farmland, allowing farmers to feel more secure in investing in localized practices . Priority could also be given to creating programs that connect farmers–particularly new farmers and those who hold underrepresented identities–to available farmland. Without the burden of securing water access, lands that would otherwise be impossible to farm with summer crops could become arable, particularly in conjunction with the concurrent support of the other policies discussed here. Though many areas will still require some access to water to successfully dry farm , crops’ need for water coincides with points in the season when surface water is most available , making areas with inconsistent water access over the course of the season likely candidates for dry farm success. Priority might initially be given to areas shown as suitable on the map, but as new and locally adapted crop varieties emerge, access may also extend.As water shortages are exacerbated by changing climates in California and across the globe, there is an increasingly urgent need to adapt agricultural systems to use less water. By nearly or entirely cutting irrigation to tomato crops grown in the summer season, dry farming has particular appeal as a low-water alternative to irrigation-intensive agricultural systems. While tomato dry farming is an inherently localized farming practice, suitable only for implementation in a specific region, it also offers a global model for how farming systems might shift towards low-water agriculture. Beyond decreasing water use, with the right policy support, dry farming also presents an opportunity to support innovation on small, diversified farms, transitioning the food system towards an agroecological future.Joya de Cerén offers a unique and exciting opportunity to study the daily lives of Mesoamerican rural residents and their household contexts during the Late Classic period in what is now El Salvador. The village was rapidly abandoned and experienced a sudden burial below several meters of fine volcanic ash and coarse cinders deposited from the eruption of Loma Caldera circa 592–660 CE . This eruption was relatively small in that its ash deposits only covered a few square kilometers . The ancient village of Cerén was unlucky enough to be located only 600 m southeast of Loma Caldera, falling victim to several hours of tephra falls and lava bombs that buried the settlement. Along with the rapid burial from tephra deposits, thatch roofs of the domestic structures caught on fire, subsequently preserving much of the village even further. The conditions that resulted from this eruption led to exceptional archaeological preservation and allows for the recovery of earthen architecture as well as materials left in situ that related to daily activities such as intact ceramic vessels, finely crafted lithic tools, and organic material that was utilized in a wide range of ways.

Changing climates have caused droughts that not only result in massive financial losses , but also raise major concerns for farmers’ ability to maintain continuity in their farming operations. Because California’s waters are over-allocated even in years of typical rainfall, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires sustainable groundwater use by 2040, implies that irrigation will need to be discontinued on hundreds of thousands of cropland acres. In this backdrop, dry farming, a practice in which farmers grow crops with little to no irrigation, has quickly garnered interest from farmers and policy-makers around the state. While dry farming is an ancient practice with rich histories in many regions, perhaps most notably the Hopi people in Northeast Arizona, dry farming emerged more recently in California, with growers first marketing dry farm tomatoes as such in the Central Coast region in the early 1980’s. In a lineage that likely traces back to Italian and Spanish growers, dry farming on the Central Coast relies on winter rains to store water in soils that plants can then access throughout California’s rain-free summers, allowing farmers to grow produce with little to no external water inputs. As water-awareness gains public attention, dry farming has been increasingly mentioned as an important piece in California’s water resiliency puzzle, however, while some extension articles exist no peer-reviewed research has been published to date on vegetable dry farming in California. We therefore assembled a group of six dry farming operations on the Central Coast to collaboratively identify and answer key management questions in the dry farm community. Growers identified three main management questions that would benefit from further research: 1. Which depths of nutrients are most influential in determining fruit yield and quality? 2. Are AMF inoculants effective in this low-water system, and more broadly. 3. How can farmers best support high-functioning soil fungal communities to improve harvest outcomes?

