Other CBOs promote democratic participation among their members by teaching them to flex collective power and engage directly with funders and decision-makers. This democratic participation may be conceptualized narrowly for the organization’s specific purposes, or it may be developed more broadly as a “public-goods politics” that seeks to educate voters on defining problems and demanding new, more community-based solutions if the current system isn’t working for them . In other words, there are multiple logics through which community-based organizations like gardening programs can promote “civic engagement” among their constituents, and researchers should be careful to assess the nature of political participation at work rather than treating it as a flat, present-or-absent feature . Regardless of their strategies for engaging members, attracting resources, and building legitimacy, civil-society groups such as garden programs and other CBOs must navigate a challenging organizational environment. While many of these organizations have expanded in size and scope under roll-back/roll-out neoliberalization, funding for the work of social service provision is still limited and the competition for it is strong. For organizations based in low income communities, tension may develop between maintaining legitimacy in the local community and building a professionalized reputation with funders and policy-makers . In a local political environment unresponsive to grassroots community pressure, organizations are unlikely to engage in efforts at civic participation at all . Furthermore, receiving funding from government sources may lead nonprofits to moderate their advocacy tactics, engaging in more insider and less outsider strategies [though see also Fyall and McGuire 2015]. Thus, a study of community gardening programs should examine the extent to which garden organizations hew to the priorities of funders versus gardeners themselves, grow trays and analysis should also pay close attention to the tactics chosen for engaging with city leaders.

The same dynamics have been identified for social movement organizations at various scales, which have been found to survive and succeed in their goals by navigating shifting political opportunities while continuing to mobilize resources from their environment . Especially for movements of the poor, the choice to formalize an organization may bring greater access to resources, but it can also constrain protest tactics . Systems that control power and resources largely function to conserve the existing institutional arrangements that afford them this control , in part through the influence they exert directly on policy making, and in part through their role in resource allocation . Ultimately, any organization working to shift the balance of resources and power in society—such as revising land use policy in a way that limits development—must navigate the constraints of an organizational environment in which better-resourced and more powerful entities will resist such change.In spite of the inertia imposed by powerful forces in the organizational environment, social relations do change over time, and social movement organizations are influential to this process. As it relates to urban gardens, community groups have organized to challenge the urban growth machine, bring equity to the food system, or counter other processes they perceive as harmful to them through activism and social movements. Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as contentious action by a group of less powerful people who use “dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, action-oriented cultural frames” to maintain their collective action toward desired ends even as they come up against more-powerful opponents. This definition serves to distinguish social movements from elite political manipulations and from less confrontational forms of organized civic participation—all of which are forms of action that occur in the varied landscape of urban agriculture and the organizations that promote it. In studying the effectiveness and long-term viability of social movements, theorists have identified several important analytical dimensions.

Political and discursive opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and framing interact in both the emergence and development of social movements . Conceptualizing the socio-political environments in which movements must operate, “political opportunity structures” describe the legal and institutional infrastructure that enables or constrains various forms of political action , while “discursive opportunity structures” refer to cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate, forming the context in which social movement claims and actions will be received by the wider public . Social movements are more likely to succeed when they can take advantage of favorable opportunity structures, but they also need to draw in sufficient resources to maintain their functioning such as material support, legitimacy, information, leadership, and active participation from movement supporters . One critical strategy for a movement to attract supporters, elicit active participation, and sway decision-makers to support their agenda is through strategic framing. “Framing” refers to the negotiation of meaning and the deployment of collective action frames that work to persuade a greater share of the public and/or decision-makers that the social movement’s goals should be met . While opportunity structures are largely exogenous conditions that structure movement possibilities, social movement leaders and participants can significantly influence resource mobilization and framing processes through their choice of actions. Research has shown that the success and survival of both CBOs and social movement organizations is partially contingent upon the organizational environment in which they operate, and that an organization’s ability to attract resources from its environment – including both material resources and legitimacy – has a significant influence on outcomes . The quality and decisions of leadership also matter for harnessing the opportunities and resources that exist in the organization’s environment.

Legitimacy is a critical resource for all types of organizations, not just those that are part of social movements. Initially, organizations seek legitimacy to gain credibility with their target audience and organizations in their environment; to do so, they need to establish a clear meaning for their activities . Legitimacy that builds credibility is necessary for organizations to gain passive support for their existence, and organizational scholars argue that a conceptually distinct aspect of legitimacy is that which affords continuity as organizations work to motivate “affirmative commitments” from at least some people— employees, customers, grantors, and others who keep the organization functional . Thus, motivating action that will sustain the organization requires not just gaining but maintaining legitimacy—processes requiring different strategies that must be tailored to the organizational environment . For urban agriculture organizations, both gaining and maintaining legitimacy present challenges. Since the act of growing food in cities has fallen outside many people’s expectations, gardening organizations have needed to engage in public-facing efforts to make their activities legible and legitimate. Once they have credibility, urban agriculture organizations must employ additional legitimation strategies to ensure continuity, as gardens require consistent labor to maintain to keep up their legitimized appearance as a garden rather than a weed patch. Critically, building and maintaining legitimacy is a process “dependent on a history of events” , which decreases the possibility for organizations to change their own practices and narratives of meaning without risking a loss of legitimacy. While organizational scholars have articulated the challenges involved in gaining and maintaining legitimacy, as well as in challenging and responding to challenges of legitimacy, little research investigates what happens when changes in external conditions necessitate new forms of legitimacy to maintain existing activities and operations. For urban agriculture organizations, this is especially relevant when real estate conditions change and gardens that have been legitimized as temporary spaces are threatened with development. If organizations seek to overcome elite interest in repurposing the land, they face the challenge of reshaping themselves from community-based organizations providing services into social movement organizations staking new claims and demanding change in a policy or paradigm. While both CBOs and SMOs have been defined and widely discussed in the literature, dry racks for weed little research exists that explores the extent to which their activities overlap. Minkoff develops the concept of “hybrid organizational forms,” but does so specifically in the context of identity-based organizations born of social movements that adapted to an increasingly partisan environment. The concept has not been applied or analyzed for organizations with other origins, such as those that begin as service organizations and take up social movement work later on. Similarly, Sampson et al. urge the use of a social movements lens to analyze civic participation, describing an increase in “blended social action” that combines protest with civic action. While this research finds that collective action events tend to occur more often in neighborhoods with a higher density of nonprofit organizations, the authors do not examine the role of organizations in mobilizing blended social action. More research is needed to investigate the dynamics involved when organizations blur the lines between community-based and social movement work. When they have gotten involved in land use contestation, organizations that coordinate and advocate for urban agriculture illustrate a variety of strategies by which community-based organizations can work to assert resident interests and achieve political victories for less powerful groups.

