Underscoring the limits to garden accessibility in Milwaukee, distance to the nearest garden appears to be increasing over time. While gardens appear to be distributed in a way that makes them more accessible for marginalized groups than for more privileged ones, the gardens are becoming less accessible in general.In Seattle, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, the primary organizations involved in building, maintaining, and defending the city’s gardens worked to gain legitimacy for themselves and, in the process, served to legitimize urban agriculture as a land use—selecting from among its many potential benefits to construct a narrative that served their organizational interests and priorities. The organizations discussed in this dissertation identified different target audiences for their legitimizing efforts, faced different challenges in gaining or maintaining legitimacy, and ultimately advanced the legitimacy of urban agriculture along different lines. As this dissertation demonstrates, variations in how urban agriculture has been legitimized have impacted the socio-natural spaces constructed in each city and the strength of arguments for long-term site preservation in the face of potential redevelopment. As it worked to gain legitimacy, Milwaukee Urban Gardens found more success as a garden support organization than it did as a land trust; as it has undertaken more programming and site maintenance over the years, Milwaukee Urban Gardens has joined with other organizations in the city to frame urban agriculture as a legitimate land use for its job training, employment and commercial potential. Urban farms are the focal point in Milwaukee, and greening is the focal point in Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society gradually evolved its Philadelphia Green program toward blight removal and neighborhood revitalization.

In recent years, this framing for the value of urban agriculture has been contested by Soil Generation, a Black- and Brown-led coalition advocating for more permanent gardens, affordable housing, and community control over land use more generally, vertical farming supplies advancing a new frame that ties urban agriculture’s legitimacy to the stewardship of longtime residents and the unjust history of dispossession they have experienced. In Seattle, the P-Patch program worked to legitimize its activities for the benefits of food production and community-building that community gardens can provide, and advocates with the P-Patch nonprofit refined this narrative over time by articulating how urban agriculture serves as a neighborhood amenity that could ease some of the strain of urban growth while attracting desirable new residents. In all three cities, economic arguments have been central to strengthening the legitimacy of urban agriculture in the eyes of city officials in order to secure more resources and favorable policy for the gardening organizations and their spaces. However, these economically focused arguments also cohere with processes perpetuating inequality in urban environments. In the case of Milwaukee’s employment emphasis and PHS’s revitalization framing, economically focused arguments have served to reinforce the conception of urban agriculture as a temporary use of urban space that can and should be replaced with more profitable development whenever the opportunity arises. In Seattle, framing that augments urban agriculture’s legitimacy as a source of livability amidst intensifying urban development overlooks the fact that rapidly appreciating neighborhoods become unlivable for residents at the bottom of the income distribution, who end up with greater food insecurity and likelihood of displacement regardless of garden permanence. Just as the different ways of framing urban agriculture’s benefit have been unequally strong as a claim for garden permanence, the different organizational configurations and environments in each city have been unequally conducive to social movement mobilization that could challenge elite interests and push city officials beyond their original willingness for garden preservation.

In terms of the organizational environment, evidence from Milwaukee and Seattle indicates that civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance work to support the process of legitimizing urban agriculture, but it appears to have been the discursive opportunity structure of mistrusting elites, absent in Milwaukee but present in both Philadelphia and Seattle, that has facilitated mobilization in defense of threatened urban agricultural spaces. Different organizational configurations across the three case-cities are instructive for understanding the dynamics of organizational hybridization, especially from community-based to social movement activities. Across the three cases, I found only one example of a community-based organization effectively taking up the work of a social movement organization —the P-Patch nonprofit. Developed as a parallel organization to support the city’s P-Patch program by providing a forum for volunteer site leaders to share strategies for garden management, the P-Patch nonprofit gained legitimacy as a representative of gardener interests while maintaining an organizational structure independent from the city program that allowed for outsider social movement mobilization when needed. Both of these features facilitated the P-Patch nonprofit’s success in SMO activities, but these activities were organized on a temporary basis, and their framing reflected the relatively privileged perspectives of the nonprofit’s volunteer leaders. In contrast, Soil Generation has arisen in Philadelphia as a counterpoint to PHS, a CBO that did not prioritize gaining legitimacy from gardeners and has been perceived as coopted because of its close relationship with city leaders. Soil Generation has functioned as a SMO since its inception and has kept up its social movement activities for the long term. With leadership explicitly oriented to the needs of poor people of color, Soil Generation is advancing a frame that re-legitimizes urban agriculture as worthy of permanence, while also insisting on policy that will address the broader needs of the city’s low-income gardeners—especially their need for affordable housing. While not generalizable to all organizations in all cities, comparing the example of Soil Generation to the other organizations in this study suggests that organizations formed with a social movement orientation may simply be better positioned to advocate for policies that run counter to elite interests than organizations formed as community-based organizations to provide services.