Growers were primarily concerned with fruit yield and quality, vertical grow rack system with blossom end rot prevention and overall fruit quality being of particular interest due to the water stress and high market value inherent to this system. Managing for yields and quality present a unique challenge in dry farm systems, as the surface soils that farmers typically target for fertility management in irrigated systems dry down quickly to a point where roots will likely have difficulty accessing nutrients and water. Because plants are likely to invest heavily in deeper roots as compared to irrigated crops, we hypothesized that nutrients deeper in the soil profile would be more instrumental in determining fruit yields and quality. As deficit irrigation and drought change microbial community composition in other agricultural and natural systems, we hypothesized that dry farm management would cause shifts in fungal communities in response to dry farm management, which could in turn improve tomato harvest outcomes. Beyond general shifts in fungal communities, farmers were specifically interested in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculants, which are increasingly available from commercial sellers. Recent research has shown that AMF can help plants tolerate water stress, and we therefore hypothesized that commercial AMF inoculants might be beneficial. We organized a season-long field experiment from early spring to late fall of 2021 to answer these questions, sampling soils and collecting harvest data from plots on seven dry farm tomato fields on the Central Coast. Each farmer managed the fields exactly as they normally would, with AMF inoculation being the only experimental manipulation. We sampled soils for nutrients and water content at four depths down to one meter throughout the growing season to determine which nutrient depths influenced harvest outcomes. We also took DNA samples from soils and roots in surface and subsurface dry farm soils, as well as nearby irrigated and non-cultivated soils, sequencing the ITS2 region to analyze the fungal community to verify inoculation establishment and more broadly characterize soil fungal communities to see how fungal communities changed under dry farm management and determine whether these changes or the introduction of an inoculant influenced harvest outcomes.

We then used Bayesian generalized linear mixed models to estimate the effects of nutrient depths and fungal community metrics on yield and fruit quality data from 10-20 weekly harvests on each field. Our results highlight a tension between managing nutrients for fruit yield and quality, while fungal community metrics show promise for increasing fruit quality. The experiment was conducted on seven certified organic dry farm tomato fields in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties in California during the 2021 growing season. Five blocks were established on each field over the course of a full growing season , for a total of 70 experimental plots. These fields are managed by six farms; one farm contributed two fields at two separate sites. Each farmer continued to manage their field for the duration of the experiment according to their typical practices. Each dry farm crop was preceded by a crop in the winter prior to the experiment, either in the form of a cover crop , or continuous winter production . All fields were disked prior to planting, and two fields additionally ripped down to 60-90cm. Each field’s plant and bed spacing, plant date, and tomato variety are listed in Table 1, along with amendments added to the soil. Fields also varied in their rotational history . The mapped soil series, measured texture, and soil pH are listed in Table 3. From March 2 to October 27 there were 15 rain events greater than 1 mm recorded at the De Laveaga CIMIS weather station , none of which occurred between the months of May and October . Monthly weather data is summarized in Table 4.A nested experimental design was used to account for management and biophysical differences across fields. Each plot contained 12 plants, and plots were divided across two beds with a buffer row between . Plots were randomly selected to be inoculated in the first experimental row and then paired with a counterpart in the second experimental row that received the opposite inoculation condition to achieve a randomized complete block design with five blocks per field. Here we refer to a pair of inoculated and control plots as a block. There were three non-inoculated buffer plants between each plot and at least twenty buffer plants at the start and end of each experimental row. Harvests began when farmers indicated that they were beginning to harvest the portion of their field that included the experimental plots. Each field was harvested once per week from its start date to its end date, grow rack with lights with the exception of Farm 5, which was harvested twice per week, in accordance with farmer desires. All red tomatoes were harvested from each plot and sorted into marketable, blossom end rot, sunburnt, or “other unmarketable” fruits and then weighed. Harvests stopped when there were no remaining tomatoes in the field or when farmers decided to terminate the field. Fruit size and quality were assessed on the third, sixth, and ninth week of harvest at a given field. Ten representative marketable tomatoes were taken from each plot, weighed, dried at 70 degrees C and then weighed again to establish the percent dry weight . PDW was used as a proxy for fruit quality, with fruits with a lower water content increasing fruit quality up to a certain point.