Urban agriculture reflects the on-the-ground blurriness between community based organizations and social movement organizations, as the groups that practice and advocate for community gardening and urban farming take many forms. A range of organizations exists to direct activity at a single garden or farm, to oversee citywide networks of community gardens, and/or to advocate for the political interests of urban agriculture practitioners—particularly legal status and land access. This dissertation provides a comparative historical analysis of urban agriculture organizations in three US cities, focusing on their efforts to secure land for gardens by promoting various benefits of urban agriculture and organizing pushes for municipal policy change, and providing insights about the dynamics of urban political contestation and the nature of hybrid organizational forms that work at the boundary between CBOs and SMOs. Situated in the context of multifaceted environmental degradation, state retrenchment, market primacy, and widening inequality, the urban agriculture organizations described herein provide insight into emerging possibilities for counter-hegemonic action at the local scale. Gaining permanent access to urban land for the purpose of social reproduction through agricultural initiatives means asking municipal governments to cede some control of one of the few domains from which they haven’t willingly rolled back in the last 50 years: land use governance. In this way, it is similar to other prominent citizen efforts today like the growing calls for community policing. Efforts to legitimize community gardens as a long-term land use are also indicative of wider struggles to redefine the value and place of nature in schema that determine collective decision-making. By examining the ways in which urban agriculture organizations navigate an environment with limited resources, public skepticism, often underprivileged and politically inexperienced members, and powerful countervailing political interests, we can better understand the dynamics required to accomplish meaningful structural change in modern cities.Organizational scholars have long investigated how an organization’s features, including its goals, structure, and relationships with other organizations, influence its lifespan and the outcomes it achieves. This chapter will build upon existing research about third-sector organizations , which has shown how decisions made in the context of these features matter for the success of civil society organizations. Day-to-day decisions about the actions an organization will take—strategies to pursue resources, the narrative communicated to target audiences, the nature of events and services, and the people they will be targeted to—are central to how the organization navigates its environment and what it accomplishes. In all three cities, such decisions made within urban agriculture organizations served to legitimize the organizations themselves; moreover, as organizational actors worked to demonstrate that their spaces could achieve outcomes desired for the organization’s own legitimacy, they prioritized some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits over others. In so doing, these organizations ultimately shaped the local narratives about what urban agriculture could offer each city. This chapter contributes new perspective on the ways that an organization’s strategic pursuit of legitimacy not only works to institutionalize the organization itself, but may also work to institutionalize ideas and social forms in the physical as well as the organizational environment. I argue that organizational sociology can further extend the concept of institutionalization by drawing on urban political ecology’s insights regarding the interplay of discursive and biophysical processes in reshaping urban space and, by extension, reshaping public understandings of socio-environmental space and the organizations that manage it.

The following sections provide a brief history of each city’s main community gardening programs, the political and economic conditions in which they have operated, and the policy victories they achieved.Like many cities in the US, Milwaukee has faced economic challenges from the 1960s onward related to globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs. The challenge has been particularly acute in Rustbelt cities such as Milwaukee, which lost over 100,000 residents between 1960 and 1980—a decline of almost 15%. The city won federal funding to support urban gardening in 1978, and the resulting Shoots n Roots program expanded upon earlier cityled efforts with a focus on making use of vacant lots to mitigate the growing urban blight that had become a visible symptom of the city’s economic decline . The city permitted Shoots n Roots gardens on a year-by-year basis, wanting to ensure that the lots remained available for redevelopment; many sites were only part of the program for a few years. Shoots n Roots was ultimately housed in the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee County Extension, and like other public entities, the Shoots n Roots program was not positioned to engage in contentious politics, which precluded pressing the city for long-term land access. The program gradually came to focus on large, county-owned parcels outside of the city limits as its federal funding was reduced over time. Consequently, while the Extension still supports community gardening activity in and around the city of Milwaukee, this program is no longer the primary administrator for urban gardens in the city. Milwaukee’s primary community gardening program, Milwaukee Urban Gardens , how to dry cannabis was founded in 2000 by local residents who had lost their gardens to development following a period of relatively stable and gradually improving economic conditions in the 1990s.

Originally created to purchase community garden sites and advocate for long-term garden and green space preservation, in 2013 the program merged with an environmental programming organization, Groundwork Milwaukee, and now serves as a single point-of-contact for anyone in the city looking to get involved with a garden or start a new one. Through the MUG program, renamed Milwaukee Grows in 2017, the city grants leases of generally 1-3 years for use of its vacant lots for community gardens. Groundwork Milwaukee also provides liability insurance, educational programming, and a paid youth work force to help residents build and maintain gardens. While the City of Milwaukee does not guarantee that its land will remain permanently available for the roughly 100 MUG community gardens, it has agreed to sell a few lots for urban agriculture projects in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, with an electoral mandate for progressive and environmental policies in the 2010s, the city government became actively involved in developing the local food system through the HOME GR/OWN program. Created by Mayor Tom Barrett in 2013, this initiative seeks to streamline the legal process for residents and groups wanting to build gardens, commercial farms, or new parks on city-owned vacant land. The city partners with a wide range of local organizations to carry out sustainability and economic development projects through this initiative. However, the HOME GR/OWN program could come to an end at the whim of a subsequent administration. Perhaps because the city has been so supportive and not inclined to sell off any of the garden sites, MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee have not been actively advocating for a more permanent legal basis for their gardens in recent years. While the city’s political climate is fairly liberal and recent green initiatives have been popular with the public, local economic conditions remain challenging; the city retains control of vacant parcels in case opportunities arise to generate tax revenue and employment on most of the land that is currently permitted for MUG’s gardens.

To build a more comprehensive and historical understanding of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, I interviewed 18 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in forming and implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee, and other organizations that interviewees identified as having contributed to the local popularity of urban agriculture. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel . Combining data from these sources, I gained an up-close perspective on the process of contesting urban agriculture’s value as a land use in Milwaukee, and I developed a unique dataset of Shoots n Roots and MUG-affiliated gardens in order to map their locations over time. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was already nearly 150 years old when it began its community gardening program, Philadelphia Green, in 1974. Originally centered around the appreciation of ornamental plants and landscape design, PHS grew into “a more holistic understanding of plants as a tool for urban transformation” when it took on the role of greening Philadelphia in the 1970s. At this time, similar to both Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s population was shrinking and the economy was under strain from high unemployment and inflation. Over time, the Philadelphia Green program evolved to offer a range of greening services, and PHS played a role in shaping the larger policy debate around vacant land in Philadelphia. Today, the organization contracts with the City of Philadelphia to maintain parks, greenbelts, and museum grounds, in addition to supporting many of the city’s community gardens. For decades, these functions coexisted as part of the Philadelphia Green program; PHS has recently rebranded the work as a range of initiatives including City Harvest , Neighborhood Gardens Trust , Civic Landscapes , and LandCare .