In Milwaukee, none of the organizations involved in building, maintaining, or advocating for urban gardens can really be considered a social movement organization. The main community-based organization that manages gardens in the city, Milwaukee Urban Gardens and now Groundwork Milwaukee, has occasionally called for gardeners to write letters on behalf of a favorable policy, but the group has never organized to pressure city officials for garden preservation or other policies that go beyond what the city is interested in doing for its own interests. Similar to PHS in Philadelphia, Groundwork Milwaukee now draws a decent share of its funding from green space maintenance contracts with the city, establishing organizational commitments that would conflict with outsider strategies for social movement mobilization. Across the three case-cities, evidence suggests that the switch from CBO to SMO is challenging because CBOs often must seek resources and legitimacy from city officials, large funders, and other elites; over time, their work as service providers appears to build up connections and commitments to other organizations that can leave them coopted or less focused on the needs of more marginalized members, clients, and constituencies. Of course, this finding only reflects analysis of a small sample of organizations, and additional research with larger samples would be needed to confirm if this pattern is widespread, but it conforms with earlier findings about the process of organizational cooptation over time . While Groundwork Milwaukee provides one example of a CBO unlikely to take up confrontational politics, the Milwaukee Food Council is an organization more like Soil Generation that was formed to advance policy goals, cannabis indoor greenhouse and due to its relative independence from the local government this organization might be better positioned for outsider strategies of social movement mobilization. However, the Milwaukee Food Council mostly counts leaders from other organizations as its members and does not have much of a direct relationship with gardeners or the general public. In other words, unlike Soil Generation, the Milwaukee Food Council has not gained legitimacy as a representative of the city’s gardeners and marginalized residents. Even if the Milwaukee Food Council had legitimacy as a representative of gardeners and a large, active base of supporters to mobilize in the push for more permanent urban agricultural spaces, because of the benefits for which urban agriculture has been legitimized in Milwaukee, the city’s civic conventions, and the political-economic reality in which currently cultivated lots are seen as a potential development lifeline for reviving the city’s economy, this organization would still face a steep challenge in convincing city officials or the general public that permanent gardens are the best policy. Across all three cities, the legitimation activities of garden organizations and the policies they have achieved to increase longevity for the city’s gardens are reflected in the physical manifestations and geographical distribution of gardens. While there are certainly similarities between the community gardens in all three cities, the forms and ideas about urban agriculture that people are likely to encounter as they move through urban space are different. Among the three cities, the prevalent urban agricultural forms in Milwaukee can be understood as the most impermanent. In Milwaukee, one is more likely to observe large, mowed lots with only a few trees or garden beds that represent the legacy of MUG’s early attempts to function as a land trust, which backfired when these sites did not have enough support or interest from nearby residents to be maintained in full form. This particular form is certainly not widespread in Milwaukee, but it is virtually absent in the other case-cities and it serves to reinforce ideas about community gardens as temporary land uses. Another distinct feature of Milwaukee’s urban agriculture landscape is the prevalence of youth job training programs and food businesses that package and distribute items grown on urban farms. Someone moving through the city is as likely to encounter a site where young people work together to tend crops as they are to encounter a community garden with individual plots claimed and cared for by different people. Both of these urban agricultural forms can provide important nutritional and social benefits for people in need, but the employment and commerce-oriented nature of Milwaukee’s urban agriculture leaves open more possibility for relocating urban agriculture to make way for other kinds of development. In Philadelphia, there are numerous traditional community gardens—certainly more than in Seattle or Milwaukee—but their presence is dwarfed by the 13,000 vacant lots that are maintained with PHS’s signature clean-and-green treatment. As in Milwaukee, this form of urban agriculture signals impermanence, but unlike the spaces tended by Milwaukee’s youth these sites are not growing food—only trees and a few ornamental plants that can be easily kept up by the circulating maintenance crews. Someone moving through the city is more likely to encounter a clean-and-green lot than a community garden or farm, but many such spaces do exist. Some of these spaces announcing themselves with signs, murals, and tributes to groups who have ensured their existence, while others keep a low profile to avoid what gardeners perceive as the likelihood the city will sell the lot if they learn it has a garden. Regardless of their outward appearance, and despite not being the focus of the legitimizing narrative that PHS amplified for many years, hundreds of gardens in Philadelphia have provided food, a sense of community, and other benefits to residents in many neighborhoods. In Seattle, the most common form of urban agriculture is the P-Patch community garden, most of which have individually tended plots and common areas with space for the public to sit and enjoy urban nature. Someone moving through the city is likely to encounter a P-Patch with signage announcing the program and perhaps an upcoming community event to be held in the space. These elements reflect the strategic efforts that P-Patch advocates have made over the years to bolster the program’s legitimacy in the eyes of city officials and the non-gardening public, given that they have secured virtual permanence for the gardens as a land use, but must still work to maintain the spaces’ public legitimacy and funding. As we consider what form of urban agriculture someone might encounter as they move through each city, we should also consider who is likely to be having the encounter in the first place. Over time, as one part of the wider urban processes of economic competition and land use contestation, organization-led efforts to legitimize and secure urban agricultural spaces have not only influenced the form that these spaces take, but also where the gardens have survived and who is most likely to be occupying nearby urban space to begin with.