Extension research has linked dry farm fruit quality with lower fruit water content, as opposed to specific compounds that are elevated in dry farm tomatoes, and we expect PDW to correlate highly with the concentration of flavors previously found to create dry farm fruits’ superior quality. After eliciting quality categorization from farmers in the study, we determined that fruit quality increases up to a PDW of 8%, peaks between 8 and 12%, and falls above 12%.Soil samples were taken three times over the course of the field season: once at transplant , once mid-season , and once during harvest . Each sample was then divided into fresh soil , dried at 60 degrees C , and dried at 105 degrees C . Ammonium and nitrate levels were measured after using 2M KCl to extract samples from transplant , midseason , and harvest samples using colorimetry. As soil pH was close to neutral, Olsen P37 was used to measure plant-available phosphate on samples from transplant and midseason . Gravimetric water content was assessed for all samples. Samples from transplant were composited by depth at each field, and texture was assessed using a modified pipette method38. At transplant, a soil core was taken with a bucket auger down to one meter from a central plot in each field and used to calculate bulk density at each depth increment. We then took a weighted average of GWC at each plot to calculate available water using bulk density and a pedotransfer function based on soil texture. Potentially leachable soil nitrate levels were calculated for each field using nitrate concentrations from the top 15cm at the harvest sampling event, which occurred within the first three weeks of harvest. Though the plants continued to grow for the duration of the harvest, it is unlikely that nitrate from the top 15cm were used due to the soil’s low water content, and no precipitation orirrigation occurred for the duration of harvest. Bulk density in the top 15cm was assumed to be 1.2 g soil/cm3 as experimental bulk density was measured with 1m of soil and likely overestimated the bulk density at the surface of the soil.Soil sub-samples taken from 0-15cm and 30-60cm at midseason were set aside for DNA analysis. In addition to the experimental plots, samples were also taken from both depths at the nearest irrigated crop production areas and non-cultivated soils, such as hedgerows, field sides, etc. . Gloves were worn while taking these samples and the auger was cleaned thoroughly with a wire brush between each sample. Roots were also collected from one plant per plot and were dug out using a trowel from the top 15 cm of soil. These samples were stored on-site in an ice-filled cooler and transferred to a -80 degree C freezer immediately upon returning to the lab . Roots were later washed in PBS Buffer/Tween20 and ground using liquid N.The ITS2 rRNA region was selected for amplification and fungal community analysis. This region has been successfully utilized in recent AMF community studies. Though AMF-specific primers exist , we chose the more general ITS2 fungal primers for several key reasons. First, in the field, SSU primers detect more taxa in nonGlomeraceae families but give lower resolution in the Glomeraceae family. Because the four species in our inoculant are in the Glomeraceae family and this family is dominant in agricultural systems and clay soils, we prioritized species resolution in Glomeraceae over other families. More broadly, the higher variability in the ITS2 region can lead to more unassigned taxa, but does not run as much of a risk that distinct taxa will be lumped together. Third, and of particular importance in our root samples, these primers are better able to select for fungal over plant material than other ITS primer options. Finally, ITS2 allowed us to also examine the broader fungal community in our samples, whereas SSU and LSU options are AMF specific and cannot be used to characterize other fungi.We modeled all yield and fruit quality data with Bayesian generalized mixed effect models. Due to zero-inflated data, we used hurdle models for yields and blossom end rot , while percent dry weight was always non-zero and therefore did not require a hurdle. To pick a model family, we modeled the non-zero data from each outcome variable with gaussian, lognormal, and gamma families, using Bayesian leave-one out estimates of the expected log pointwise predictive densities to compare model fits. Gamma models showed the best fit for each outcome variable and were therefore used for all linear models.In addition to the variables of interest, each model had a random effect of field and block within field. Yields were modeled using the total marketable fruit weight harvested from each plot at each harvest point, while BER was modeled using the proportion of fruits that were classified as non-marketable due to BER from each plot at each harvest point.

Amidst an increasingly industrialized food system, farmers and activists the world over have advocated and struggled to move agricultural production towards diversified farming systems. Agroecology–a form of agriculture based in small-scale, thought-intensive, diversified farming systems and the socio-political movements necessary to defend them and advocate for their wider adoption–has emerged as a combination of science, practice, and movement that can lead farming systems towards ecological, economic, and social sustainability. As climate, economic, and political injustices accelerate in the food system, transitions towards agroecology are increasingly urgent; however, these transitions have been slow to gain traction in dominant political and economic regimes. The current era of climate change is creating shocks that open windows for food systems transition, forcing farmers, researchers, and policy makers to consider new approaches to farming and food production. My own work has focused on water scarcity, which is perhaps the most salient climate shock in California where my home institution is located, and a key agricultural concern across the nation and globe. In California, the 2020–2022 drought caused the estimated loss of 15,000 jobs and $3 billion in agricultural output, and followed a similarly devastating drought in 2011- 2016, calling attention to an urgent need to address future water scarcity in the state. Meanwhile, 60% of US farms experienced drought in 2012, rolling grow tables with extreme drought in the Midwestern US causing price spikes and yield declines, followed by extensive flooding in 2019.