The program’s urban agriculture network includes 140 current community gardens and urban farms across Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia has long supported PHS’s greening work on vacant lots, but over decades of collaboration the community gardens were generally viewed as a temporary land use. Philadelphia’s population hit its lowest between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, yet this period was also one in which many gardens were lost. Between 1996 and 2008, more than half of the city’s gardens were lost to parcel development or other changing conditions . PHS was involved in some land preservation efforts, but the organization did not pursue a blanket policy to preserve community gardens. As the discouraging trend of garden loss became apparent, and especially when a 2012 zoning amendment threatened the security of 20% of the remaining gardens, the city faced growing pressure to support and preserve its community gardens. Advocates from organizations including PHS, the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, and others sought changes to the city’s land disposition system, which at the time considered lots with gardens to be “vacant,” in order to improve the flow of information between gardeners and the city. They succeeded in halting the zoning amendment and then secured passage of the Philadelphia Land Bank Act in 2013. In the process of streamlining vacant lot disposition to spur economic development, best way to dry cannabis the Land Bank must give gardeners priority to acquire their sites rather than listing these sites as vacant and available for developers. Today, PHS has a mostly indirect role in advocating for garden preservation. Its close affiliate Neighborhood Gardens Trust maintains a voice in policy debates while raising money to purchase and save gardens facing development threats as the city undergoes a period of rapid gentrification. In the last decade, in a context of gentrification and displacement heavily affecting low income residents and communities of color, other organizations—most notably Soil Generation, a Black-and Brown-led coalition of growers—have taken the lead in the citywide efforts to organize and advocate for garden preservation and land use policy. Soil Generation and allied groups continue to press the city for more socially just land dispensation through the Land Bank and for broader responsiveness to resident priorities regarding urban agriculture and other community-oriented land uses. To assess the organizational dynamics and decisions involved in securing land for urban agriculture in Philadelphia, and to enable comparisons with Milwaukee, I collected data from similar sources. I interviewed 20 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in advocating for or implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the City of Philadelphia. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Integrating these data for my analysis, I gained a detailed understanding of the historical process by which urban agriculture’s value as a land use has been constructed and contested in Philadelphia, and I developed a unique dataset of PHS-affiliated gardens in order to map their locations over time. Since 1973, the City of Seattle has managed a network of community gardens through its P-Patch program. Like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, in the early 1970s Seattle was struggling with high unemployment and inflation, and the P-Patch program was created as a way to make unused urban land available for food production. Unlike Milwaukee and Philadelphia, however, Seattle’s P-Patch program is administered by the city itself. For almost 50 years, gardeners have succeeded in convincing city officials to maintain the program’s funding through municipal budget cuts and to avoid selling garden sites when development pressure increased during periods of economic growth . Today, the city devotes many acres of its own land to the P-Patch gardens, including some lots that were purchased specifically for new P-Patches. The city program’s staff assign garden plots, organize events, and train the volunteer site leaders who maintain gardens.

Early in the history of the P-Patch program, volunteer site leaders organized a nonprofit to improve communication and pool their expertise. This nonprofit took on an advocacy role in the mid-1980s when Seattle saw a period of economic growth and gardens began to face development threats. The nonprofit reorganized as a land trust to take ownership of a saved garden, Pinehurst, which became the city’s first permanent community garden. The nonprofit continued to advocate for stronger protections for the P-Patches, winning their inclusion in the city’s 1994 Comprehensive Plan, and passage of the Protect Our Parks initiative in 1997, which makes community gardens and other recreational spaces on city land virtually permanent. This policy ensured that the city could not sell any land used for P-Patches as the local economy has grown, fueled by its strong technology sector, even through a feverish real estate market in the mid-2010s. Today, the P-Patch nonprofit continues advocating for the gardens and providing administrative support to the P-Patches , while expanding out from Seattle to help promote community gardening across the region. To compare the movement strategies, organizational dynamics and decisions involved in securing land for urban agriculture in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Seattle, I collected data from similar sources in all three cities. For Seattle, I interviewed 17 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in advocating for or implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from the P-Patch program office and the City of Seattle Municipal Archives. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Integrating these data for my analysis, I traced the historical process by which urban agriculture gained recognition and security as a land use in Seattle, and I developed a historical dataset of P-Patch gardens in order to map their locations over time. In chapter 1, I survey prior research on urban agriculture and relevant theoretical frameworks, including food justice, political ecology, urban political economy, community based organizations under neoliberalism, organizational legitimacy, and social movement processes. Situating my work at the intersection of these literatures, I highlight the limited attention paid to land use contestation for urban agriculture, on the one hand, and the broader need for more understanding of how community-based organizations contribute to urban social movements on the other.

Over the course of this research, many of my friends and family who visited automatically blamed the pickers’ poor living and working conditions on the growers and assumed that these growers could easily rectify the situation. This supposition is supported by other writings on farm workers, most of which describe the details of pickers’ lives but leave out the experiences of the growers . The fact that the perspectives of farm management are generally overlooked encourages readers’ assumptions that growers are wealthy, selfish, or unconcerned. The stark reality and precarious future of the farm described next remind us that the situation is more complex. The corporatization of US agriculture and the growth of global free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. Thus, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farm workers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice . The structural nature of the labor hierarchy comes into further relief when the hopes and values of the growers are considered. The Tanaka Farm executives are ethical, good people who want the best for their workers and their local community. They have a vision of a good society that includes family farming and opportunities for social advancement for all people. They want to treat their workers well and leave a legacy for their children. They participate in churches and non-profit organizations working toward such hopes in society. They asked for my opinions on how the labor camps could be improved for the workers. After a picker strike in which explicit racist treatment of the pickers in the fields was brought to light, the growers were visibly surprised and upset.

Perhaps instead of blaming the growers, industrial drying racks it is more appropriate to understand them as human beings doing the best they can in the midst of an unequal and harsh system. Rob Tanaka is a tall, bearded man with a kind, gentle personality. He is in charge of agricultural production of the farm, planning everything from planting to harvest and overseeing those in charge of each crop. His office is located in a small house in the middle of the berry fields, several miles from the main offices. He spends most of his time in this office, although he also works via laptop in the small lounge of the main office building and visits the fields often. His primary concerns relate directly to farming—weather, insects and birds, soil quality, and labor—although he is also concerned by the survival of the farm. Over several conversations in the small lounge in the main office building, Rob described to me his anxieties related to his work and the farm’s techniques to buffer their vulnerability.In this conversation, Rob indicates his primary worries regarding the most important variables affecting not only his job but the feasibility of the farm business as a whole—labor, weather, urban growth, regulations, and the market. He explains that this family farm has developed a ‘‘portfolio of crops’’ in order to buffer their vulnerability to the market. In another conversation, Rob told me about a recent meeting of the farm executives about being a ‘‘great company.’’ He explained that every time he heard the word ‘‘great’’ all he could see in the discussion was profitability to shareholders. This made him angry and he said, ‘‘We already are a great company, and if this is what being a great company means, then I want to be a good company.’’ He described his frustration with the farm becoming more corporate and bureaucratic. He liked it more when it was a small family business and he ‘‘didn’t have to go through all these hoops to write a check.’’ These excerpts show Rob Tanaka concerned with the farm’s survival for future generations in the midst of a difficult market while resisting becoming another corporate agribusiness.