As the US economy is shifting away from manufacturing, Florida argued, continued growth derives from an ascendant group of workers he called the “creative class”—people who work in science, technology, engineering, design, and other knowledge-based sectors . Because their work is intellectual rather than physical, these individuals are not as tied to particular locations, and they can choose to live in whichever cities they find attractive; in other words, particular types of use value can serve as a basis for increasing exchange value. The types of use value most important to the creative class include diversity, individual expression, and loose community with many weak social ties . Indeed, Florida highlighted Seattle as a creative city with all the ingredients to attract the creative class, and the P-Patches are exemplary of the urban character that Seattle was offering: they are filled with art and with all different kinds of people getting to know one another in loose communities . Without having the vocabulary of creative cities, P-Patch advocates in the 1990s framed the value of their gardens for city leaders in terms that align well with attracting the creative class. While the theory of creative cities appears to offer a resolution to the tension between use and exchange value in urban growth dynamics, in reality the tension is simply displaced. Urban growth entrepreneurs were quick to take up Florida’s ideas in their development strategies, and critics were equally quick to decry the downsides . Florida himself acknowledged that creative cities tend to have higher levels of inequality as the economy is increasingly bifurcated into a creative class and a service class . People in creative cities who do not belong to the creative class cannot fully enjoy the benefits of its use-value-rich amenities. The increasing exchange value in hip neighborhoods—or, in cities such as Seattle, hydroponic racks all neighborhoods—contributes to higher rents and displacement of lower income and marginalized people .

Furthermore, while creative cities make a show of celebrating racial and ethnic diversity, the reality is often a superficial multiculturalism lacking substantial engagement with institutional racism and the inequalities it produces . In creative cities, the downsides of increasing exchange value are borne even more heavily by marginalized people. This diminished use value is just easier for a creative city’s more affluent residents to ignore than the traditional downsides of growth such as noise, traffic and air pollution—pervasive downsides that P-Patches help ameliorate for Seattleites. For the last 30 years, the political economy of Seattle has enabled continued investment that has helped solidify the status of the city’s community gardens, but nothing about this political economy ensures that the gardens are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents—or even that they remain accessible to these communities at all. The city’s gardens do produce a lot of food, with some of it directly feeding low-income gardeners in the P-Patch program and other gardens such as the Danny Woo International District Community Garden, which serves primarily Asian-American residents of nearby affordable housing. As described in chapter 3, the City ensured that as its P-Patch program expanded, new gardens accessible to low-income residents were prioritized, and P-Patch gardeners also grow tons of fresh produce for the city’s food banks. Food bank donation is a longstanding tradition in the P-Patches, but it is not a requirement for participants and is contingent upon the available time and generosity of current gardeners. In good years, the total amount of produce donated by P-Patch gardeners exceeds 40,000 pounds; however, as Seattle has become increasingly unaffordable, the number of people relying on food banks has also increased. Even before the pandemic, food banks were distributing more than 22,885,000 pounds of food a year .