In response, local, state, and national advocacy groups and policymakers have begun to call for and implement policy with the intention of making farm systems more resilient to water shortages. For example, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California now calls for groundwater basin water budgets to be balanced by 2042; however, there is considerable debate surrounding how to achieve such a goal. Given the complexities of the systems in which these policies operate, implementation can be difficult, and even the best-intended policies can act to either create or curtail opportunities for transitions towards agroecology. In my own work, I have seen climate-motivated policies in the US–in this case the bio-fuel mandate–lead farmers in the Midwest towards degradative soil practices, while farmers in California respond to water scarcity by growing the tastiest tomatoes chefs have ever encountered. As farmers navigate a complex web of physical, biological, political, and economic environments, they arrive at a wide array of outcomes that reflect both a unique local context and influences that act on entire regions and nations. Yet current economic and political structures have overwhelmingly led US farmers to make choices that have moved agricultural towards the inputintensive, large-scale production that now defines the country’s dominant agriculture. First, what are the farming practices that actually improve farms’ capacity to adapt to water scarcity without jeopardizing farmer livelihoods? And second, can policies support an agroecological transition towards these practices that does not allow their cooptation towards an industrial agriculture–and conversely, what policies are leading our country towards input-intensive industrialized systems even in the face of changing climates?

These questions play out in many ways across different agricultural landscapes, and I do not begin to tackle them in their entirety. Instead this dissertation explores both of these questions in two distinct systems: large-scale corn-based rotations in the US Midwest, and tomato dry farming in small-scale, diversified operations on the northern edge of California’s Central Coast region. In my attempts to answer these questions, I have tried to use the tools at my disposal to center farmers and their experience, wisdom, and intimate knowledge of the lands they work. From participatory research, to farmer interviews, to simply trying to understand farmers as complex actors in complex systems, my work has led me to see farmers as adept scientists, and I hope to honor and complement their skills with a few of my own. Given farmers’ limited access to time and resources, I have used mapping, lab analyses, field data collection, and statistics to help farmers answer the questions they find most pressing and garner the policy support needed to let diversified farming systems thrive. I begin in my first chapter, Biophysical and policy factors predict simplified crop rotations in the US Midwest, by asking what policy and environmental factors push farmers towards diversifying vs. simplifying their crop rotations in the US Midwest. After the 2012 drought, there is more reason than ever to shift this historically homogenized, highly input intensive agricultural region towards more complex rotations, which promote soil health and stabilize yields in times of environmental stress including drought. However, while soil health benefits give farmers every reason to explore complex rotations, there has been a continued trend towards rotation simplification in the region over the past century.

I therefore explored how policy was reshaping this system, asking how top-down policy pressures combine with biophysical conditions to create fine-scale simplification patterns that threaten the quality and long-term productivity of the United States’ most fertile soils. Given the availability of public, spatially explicit data, I developed a novel indicator of crop rotational complexity and applied it to 1.5 million fields across the US Midwest, using bootstrapped linear mixed models to regress field-level rotational complexity against biophysical and policy-driven factors. The second and third chapters explore water resiliency in California, using tomato dry farming in the Central Coast region as a case study. Dry farming–a management system that relies on diversified farming practices to build soil water holding capacity and fertility–allows farmers to grow crops with little to no irrigation and has quickly garnered interest from farmers and policymakers as an alternative to the irrigation-intensive farming that is nearly ubiquitous in the rest of the state. While dry farming is an ancient practice with rich histories in many regions, perhaps most notably the Hopi people in Northeast Arizona, vegetable dry farming emerged more recently in California, with growers first marketing dry farm tomatoes as such in the Central Coast region in the early 1980’s. In a lineage that likely traces back to Italian and Spanish growers, dry farming on the Central Coast relies on winter rains to store water in soils that plants can then access throughout California’s rain free summers, allowing farmers to grow produce with little to no external water inputs. While this system holds great interest and promise for farmers in California, no peer-reviewed research has been published to date on vegetable dry farming in the state. In my second chapter, Deep nutrients and fungal communities support tomato fruit yield and quality in dry farm management systems, I collaborated with farmers to identify and answer key management questions in the dry farm community. This participatory-based process allowed me to build relationships with farmers and begin to coalesce a community of practice that farmers were excited to connect to. As advocacy groups begin to shine a light on dry farming as a potential key to California’s water resilient future, flood drain table it felt crucial to engage with the farmers who champion this system to collectively come to a deeper understanding of how dry farming functions and the farming practices that can best support its success. Growers were primarily concerned with fruit yield and quality, with fruit quality being of particular interest due to the quality-based price premiums that farmers rely on when growing in a region with some of the highest agricultural land values in the nation. Managing soils to promote quality and yields presents a unique challenge in dry farm systems, as the surface soils that farmers typically target for fertility management in irrigated systems dry down quickly to a point where roots will likely have difficulty accessing nutrients and water. As deficit irrigation and drought change microbial community composition in agricultural and natural systems, farmers were also interested in how dry farm management might shift fungal communities, and if that in turn would improve tomato harvest outcomes. Beyond general shifts in fungal communities, farmers were specifically curious about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculants, which are increasingly available from commercial sellers. Recent research has shown that AMF can help plants tolerate water stress, and that inoculation can improve harvest outcomes in some agricultural systems.