Another of the executives is Tom, a lean white man in his late 40s brought in by the Tanaka family to help the farm compete on the international small fruit market. Tom has an office in the trailer with the other main executive offices, although he has taken more care to decorate it than most, proudly displaying a colorful painting of workers picking strawberries in China—one of the very places against which he is competing. Previously, Tom was in charge of processing and marketing for a large Mexican strawberry producer. At the Tanaka Farm, his job starts before sunrise, when he calls his competitors and potential buyers in Poland, China, and then Chile. Later in the day, he can take breaks to meet friends or eat out. He daily attempts to find a competitive advantage by changing the fruit grown in various fields or by buying fruit from other farms to process and then sell. Over the course of several months, Tom describes the stark competitive disadvantages of the farm in domestic and global terms.Tom paints a stark picture of the effects of global free markets in the context of large economic inequalities. He worries daily about competition with the California variety of berries along with the stretching of its flavor via food science. Although Tom is dedicated to his job, starting work before the sun rises, he does not have much hope for the future of berry farms in the Pacific Northwest nor in the United States in general. The farm executives are anxious to ensure the survival of the farm for future generations in the midst of bleak economic trends. They work long days, worrying about many variables only partially within their control and doing their best to run a family farm that treats its workers well. They are very aware of their own structural vulnerability. They also have some control over their own schedules. They take breaks when they choose to eat or work out, talk on the phone or meet with a friend. They have comfortable houses, private and clean indoor bathrooms and kitchens, insulation and heating, and quiet.

They have private indoor offices with phones and computers as well as employees ‘‘under’’ them .Most of the administrative assistants are white, along with a few Latino US citizens. All are female. They work seated at desks in open spaces without privacy. They are in charge of reception, interacting with white local residents and business people as well as with Mexican farm workers. Sally is the year-round front desk receptionist. She is a lean, white woman, approximately 40 years old, often smiling. She grew up in the same town in which the farm is located and lives with her husband and children in a relatively small house. The reception desk used to face away from the front counter such that anyone entering approached the receptionist’s back. Sally tries to treat the workers well and turning around the desk when she first arrived was one step in this direction. She helped arrange loans for the Mexican farm workers one year when the picking date was moved back and the workers were living out of their cars, waiting without money or food. Crew bosses and farm executives regularly reprimand her for being too nice to the workers. She has been told to be ‘‘more quick,’’ ‘‘less friendly.’’ In addition, she feels disrespected by the people ‘‘above her’’ , treated like a ‘‘peon.’’ They sometimes give her advice on her work or give her jobs to do without the common courtesies of ‘‘please’’ or ‘‘thank you.’’ Maria is 30, a bilingual Latina from Texas. Her great grandparents moved to the United States from Mexico. She lives in the nearest labor camp with heat and insulation. She works several positions May through November, sometimes at the front desk with Sally, commercial greenhouse benches sometimes in the portable unit where pickers can ask questions and pick up mail in the afternoon. On Fridays, she works in the wooden shed where paychecks are passed out to workers in a long line. Her first summers on the farm, including the summer she was pregnant, she picked berries and worked with a hoe. After four years with the hoe, she was moved up to desk work due largely to her ability to speak English fluently. Like many other workers on the farm, she first heard of indigenous Mexicans while working on the farm. She explained her work to me while we sat in the portable, occasionally interrupted by a picker seeking their mail.The crop managers are in charge of all details involved in the efficient production of a specific crop, from plowing to planting, pruning to spraying, picking to delivery, and finally to processing. They have private offices in the field house amidst the berry fields nearby the largest labor camp, although they also spend a fair amount of time walking through the fields overseeing.

During harvest, they begin by 5 a.m. seven days a week and finish in the early evening. They can take a break when they choose to eat, run errands, or go quickly home. The crop managers worry about the availability of machinery, the effects of weather on the crops, and the docility of their labor force. They have some control over how much the pickers are paid, and they have several field bosses below them enforcing their instructions. Jeff is a 30-year-old white man who recently finished a degree in agricultural marketing at a university in California. He manages blueberries and raspberries. Jeff told me about his job as he drove his large white pick-up with two large dogs in back. We drove to an agriculture store to buy large concrete drains for the blueberry fields and to Costco to buy tri-tip steaks for a potluck at his church. He explained several simultaneous tasks in the raspberry fields to illustrate the many things a crop manager has to oversee. The thing that causes him the most anxiety is having multiple bosses on a family farm without a strict chain of command. He also worries about weather, and about harvest crews: ‘‘It is what it is, you know. Sometimes people walk out and sometimes people pick. It’s kind of like the weather, you can’t really predict it and you don’t really have control over it, but usually it ends up working out all right.’’ He went on, ‘‘We make the prices fair, so if the crew walks out [on strike], we just say ‘hey, we’ll be here tomorrow’ and that’s the way it is. They can come back if they want.’’ He told me that all the people on raspberry machines are Latinos from Texas whereas those picking blueberries are ‘‘O-hacan’’ , although he also told me that he cannot really tell the difference. That week, Jeff was in the midst of budgeting for next year, trying to predict the crop yield. He predicts based on bud count: for each fruit bud in the fall, he expects seven berries the following summer, although a freeze could make the fruit smaller or kill the buds altogether.Several supervisors, often called ‘‘crew bosses,’’ work under each crop manager. Each directs a crew of 10 to 20 pickers. They walk through the fields, inspecting and telling workers to pick more quickly and carefully. The crew bosses are under constant supervision from the crop managers, although they can take short bathroom breaks and they often carry on light-hearted conversations with coworkers. Most crew bosses are US Latinos, with a few mestizo Mexicans and one Mixteco indigenous Oaxacan. They live in the insulated, year-round labor camp. Some of the crew bosses call the Oaxacan workers derogatory names. The crew boss most often accused by pickers of such racist treatment has a daughter, Barbara, who is also a crew boss. Barbara is a bilingual Latina from Texas in her early twenties who has worked the harvest at the farm for 11 years. She attends a community college in Texas every spring and hopes to become a history teacher. She is upset that other crew bosses call Oaxacan people pinche Oaxaco or Indio estupido . She explains to me that Oaxacans are afraid to complain or demand better working conditions because they do not want to lose their jobs. She describes a farm policy stating that if a crew boss fires a picker, they can never be hired by anyone else on the farm. She explains, ‘‘It’s unfair. I think there should be checks and balances.’’ Her family learned English in Texas as well as in the farm-sponsored English classes each night after work.