From 2007 to 2011, average monthly visits to food banks in Seattle doubled from 61,401 to 122,197 . The rate of food insecurity in Seattle grew from 7% in 2007 to 13% in 2019 . The fresh, organic produce that flows from P-Patches to low-income gardeners and other food-insecure Seattleites is not insignificant, but the rate of growth in food bank donations is not keeping up with the rate of growth in rents and attendant growth in food insecurity. Food provision is one of the key benefits that urban gardens can offer low-income residents, but others matter as well. Low-income neighborhoods tend to suffer from more blight, higher crime rates, and lower neighborhood social cohesion, and gardens have been extolled for their potential to improve low-income neighborhoods along these dimensions. However, if the neighborhoods become unaffordable for low-income people, then those residents have to move, and the neighborhoods’ improvements are moot for them. In Seattle, over the last two decades since garden advocates won preservation victories and significant resources to expand the P-Patch program, real estate values have also increased dramatically citywide . Staggering increases in median home values—up 93% from 2012 to 2018—have priced many people out of formerly affordable neighborhoods or out of the city entirely . As one outcome of this extreme housing market, the Laotian gardeners who helped build Bradner Gardens Park in the 1990s can no longer afford to live in the surrounding neighborhood. Overall, the program has evolved toward benefitting low-income residents because of its public mission and some of its partnerships, and P-Patch gardeners have long celebrated their racial and ethnic diversity although it does not seem that a lot of effort was put into cultivating leadership from minority communities. The social movement mobilized to prevent program cuts in the early 1990s and preserve threatened P-Patches thereafter was led by gardeners who were active in the P-Patch nonprofit.

Unlike the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, this organization was seen as a legitimate representative of gardeners’ interests, but the movement the organization built was not framed around or led by gardeners of color, immigrants, or low-income people. This movement has been extremely effective at preserving community gardens and ensuring that public resources continue to support these spaces; today, P-Patch advocates quickly organize to protect any sites that become threatened . The P-Patch nonprofit has many of the features known to contribute to social movement success: skilled and experienced leadership, an engaged constituency, legitimacy in the eyes of decision-makers and the public, and sophisticated framing that resonates with their target audiences. However, this movement has been organized narrowly around preserving the P-Patches—resisting one of the symptoms of unrestrained urban growth, rather than challenging the logic of growth overall or any of its other ill effects. As Seattle real estate values continue to balloon, microgreen grow rack displacement continues apace, and the framing for preserving P-Patches does not address the detrimental impacts of growth on poor gardeners, residents of color, or others vulnerable to the ongoing displacement.Evidence from the three case-cities indicates that a local government’s ability to support urban agriculture is tied to its economic and fiscal situation. Of course, the status of the locality within the ongoing global competition to attract growth matters for the amount of resources available to invest in urban gardens. Since cities are continuously engaged in this competition, their status is always subject to change, and potential change in the city’s economic fortunes remains a top concern of elected officials and growth elites regardless of the city’s current success or failure in attracting urban growth. The history of all three cities shows that framing urban agriculture as a valuable tool to improve or insure a city’s economic standing has been an effective strategy for winning favorable policy and public investment. The appeal to growth interests has taken on different forms in the different economic and political contexts of each city, and in all three cases these economic rationales have consequences for the city’s gardens and/or for its marginalized residents. In Seattle, as the city was beginning to experience urban growth due to its strong technology sector, P-Patch advocates refined their efforts to legitimize community gardens by framing them as a neighborhood amenity that ameliorates some ill effects of urban growth, building a case to value gardened land alongside housing and commercial development and furthering the commodification of nature as a selling point for the city’s livability. This refined framing presents urban agriculture as a palliative for the alienation from nature and fellow humans that often occurs with urbanization . However, it does not address other social impacts of rising property values—particularly the affordability crisis that displaces the city’s low-income residents.