Farmers therefore wanted to test commercial AMF inoculants’ potential benefits in the dry farm context.It is difficult to imagine what this dissertation would have looked like without the collaboration, mentorship, and friendship of my advisor, Timothy Bowles. Working with Tim has been one of the greatest joys, privileges, and teachers of my career, and his influence can be seen in every corner of the ideas and approaches in these pages. Tim’s example is one I want to follow wherever I go, whether it be his drive to include justice and equity in conversations of science, his thoughtful and generous approach to any collaboration, or his commitment to honoring family, friends, art, and his own well being alongside the demands of an academic lifestyle. My thanks also go to Todd Dawson and Eoin Brodie, who generously served on my committee, leant me all sorts of fun field and lab equipment, invited me to lab meetings, and provided valuable gut checks all along the research process. Todd’s enthusiasm for understanding plant-AMF symbioses has been contagious, and I so appreciate our conversations and the excitement they breathed back into me when I was mired in research logistics. Eoin continues to surprise me with his ability to glance at my results and understand them better than I do, and my work is certainly better for it. Little of this research would have been possible without Jim Leap. As far as I’m aware, Jim knows every dry farmer in the state of California, and he connected me to nearly every farmer I worked with. I’m honored to consider him a friend and a mentor, and delighted every time I get to visit his farm. Jim is limitless in his capacity to teach and learn about diversified farm management, and also in his ability to guide me towards joy in this work. Of course literally none of the dry farm work in this dissertation would have been possible without the brilliant farmers I was able to collaborate with. Though of course I won’t out them all here for privacy reasons, I hope they know that they are both the reason I do this work, and the reason I can do this work. Of all the farms I have gotten to connect to over the course of my dissertation, I want to give Brisa Ranch an extra dose of gratitude. Verónica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, Cole Mazariegos Anastassiou, and Claire Woodard have taught me what agroecology can look like, and their farm has been the inspiration for much of the research I have done in this PhD. It was always such a gift to stop by after a long field day and remember what this work is all about. Rose Curley, Alex Dhond, Melanie Rodríguez, Javier Matta, and Bethany Andoko were at my side for the work that has built the foundation of my research. Amidst sample collection and analysis that at times seemed interminable, you kept me afloat with your careful diligence and enthusiasm, and allowed me to grow with you as we explored our way through the research process. My gratitude also goes to the many other undergraduates whose work made this research possible: Karly Ortega, Grace Santos, Yordi Gil-Santos, Amiri Taylor, Moe Sumino, Gisel De La Cerda, and Joey Mann. Also at my side throughout this work were the members of the Berkeley Agroecology Lab: Cole Rainey, Kenzo Esquivel, Miguel Ochoa, Paige Stanley, Aidee Guzman, Ansel Klein, HannahWaterhouse, Janina Dierks, Franz Bender, Maria Mooshammer, Khondoker Dastogeer, Jennifer Thompson, Kait Libbey, and Kangogo Sogomo have created a community that I could rely on, learn from, and grow with. From before day one, Cole has shown up for me as a friend, sounding board, teacher, and mood-lifter, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the trajectory of my career is better for their influence. Kenzo is a joy to work, cook, organize, and make music with, and his friendship has buoyed me along this ride. Ben Goldstein, though not technically part of the lab, holds a similar place in my heart, and has become an invaluable colleague as well as friend.

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.