Using the ggplot and tidyverse packages , we displayed the difference in values between Field A and Field B for each indicator for soil fertility sampled at each farm using bar plots. We also included error bars to show the range of uncertainty in these indicators for soil fertility. Lastly, we further compared Field A and Field B for each farm using radar plots. To generate the radar plots, we first scaled each soil indicator from 0 to 1. Using Jenks natural breaks optimization, we then grouped each farm based on low, medium, and high N-based fertilizer application, as this soil management metric was the strongest coefficient loading from the first principal component . Using the fmsb package in R , we used an averaging approach for each level of N-based fertilizer application to create three radar plots that each compared Field A and Field B across the eight indicators for soil fertility. Farmers provided an overview of their farm operation, including farm size , the total number of crops each farm planted per growing season at the whole farm level, the types of crops planted in their field during the initial field visit , the type and amount of nitrogen-based fertilizer they applied on farm, and key aspects of soil health in their own words . Farm sizes ranged from 15 to 800 acres, with about one third of farms in the 15 – 50-acre range, another third in the 100 – 450-acre range, and roughly a final third in the 500 – 800 acre-range. Farmers grew primarily summer crops, including tomato, a variety of cucurbits, strawberry, herbs, nightshades, root vegetables, and sunflower/safflower for oil. Farmers reported applying a range of external N-based organic fertilizers, including fish emulsion, Wiserg , pelleted chicken manure, and seabird guano, at varying rates . On the low end, farmers applied <1 kg-N/acre, and on the high end, farmers applied 90 – 180 kg-N/acre per season. About a third of farmers applied 2 – 25 kg-N/acre of N-based fertilizer.

Farmer responses for describing key aspects of soil health were relatively similar and overlapped considerably in content and language . Specifically, farmers usually emphasized the importance of maintaining soil life and/or soil biology, promoting diversity, greenhouse rolling benches limiting soil compaction and minimizing disturbance to soil, and maintaining good soil structure and moisture. Several farmers also touched on the importance of using crops as indicators for monitoring soil health and the importance of limiting pests and disease. Discussion of the importance of promoting soil life, soil biology, and microbial and fungal activity had the highest count among farmers with ten mentions across the 13 farmers interviewed. Next to this topic, minimizing tillage and soil disturbance was the second most discussed with six of 13 farmers highlighting this key aspect of soil health. In addition to discussing soil health more broadly, farmers also provided in-depth responses to a series of questions related to soil fertility—such as key nutrients of interest on their farm, details about their fertility program, and the usefulness of soil tests in their farm operation— summarized in Table 2. When asked to elaborate on the extent to which they considered key nutrients, a handful of farmers readily listed several nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium , and other general macronutrients as well as one micronutrient . Among these farmers that responded with a list of key nutrients, some talked about having their nutrients “lined up” as part of their fertility program. This approach involved keeping nutrients “in balance,” such as for example, monitoring pH to ensure magnesium levels did not impact calcium availability to plants. These farmers also emphasized that though nitrogen represented a key nutrient and was important to consider in their farm operation, tracking soil nitrogen levels was less important than other aspects of soil management, such as promoting soil biological processes, maintaining adequate soil moisture and aeration, or planting cover crops regularly.

As one farmer put it, “if you add nutrients to the soil, and the biology is not right, the plants will not be able to absorb it.” Or, as another farmer emphasized, “It’s not about adding more [nitrogen]… I try to cover crop more too.” A third farmer emphasized, that “I don’t use any fertilizers because I honestly don’t believe in adding retroactively to fix a plant from the top down.” This same farmer relied on planting a cover crop once per year in each field, and discing that cover crop into the ground to ensure his crops were provided with adequate nitrogen for the following two seasons. While most farmers readily listed key nutrients, several farmers shifted conversation away from focusing on nutrients. These farmers generally found that this interview question missed the mark with regards to soil fertility. One farmer responded, “I’m not really a nutrient guy.” This same farmer added that he considered [soil fertility] a soil biology issue as much as a chemistry issue.” The general sentiment among these farmers emphasized that soil fertility was not about measuring and “lining up” nutrients, but about taking a more holistic approach. This approach focused on facilitating conditions in the soil and on-farm that promoted a soil-plant-microbe environment ideal for crop health and vigor. For example, the same farmer quoted above mentioned the importance of establishing and maintaining crop root systems, emphasizing that “if the root systems of a crop are not well established, that’s not something I can overcome just by dumping more nitrogen on the plants.” Another farmer similarly emphasized that they simply created the conditions for plants to “thrive,” and “have pretty much just stepped back and let our system do what it does; specifically, we feed our chickens whey-soaked wheat berries and then we rotate our chickens on the field prior to planting. And we cover crop.” A third farmer also maintained that their base fertility program—a combination of planting a cover crop two seasons per year, an ICLS chicken rotation program, minimal liquid N-based fertilizer addition, and occasionally compost application—all worked together to “synergize with biology in the soil.” This synergy in the soil created by management practices—rather than focusing on nutrient levels—guided this farmer’s approach to building and assessing soil fertility on-farm. Another farmer called this approach “place-based” farming. This particular farmer elaborated on this concept, saying “I think the best style of farming is one where you come up with a routine [meaning like a fertility program] that uses resources you have: cover crops, waste materials beneficial to crops, animals” in order to build organic matter, which “seems to buffer some of the problems” that this farmer encountered on their farm. Similar to other farmers, greenhouse bench top this farmer asserted that adding more nitrogen-based fertilizer did not lead to better soil fertility or increase yields, in their direct experience. Regardless of whether farmers listed key nutrients, a majority of farmers voiced that nitrogen was not a big concern for them on their farm. This sentiment was shared among most farmers in part because they felt the amount of nitrogen additions from fertilizers they added were insignificant compared to nitrogen additions by conventional farms. Farmers also emphasized that the amount of nitrogen they were adding was not enough to cause environmental harm; relatedly, a few farmers noted the absurdity and added economic burden of the recent nitrogen management plan requirements—specifically among organic farms with very low N-based fertilizer application. The majority of farmers also expressed that their use of cover crops and the small amount of N-based fertilizer additions as part of their soil fertility program ensured on-farm nitrogen demands were met for their crops. Across all farmers interviewed, cover cropping served as the baseline and heart of each fertility program, and was considered more effective than additional N-based fertilizers at maintaining and building soil fertility. Farmers used a range of cover crop species and often applied a mix of cover crops, including vetches and other legumes like red clover and cowpea , grains and cereals like oats .