In Philadelphia, where economic downturn and disinvestment left 40,000 lots across the city vacant, PHS and other growth coalition members successfully argued that this land was a liability for the city, and that repurposing it for greening would help revitalize blighted neighborhoods and attract new capital investment. They were right; Philadelphia has turned its fortunes around and is now experiencing renewed urban growth, including rapidly increasing land values and gentrification in some of the city’s neighborhoods. With the floodgates opening to capital flows, gardens are getting swept away. Now, Soil Generation and its allies are trying to push back on the commodification of nature as a symbol of investment readiness that can flip vacant land from liability to asset, shifting the focus to the community members who have stewarded these spaces and arguing that they deserve to retain them—an outcome that would necessitate both the gardens and the gardeners being able to stay in place. In order for this to occur, the city’s Land Bank must implement its directives in a way that prioritizes community land uses in gentrifying neighborhoods, an uphill battle given the immense amounts of capital held by growth entrepreneurs vying for ownership of these spaces. Soil Generation’s ongoing organizing and framing around community control works to put power behind this struggle, and they have accomplished some early victories in framing the Land Bank’s mandate and revising the disposition process; however, it remains to be seen what the movement will ultimately achieve in terms of garden preservation and affordable housing. In Milwaukee, the city is still struggling to win greater capital investment and urban growth, and land is seen as a lifeline for this effort. Urban nature in the form of gardens and farms has been commodified as a tool for training and employing residents, a potential pathway to economic development that can ameliorate some of the worst impacts of capital flight that the city has experienced. Despite its poor fiscal situation, the cash-strapped city government still shows willingness to devote some resources and recruit public and private partners to invest in urban agricultural spaces. However, like PHS’s framing in Philadelphia, Milwaukee’s commodification of urban nature as training ground and space of economic production leaves open the ongoing possibility of replacing gardens and farms with any more profitable use that might come along.The preceding chapters have revealed how the main community garden programs and proponents in each city highlighted some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits over others, influencing the priorities for how community gardens were developed and managed over time. In addition to assessing what benefits community gardens are providing to surrounding neighborhoods, we can better understand their impact on a city by investigating where community gardens are located, and thus to which neighborhoods their benefits are accruing. As noted throughout this study, many of the benefits for which community gardens are celebrated are particularly important for low-income communities and marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The free or low-cost fresh produce these spaces can yield will matter most for food-insecure households, often associated with high-poverty neighborhoods and those with a higher proportion of Black and/or Latino residents . Urban blight, crime, and inadequate greenspace are also more common in neighborhoods with these characteristics, so the value of community gardens as safe, attractive, and healthy greenspace is also especially salient in such areas . Community gardens can support important cultural practices as well, since ways of growing food and medicine are meaningful traditions for virtually every culture. In this regard, the ability for immigrants to access community gardens is another key consideration for understanding whether urban agriculture’s touted benefits are available to those who need them most.As with any alternative food initiative, there is no guarantee that the benefits of urban agriculture will accrue to those who are most in need.

As chapter 5 will detail, longitudinal spatial analysis demonstrates that between 1980 and 2019, P-Patch gardens have become more accessible overall; moreover high-poverty neighborhoods in Seattle were originally further from the PPatch gardens than their lower-poverty counterparts, but that relationship has flipped over time such that proximity is greater for low-income communities today. Finally, in response to the “persistent skepticism” about gardens as a private use of public land, as Frank Kirk’s quote above describes, the P-Patch program leaders systematically incorporated public spaces into design and redesign plans for the gardens. In my analysis of PPatch Post newsletters, the code design for community was only applied twice for issues in the 1980s, but this code came up more and more often in the 1990s and especially from 1998 onward. New gardens were built with public features like benches or picnic tables, and such elements were added to the older gardens as they were renovated—especially when those gardens won Neighborhood Matching Funds to improve their spaces. Because of the civic infrastructure in Seattle, including numerous channels of communication between garden advocates, city officials, and other residents as well as the availability of public resources for garden development, P-Patch gardeners were able to maintain legitimacy for their organization and for the use of public land for urban agriculture by aligning their activities with widely shared values and public priorities. The priorities of city officials and P-Patch gardeners were not always perfectly aligned, however. As mentioned earlier, two P-Patches on public land were threatened by development in the mid-1990s. Gardeners first pressed their interests through the city’s bottom-up governance infrastructure, but it soon became clear they would not prevail through insider strategies .