Farmers cited several reasons for the effectiveness of cover cropping, such as increased organic matter content, more established root systems, greater microbial activity, better aeration and crumble in their soils, greater number of earthworms and arthropods, improved drainage in their soils, and more bio-available N. Whereas farmers agreed that “more is not better” with regards to N-based fertilizers, farmers did agree that allocating more fields for planting cover crops over the course of the year was beneficial in terms of soil fertility. However, as one farmer pointed out, while cover crops provide the best basis for an effective soil fertility program, this approach is not always economically viable or physically possible. Several farmers expressed concern because they often must allocate more fields to cover crops than cash crops in any given season, which means that their farm operation requires more land to be able to produce the same amount of vegetables than if they had all their fields in cash crops. Farmers also shared that in some circumstances, such as in early spring, they are not able to realize the full potential of a winter cover crop if they are forced to mow the cover crop early to plant cash crops and ensure the harvest timeline of a high-value summer vegetable crop. The cover crop approach to soil fertility takes “persistence,” as one farmer emphasized; another farmer similarly pointed out that the benefits of cover cropping “are not always realized in the crop year. You’re in it [organic agriculture] for the long haul, there is no quick fix.” Indeed, farmers who choose to regularly plant cover crops to build soil fertility, rather than just add N-based fertilizers, reported that they came up against issues of land tenure and access to land, market pressures, and long-term economic sustainability. To build on conversations about soil fertility, farmers also provided responses to interview questions that asked them to elaborate on the usefulness of available soil tests to gauge soil fertility more broadly—and then more specifically, the usefulness of soil tests in informing their soil fertility program and/or management approaches on-farm. Overall, only three of 13 farmers reported regularly using and relying on soil tests to inform their soil fertility program or aspects of their farm operation. These farmers offered very short responses and did not elaborate. For example, one farmer shared that they “test twice a year in general,” and that they “rely on the results of the soil tests to tweak [their] fertility program.” Another farmer said briefly, “We use soil tests… we utilize them to decide what to do to try to improve the soil.” A third farmer admitted that though he “used to do a soil test every year, literally used to spend hundreds of dollars per year on soil tests,” he found that the results of soil tests did not change year-to-year and were, as he put it, very “stable.” This particular farmer no longer regularly uses or relies on soil testing for their farm operation. The remaining ten farmers confirmed that they had previously submitted a soil test, usually once and most often to a local commercial lab in the region. These farmers expressed a range of sentiments when asked about the usefulness of soil tests, including disappointment, distrust, or both, particularly in the capacity of soil tests to inform soil fertility on their farm. Some farmers said directly, “I just don’t trust soil tests,” or “frankly, I don’t believe a lot in soil testing because it’s too standardized,” while other farmers initially stated they had used “limited” or “infrequent” soil tests, and then later admitted that they did not use or rely on soil tests on their farm operation. These farmers tended to focus on the limitations of soil tests that they encountered for their particular farm application. Limitations of soil tests discussed by farmers varied. Farmers stated that soil tests often confirmed what they already knew about their soil and did not add new information. For this reason, some farmers used results from a soil test as a guide, while other farmers found results to be redundant and therefore less useful to their farm operation. Because issues with soil fertility were sometimes linked to inherent soil characteristics within a particular field, such as poor drainage or heavily sandy soil, farmers found that soil tests were not able to provide new insight to overcome these environmental limitations. “I’m not able to correct that environmental limitation [ie, poor drainage] by adding more nitrogen,” one farmer emphasized.

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, vertical grow rack 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, 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. 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, hydroponic shelf system 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.Results of the LDA showed that both linear discriminant factors are most strongly explained by soil texture , as shown by the LDA loadings . Management practices all equally, but weakly, influenced LD1 and LD2 . LD1, which explained 66.3% of the variance, was effective at separating the Farm Type I and Farm Type III . However, Farm Type II overlapped with both Farm Type I and Farm Type III for LD1. In contrast, LD2, which explained 33.6% of the variance, did not display a definitive separation between the Farm Type I and Farm Type III; however, LD2 was effective at separating Farm Type II from Farm Type I and Farm Type III. LDA accurately discriminated between the three farm types, with an overall accuracy of 90.1% , as shown in Table 8. Model accuracy was high for all three farm types . The model had the greatest sensitivity to Farm Type II and Farm Type III , and low sensitivity to Farm Type I . Both Farm Type I and Farm Type III displayed minimal confusion with Farm Type II, as the comparison of training and validation data details . We determined the proportion of variation in the three farm types accounted for by management and by soil texture . Soil textural class contributed 28% of unique variation , while management contributed 18% of unique variation . The shared contribution for all predictors was 1%, and the overall contribution of all predictors was 47%.We found across all 27 farm sites sampled that gross N mineralization rates ranged from 0.05 – 4.82 µg-NH4+ -N g-soil-1 day-1 and gross N nitrification rates ranged from 0.55 – 5.90 µg-NO3- -N gsoil-1 day-1 . We determined net N mineralization rates ranged from 0.07 – 1.51 µg-NH4+ -N g-soil-1 day-1 , while net N nitrification rates had a wider range from 1.53 – 25.18 µg-NO3- -N g-soil-1 day-1 . We visually compare the six key N cycling variables—pools of inorganic N , and net and gross N rates—across the three farm types . Despite the variation in net and gross N mineralization and nitrification rates, using the farm types developed above, we found that N cycling variables were not significantly different across the three farm types for all six variables examined—based on ANOVA results . Given the variation in gross N rates reported above, we further explored the drivers of this variation in gross N rates using mixed modelling approaches.

Table 10 shows results provide for the linear mixed models used for the prediction of potential gross ammonification rates . Soil ammonium concentration and % sand were significant predictors of gross mineralization rates. While not significant, indicators for SOM were selected and also included in the model, based on AIC results. We also provide results from the selected linear mixed model used for prediction of potential gross nitrification rates in Table 11. As shown, indicators for SOM emerged as the sole significant covariate . While not significant, crop abundance was also selected and included in the model, as determined by AIC results.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. To determine drivers of this variation, we explored key predictors for soil N cycling and found that SOM indicators influenced gross N mineralization and nitrification rates, in particular gross nitrification rates. Each of the four indicators for soil organic matter used in this study—total soil N, total organic C, POXC, and soil protein—showed a strong correlation with farm type, and collectively, created a gradient in soil quality . Farm Type I consistently showed the highest values for total soil N, total organic C, POXC, and soil protein, which suggests sites in this farm type had higher soil quality compared to Farm Type II and III; similarly, Farm Type II consistently showed intermediate values for all four indicators for soil organic matter. Lastly, Farm Type III consistently showed the lowest values across all four indicators, which suggests sites in this latter farm type had lower soil quality compared to the other two farm types.

Understanding the substance of farmer knowledge serves as a first step to conserve this essential knowledge base in practice; however, it is equally critical to document the particularities of farmer expertise in local contexts to provide essential knowledge for other contemporaneous and future generations of farmers, scientists, and policymakers alike. Moving forward, there is therefore a need to elevate the importance and value of farmer knowledge across multiple disciplines such that farmer knowledge is considered “expert” knowledge throughout alternative agriculture . While other studies attempt to integrate the artificial binary between “formal” and “informal,” or “expert” and “non-expert” knowledge and view the two forms of knowledge as complementary , in this paper we maintain that farmer knowledge is scientifically valid, expert knowledge and therefore warrants formal, standalone documentation within the scientific literature . While it is true that the terms “traditional,” “folk,” and/or “indigenous” knowledge are applied in certain contexts, in this paper, the term “local knowledge” is most appropriate , as farmer participants were all white and all either first- or second generation settlers on unceded Patwin-speaking Wintun Nation tribal lands in Yolo County, CA. To frame this paper, we apply Agrawal’s definition of local knowledge as knowledge that is “integrally linked with the lives of people, always produced in dynamic interactions among humans and between humans and nature, and constantly changing.” This definition of local knowledge recognizes the key elements of local knowledge: 1) It is produced by people and among people; 2) It is always produced in relationship with nature; and 3) It is a dynamic process. More broadly defined, local knowledge involves dynamic processes and complex systems of experiences, practices, and skills developed and sustained by people in their environmental and socioeconomic realties . Further, plant growing rack local knowledge may develop even within one or two generations of place-based experience . In the US, there exists a handful of studies documenting rural local knowledge and rancher local knowledge .