While Seattle’s political opportunity structure is usually amenable to resident interests, indoor plant table competing resident demands—and the growth machine’s drive for increasing exchange value—exerted strong countervailing influence in these cases. When insider strategies proved futile, the garden advocates pursued outsider strategies to organize public opposition to the development plans. In this period of mobilization, Seattle’s civic conventions promoting distrust of elite control and expecting neighborhood involvement in decision-making helped form a discursive opportunity structure for framing the threat of garden loss in a way that would resonate well beyond the gardens. When the gardeners at the Mount Baker P-Patch learned that their city-owned lot was slated to be auctioned off for housing development, they joined with the local neighborhood association to come up with an alternative plan. With a grant from the Neighborhood Matching Fund, they conducted design charettes with P-Patchers, representatives of greening organizations, and other residents. The final product, a plan for Bradner Gardens Park, interwove P-Patches with numerous other uses such as a basketball court, family picnic area, public art, and native planting demonstration gardens. Advocates for Bradner Gardens Park presented the plan to city officials, and also visited the meetings of neighborhood associations from across the city to gain their endorsements. They built up legitimacy for the Park proposal through the civic infrastructure of Neighborhood Matching Funds and neighborhood association endorsements, and they framed their proposal as the epitome of neighborhood planning, civic participation and collaboration among diverse groups in a community. City leaders remained steadfast in their desire to see housing on the site, however, so the garden advocates devised an initiative to prevent the auction. With the help of a former were reneging on their previous deal.The argument that the city could not be trusted helped to whip up opposition to the proposed move, and it also resonated with one council member who reportedly didn’t care about PPatches but was moved by the argument about fairness.

Ultimately, council members did approve a plan to move the garden, but only on the condition that gardeners were given a better replacement site and logistical and material support for the move. These concessions made a big difference for the future direction of the Interbay P-Patch, which is a thriving community garden and destination for neighborhood residents today. In both of these cases, Seattle’s garden advocates were able to strike a nerve for the general public by framing the city’s plans as a betrayal of the self-government expectations they held, and by arguing that these moves needed to be resisted in order to hold the government accountable to its citizens. Ultimately, in both cases, council members originally opposed to the gardeners’ requests ended up voting in their favor. The garden advocates’ leveraging of Seattle’s civic conventions is evident in analysis of documents and interviews from the three cities, which shows that the code for fairness or justice was more than twice as common in Seattle as in Philadelphia and more than three times as common as in Milwaukee. The bulk of these codes applied to documents in the period of October 1995 to September 1996, when the Bradner and Interbay resistance efforts were broadening from insider strategies into outsider strategies involving criticism of the city and mobilization of both gardeners and the public. These examples demonstrate how social movement mobilization was effective in Seattle and accomplished long-term preservation for many of the city’s gardens. However, the movement mobilized in the mid-1990s was framed around a symptom—development threats to specific gardens—and not around the underlying economic dynamics driving garden displacement. While all of the gardens on public land are effectively permanent thanks to movement organizers’ victory in passing Initiative 42, gentrification has continued apace in Seattle; among the many low-income residents who have been displaced due to rising housing costs are gardeners who can no longer afford to live near the sites they helped to build, including Bradner Gardens Park.

In this way, the local garden preservation movement in Seattle draws a clear contrast with that in Philadelphia, where garden loss is framed in connection to the broader context of structural racism, neighborhood disinvestment, and growth machine logic that threatens vulnerable people as well as vulnerable spaces.This chapter has demonstrated multiple ways that civic conventions structure opportunities for garden organizations to legitimize their activities and to build broader support for urban agriculture as a land use. Civic institutions that support public input into policy making have served as political opportunity structures to legitimize urban agriculture as a land use desired by residents. Civic ideas can serve as a discursive opportunity structure that garden advocates can leverage to frame the need for social movement mobilization in support of threatened gardens, whether or not these spaces have gained legitimacy through formal policy channels. When a city’s civic conventions include infrastructure for bottom-up governance, this infrastructure provides a political opportunity structure for supporting resident demands such as space for community gardens and urban agriculture. A participatory governing process can rationalize garden development in accordance with broader public interests and concerns while building legitimacy for community gardens as a land use. Garden organizations in Seattle and Milwaukee have bolstered the legitimacy of their gardens by taking advantage of civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance, including the civic infrastructure of grant programs for resident-initiated projects and accepted channels for communicating resident desires. In these cities, conventions for bottom-up governance provided a political opportunity structure to legitimate urban agriculture as an activity in line with broader public priorities. The same political opportunity structure did not exist in Philadelphia, where PHS established legitimacy for its Philadelphia Green program as a provider of city beautification services and a catalyst for neighborhood reinvestment, with less emphasis on the importance of fulfilling resident desires for growing space. Instead, gardens in Philadelphia struggled to gain legitimacy in the eyes of city officials even as many such spaces were used and valued by neighborhood residents. The city’s redevelopment efforts led to the loss of numerous gardens in the early 2000s, plant growing stand when city officials treated these spaces as “vacant” rather than land already under legitimate use. With PHS having legitimized its garden support activities as temporary measures to promote redevelopment, the organization was not positioned to challenge the loss of gardens through that very redevelopment. Indeed, due to PHS’s dependence on city contracts for greening services and its association with the city’s social elite, the organization stood to lose legitimacy in any open confrontation with public officials. When PHS did not mobilize its gardeners to challenge the city’s land use policies, another organization did. Situating the pattern of garden removal in the historical context of dispossession and racial injustice, Soil Generation has mobilized the city’s growers to push for greater community control over land use decisions. Their framing legitimizes urban agriculture as stewardship of land long abandoned by property owners and the city, while delegitimizing the city’s development plans by drawing on widely shared cynicism about the government’s effectiveness and trustworthiness. This cynicism has provided a discursive opportunity structure in which calls for ongoing mobilization to ensure government accountability have resonated widely. In coalition with other groups organizing for economic and racial justice, Soil Generation has gained legitimacy as a genuine representative of the interests of gardeners and communities of color in the city, and the organization has sustained outsider strategies to pressure the city government to transfer land ownership to community gardeners. Discursive opportunity structures in Seattle have similarly supported social movement mobilization when gardeners sought to preserve gardens and public officials resisted.

Widely shared ideas about the value of civic participation underlay the development of the P-Patch nonprofit, its successful cultivation of volunteer labor over decades, and its mobilization to stave off garden loss and achieve permanence for the P-Patches. As in Philadelphia, civic ideas about distrust of elites contributed powerfully to the local discursive opportunity structure; by framing Initiative 42 as a necessary bulwark against city officials selling off parks, P-Patch advocates won broad public support for their proposal and secured stronger protections for the city’s gardens than public officials were initially wiling to enact. In contrast, Milwaukee’s civic conventions hold more of an assumption of good governance on the part of city officials, and the local discursive opportunity structure has been far less favorable to social movement mobilization. Garden advocates have achieved longer term land access and more permissive zoning policy through insider political strategies, but many gardens in Milwaukee remain classified as a temporary use. Without an organized effort to engage gardeners in civic action, and without a widely held belief in the need to mobilize to hold the government accountable, the city’s garden advocates seem to lack the tools to pressure city officials into making more gardens permanent. In terms of urban political economy, insider strategies that frame urban agriculture’s value to align with the city government’s priorities will likely reflect growth machine logic. Land use policies that elected officials will happily pass, such as small matching grants to support green space improvements and ordinances allowing beekeeping, tend to increase use value for residents in ways that do not undermine the potential for increasing exchange value as well. To achieve permanent tenure for community gardens and urban farms means removing the land from the city’s development portfolio—something that runs counter to the standard motivations of most city officials. The cases of Philadelphia and Seattle demonstrate how garden advocacy organizations have mobilized social movement activity by drawing on discursive opportunity structures to successfully frame the need for garden permanence as part of a wider struggle to preserve resident interests in the face of potential political corruption. Alongside these more confrontational efforts, organizations in both Philadelphia and Seattle also used insider strategies for some of their efforts to legitimize gardens. As Chapter 4 will explain, growth machine logic endures as a powerful force in shaping the framing, policy, and practice of urban agriculture in all three cities.A city’s civic conventions form an important piece of the organizational environment in which community gardening programs develop and define themselves. Yet what is possible for urban agriculture in any given city is also contingent upon its political-economic context. As urban political ecologists would describe it, ideas about appropriate uses for urban space combine with material flows and conditions, as well as ideas governing the legitimacy of governments themselves, in order to determine the actual production of urban socio-nature . In this regard, the distribution and character of urban agriculture in any city is influenced by local economic pressures, the sources and extent of public resources, and political factors at larger scales such as the laws and activities of state and federal governments.