Very few studies explicitly examine local knowledge in the context of alternative agricultural or organic systems, referred to as “farmer knowledge” in the literature. This type of knowledge is a subset of local knowledge that enables knowledge holders to farm alternatively in their specifical local contexts. To date, most formal studies on farmer knowledge tend to focus on farmer decision making as it relates to the adoption of new practices . Few studies exist at the intersection of local knowledge, alternative agriculture, and soil management. To consider this gap, we focus this study on a significant epicenter for alternative agriculture in the United States: Yolo County, California, which represents unceded Patwin-speaking Wintun Nation tribal lands. This region in northern California is unique in that it is among the handful of places in the country that emerged as a catalyst and knowledge hub for the organic agriculture movement and where a large concentration of high value, innovative organic production farms continue to thrive today. Due to a unique set of historical and ecological circumstances, the region experienced an influx of organic farmers beginning in the 1970s . During this decade, Yolo County—in combination with Santa Cruz, CA—became a significant node in the organic movement. Its emergence as a significant node was in part due to Yolo County’s proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area and the University of California, Davis—which provided key institutional support—and also partially due to the existence of largely prime agricultural lands combined with a temperate climate ideal for growing year-round. As a result, Yolo County became one of a few of places where regulations for organic production first evolved and experimentation with organic farming first emerged . Following the farm financial crisis of the 1980s, land prices in the County sharply dropped ; this economic window provided an opportunity for a new generation of farmers to insert a more ecologically-minded approach to farming.

Many of these farmers arrived to Yolo County relatively new to farming —often young, educated white urbanites with a desire to farm alternatively to the industrial agribusinesses that had historically dominated the landscape of Yolo County since the early 1900s . When these so-called “back-to-the-land” farmers arrived, many were particularly interested in soil fertility—a conscious effort to avoid “mining the soil” and address ongoing issues with soil degradation in agriculture . While initially these back-to-the-landers lacked historically- and ecologically specific knowledge of the lands they cultivated , over the last three decades or more, it is highly probable that they have individually amassed a wealth of local, place-based knowledge of their specific management contexts and soil landscapes . In this sense, farmer knowledge of soil management presents a particularly salient entry point for further examination in the context of Yolo County specifically. How did these particular farmers address the challenge of soil management in their region? What have they individually and collectively learned about soil management, in theory and in practice? Such questions are particularly important to consider given that—from a pedological and agricultural perspective—soils are heterogenous across landscapes. For example, even at the scale of a single field, differences in micro-environments, management histories, inherent soil characteristics, and time of year can all dramatically influence how a particular field can be most effectively managed. Addressing this challenge in soil management and understanding the nuances of soil management are fundamental to organic systems—where deep place-based knowledge of soil landscapes is the basis for building and sustaining healthy soils on-farm—and more broadly, resilient agriculture. Yet, farmer knowledge of soil management is still generally under-researched, particularly in the United States and particularly among organic farmers.

Though documentation of farmer knowledge of soil management in alternative agriculture exists, most studies focus within the “development” context . Similarly, research on indigenous knowledge of soil is frequently approached from an ethnopedological or traditional ecological knowledge perspective , and lacks focus on production and/or organic agriculture. To date, farmer knowledge of local soil landscapes and related soil management practices remains entirely undocumented in Yolo County. Yet, the unique historical and ecological context makes farmer knowledge of soil health and soil management in this region especially important to document; this knowledge is potentially foundational as organic farmers adapt their farming approaches and management in the face of increasing social, economic, and environmental uncertainties. This research is informed by a Farmer First approach, which recognizes farmers as experts and crucial partners in researching and innovating solutions for resilient, alternative agriculture . 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, indoor vertical garden system 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, 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. All farmers interviewed mentioned direct experience as being one of the most important modes for understanding their landscape, their farming system, and management practices essential to their farm operation. Farmers described this accumulation of experience as “learning by doing,” being “self-taught,” or learning by “trial and error” . These farmers added that in learning by experience, they made “a lot of mistakes” and/or faced “many failures” but also learned from these mistakes and failures—and importantly, that this cycle was crucial to their chosen learning process. More than half of the farmers interviewed maintained that no guidebook or manual for farming exists; while reading books was viewed as valuable and worked to enhance learning for individual farmers, to farm required knowledge that could only be gained through experience. Moreover, nearly all farmers also explicitly commented on the fact that they have never stopped learning to farm . Overall, farmers learned primarily through personal experience and over time, making connections and larger conclusions from these experiences.

The reader and the writer meet in the space of the text, but they do so incompletely. For Lévinas, the Other is both the condition for recollection and the condition for the representation, since it is in conversation with the Other that the subject can communicate.The monument Kofman creates with Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is, finally, a home, but not a private home. It is a home that acknowledges the ways in which people and spaces interpenetrate one another. Kofman’s text is, on the one hand, deeply private. She makes no metatextual statements to introduce the reader to the space she is creating, for instance, and she does not do work for the reader’s benefit, such as explaining the significance of July 16, 1942 or The Lady Vanishes. This lack of gestures towards the reader may seem unwelcoming. Yet this very lack of purposeful welcome enables the reader to interact with Kofman and her text, to help build it out by providing the historical context and following the intertextual references where they lead. The home Kofman and the reader build together is a Möbius-monument, a space of escape routes and thresholds that allow for, perhaps, a measure of mutual comprehension while simultaneously acknowledging and preserving individual subjectivity. Architect Julian Bonder employs Lévinas when he explains how the ethical “working memorials” he builds should create a space in which the visitor can enter into a conversation with the Other and with the otherness of the past . While Bonder builds physical monuments, such as the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage in Nantes, France, text may in some ways be a more appropriate medium for an ethical monument. As Ann Smock notes, text, especially for Kofman, is “sure to dispossess you,” weed growing systems robbing the writer and the reader of their subjectivity and enabling them to transcend themselves and, as Lévinas would say, to have a conversation .

Kofman maps her memories and city space onto one another, using the inherent intersubjectivity of text to create a monument in their intersection where both she and the reader may dwell.Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies differs in several significant ways from Perec’s and Kofman’s texts. Rodoreda’s text is a novel, not an autobiography . It takes place in Barcelona, not Paris, and it is written from Rodoreda’s exile in Geneva, in Catalan, not in French.That this text is in certain ways so different from the other two throws into relief their intriguing similarities. All three texts involve a painful and divisive wartime period, and all three are meditations on the relationship between historical and personal memory, and on monuments of the war period and the postwar. Finally, the meditation in all three texts involves the creation of a unique textual space that lays the foundation for a more nuanced monument than a simple chronological account or a physical monument. If Kofman’s text is about intersubjective space and Perec’s text is about the network of one’s own memory , Rodoreda’s text is about balancing memory with the tendency to ossify the past: that is, it treats the question of how to remember the past but not be trapped by it. Rodoreda seeks to create a monument that incorporates the present and allows for change and growth, a living monument. She does this by constructing a synchronous network of symbols, contrasting this network with a tendency to look to the past and towards one’s “roots. “Rootedness” implies fixedness; rooted monuments do not admit polysemy or change. For Rodoreda, both textual monuments and physical monuments may have this immobile quality, which contains an element of violence or constraint. At several points in El carrer de les Camèlies, the protagonist is violently fixed with a name or a mark. In contrast to these scenes of violent inscription stands Rodoreda’s vast and polysemous symbolic network.

In El carrer de les Camèlies, writing and language can be violent, pinning meaning and identity in one place like the name etched on a tombstone, but they also have the potential to provide freedom through the circulation of symbols, a process of signification and resignification. Rodoreda thus contends with a tension between, on the one hand, those physical monuments and the acts of writing, which is also a monumentalizing practice, that pin meaning in one place and, on the other hand, those monumentalizing processes that allow for a degree of polyvalence and freedom. This tension may also be seen on the difficult border between collective and personal memory. Collective memory does not exist as such, independent of individuals. As Halbwachs writes, “the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories” . On the other hand, the way that a collective has agreed or come to remember something, and the things it chooses to remember and forget, molds the individual’s recollection. “The past is not preserved,” writes Halbwachs, “but reconstructed on the basis of the present” . The individual has no access to the pure, preserved past, but only to the memories that he or she can create, which are shaped by the larger collective. The issue of what remains in collective memory, and how it remains there, is of particularly urgent interest to Rodoreda, writing as she was during the Time of Silence, when Republican and Catalan suffering was either officially forgotten and, when it was officially remembered, differed greatly from the way the victims remembered it . If we follow Halbwachs in thinking that memory is constructed through a kind of dialogue between “collective frameworks” and the individual, we see how an individual can influence the creation of collective memory as much perhaps as the “collective frameworks” can influenced what is remembered and how. Thus Rodoreda’s insistence on the maleability and mobility of memory is an insistence on the individual capacity and need to modify collective memory. Like the physical monuments produced by a society, language may also be considered a manifestation of the Halbwachs’ “collective frameworks.” Through that language, a group may experience, share and create a common heritage. On the other hand, that binding function of language can be restrictive.

El Carrer de les Camèlies is a textual monument out of language that is polyvalent, and both personally and collectively significant. In creating such a monument, Rodoreda is advocating for a writing that binds a community together but does not suffocate it in doing so. This loose binding allows individuals and the memories they possess to allow the larger “collective framework” to grow and change. A few central images express the tension between Rodoreda’s synchronous symbol network and monumentalizing practices that arrest the flow of meaning and are oriented exclusively towards the past. First, she treats the paradox of a stone angel or a stone bird: the angel is an image of flight and movement, but the stone angel can do nothing of the sort. A bird is a similar image of freedom and flight, yet in El carrer de les Camèlies, birds are often associated with stones. The second set of images are a pair: the cemetery and the garden. A cemetery is filled with immobile stone monuments, promising a fixed, unchanging memory that only looks backwards21. In the garden, the flowers may, like the monuments, carry associations with them, but they are also alive, able to grow and change22. For Rodoreda, the best garden is ungated: just as the stone monument in the cemetery constricts possibilities for memory, the gated garden constrains the flowers inside, fixing them in one space like the tombs in the cemetery. The story of Cecília’s life proceeds chronologically, indoor farming systems stretching from just before the Spanish Republic to the postwar economic boom . Cecília’snarration, however, is sometimes anti-chronological, moving from the effect of an event back to the event itself. The network of symbols in the text similarly pulls against reading chronologically, inviting the reader to follow the thread of a symbol and make connections between past and present. Such a reading is more synchronous than chronological, as the appearance of a symbol recalls to mind its other appearances. At times, the reader does not understand the full weight of a symbol until later in the text, recontextualizing its previous appearances. El carrer de les Camèlies thus has two structures: the chronological structure and the one created by her dense symbolic network. Because a reading of the text necessitates considering more than one moment in the text at a time, a quick summary of the text may help orient the reader of this piece. El carrer de les Camèlies is the story of a beautiful woman, Cecília, who was found as an infant by a night watchman outside of a garden gate in Barcelona, on the street named in the novel’s title. Pinned to her clothing is a piece of paper with “Cecília Ce” written on it. Cecília grows up with adopted parents, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena.

She continually searches for clues to her parentage, in particular to the identity of her father, and runs away from home twice in search of him. Once she goes to the Liceu Opera House in search of him, thinking he may be a musician. She spends the war years with her adopted family, then runs away for good with her first lover, Eusebi, to live in a shantytown on the outskirts of Barcelona. After Eusebi is arrested and a subsequent lover dies, Cecília becomes a street prostitute and eventually a kept woman. Her living situations become progressively more oppressive and unpleasant, finally culminating in imprisonment in the apartment of a lover, Eladi, who forces her, over a long but unspecified period of time, to drink to the point of hallucination. After this episode, she is left on the street and rescued by an acquaintance who nurses her back to health. After she recovers, her fortunes change and she becomes a wealthy demimondaine in possession of her own home. Throughout, she is often pregnant, but always either aborts or miscarries the fetus; she never has a child. The text ends with Cecília in conversation with the night watchman who found her. He tells her that she had been originally left at the gate of another family on the street, but he decided that Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, childless, would prefer to raise a baby. He also confesses that he was the one who pinned the name to her clothing, naming her after a girl he had been in love with who had died.The preservation from the rapid deposition of volcanic ash results in the archaeological visibility of flora that were either growing at the time of the eruption or were collected, stored, and utilized in some manner by the ancient inhabitants. Thus far, plant material has been recovered at this site in two main forms: carbonized macrobotanical remains and plaster casts taken when archaeologists encountered voids within the volcanic ash during excavations. Using paleoethnobotany as a methodological tool at Cerén reveals significant plant-human interactions of ancient Mesoamericans that add to other studies of less wellpreserved domestic settings, where investigations have typically focused on architecture and artifacts , creating a stronger and more in-depth interpretation of ancient household life in ancient Mesoamerica. The paleoethnobotanical collection efforts at Cerén have been highly productive, revealing foodstuffs within homes, kitchens, and storage facilities as well as exterior spaces such as small household garden plots, clusters of fruit trees surrounding each structure, and extensive infields and outfields of maize, manioc, and wild and weedy plant species. The assorted array of culturally and economically useful species reveals a detailed variety of foodstuffs readily accessible to the inhabitants on a daily basis that would have been incorporated into meals and contributed towards daily life as medicine, tools, construction material, fuel, and more. Typically, the recovery of ancient plant remains in Mesoamerica is challenging due to the generally poor preservation of organic materials in the tropical environment, with carbonization leading to the best preservation conditions . The long history of paleoethnobotanical research at Cerén allows for a deeper study of the social meanings behind Mesoamerican agriculture and home gardens with an intimate view of how these ancient people interacted with and viewed their environment in the past.