This is not to say that active racial bias was applied in hiring and appointing leaders, rather that low or no pay likely served as a barrier for gardeners of color in light of persistent racial wealth gaps . The demographics of P-Patch leadership are likely to have impacted the perspective from which both organizations operated, especially the framing of the benefits of community gardens. P-Patch volunteers assiduously grew and measured their food bank donations, which have no doubt been helpful for food insecure Seattleites; however, produce distributed through food banks treats the symptom of hunger, rather than its root cause of economic inequality . Likewise, community building is an important and hard to measure process for maintaining healthy social dynamics in cities . However, when community-building is framed as a relief-valve for the pressures of increasing urbanization, as was often the case in the P-Patch’s framing, it reflects an ideological orientation that seeks to accommodate rather than challenge ideas of inexorable urban growth. Moreover, as Chapter 4 will explain, the sense of community engendered in the P-Patches is part of what has made Seattle such an attractive city for the “creative class” whose purchasing power and population growth have contributed to gentrification in most Seattle neighborhoods. Among the three case-cities, Seattle’s urban agriculture movement, in particular the organized efforts to preserve P-Patches in the 1990s, grow table has been the most effective so far at accomplishing policy change that secures community gardens as a permanent land use.

The organizational structure, pairing a city-run garden program with a nonprofit fundraising and advocacy organization, appears to have worked very well to develop and manage gardens in a stable way while facilitating gardener mobilization when needed and encouraging leadership from gardeners themselves. However, gardeners from more marginalized communities have almost never taken on these leadership roles, and the mobilization to protect gardens has not addressed the question of securing low-income gardeners themselves in the neighborhoods they have helped to shape.Urban agriculture has gained legitimacy as a land use in each of the three case-cities, and the benefits with which it is most associated reflect the strategies that the main gardening organizations in each city have pursued to gain and maintain their own legitimacy. In Milwaukee, MUG attempted to gain legitimacy as a land trust, but when they were unsuccessful in convincing a sufficient donor audience that garden preservation was a meaningful cause, MUG ultimately joined Growing Power, Walnut Way and the Victory Gardens Initiative in focusing on youth engagement and employment. Together, these organizations built legitimacy for urban agriculture as a tool for job training and economic development. Philadelphia Green gained legitimacy as a program of the well-established Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and in working to maintain its legitimacy for the organization’s donor base, program leaders demonstrated how greening can work as a tool for blight removal and neighborhood revitalization. However, PHS and Philadelphia Green did not invest as much effort in building the program’s legitimacy with urban gardeners themselves, and another group has claimed that role. When community organizers were mobilizing to change city policy and defend threatened gardens, they ultimately removed PHS from their coalition and formed Soil Generation, an organization staking its legitimacy on its representation of Black and Brown growers in the city.

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

Since the PPatch nonprofit had gained legitimacy as a forum for supporting gardeners, rather than as a garden site administrator, its primary legitimizing audience was the gardeners themselves, and the organization depended relatively less on approval from city officials. Framing appeals for collective action as looking out for the interests of its primary, already-engaged audience, the PPatch nonprofit was able to take up the function of a social movement organization with relative ease . Finally, let us consider how the various organizations’ efforts to legitimize their operations have impacted the physical institutionalization of urban agriculture within each city’s landscape. For example, most Milwaukee residents and visitors are just as likely to encounter young people selling cottage goods made from produce they grew as they would be to encounter the space in which the products were grown. Given the relative scope of Philadelphia Green’s different projects, residents and visitors in Philadelphia are far more likely to see lots with the “clean-and-green” treatment than they are to see community gardens. Meanwhile in Seattle, the P-Patch gardens have been gradually developed into public gathering spaces rather than just growing spaces, and residents and visitors are increasingly likely to encounter them as inviting, park-like places. Thus, the organizations have legitimized urban agriculture around some benefits rather than others, not only discursively through media coverage, publicity, vertical rack and political engagement, but also materially through the manifestations of their work that reinforce particular ideas about urban nature.Organizational sociologists and social movement scholars have long emphasized the influence of external factors on organizational practices and outcomes . Yet an aspect of the organizational environment that has not received much attention in the literature is the locality’s civic conventions . Civic conventions are shared beliefs about expected and acceptable forms of interaction between the government and the polity, an institutionalized understanding of “how we do things around here” . This chapter will demonstrate how civic conventions are especially influential for hybrid organizations as they attempt to expand into a new organizational function which positions them differently with respect to civic action. Deploying the concept of civic conventions, I contribute to the literature on hybrid organizational forms by exploring the dynamics at work when service providers take on social movement work, rather than the reverse scenario described by Minkoff . Unlike hybrid organizations that begin as movement organizations and later take up service provision as a form of civic action, urban agriculture groups initially work to organize communities in the civic action of transforming land and must then take up social movement work later, when the transformed land becomes threatened. In doing so, garden organizations must navigate idiosyncratic local expectations regarding civic and political engagement. Organizations that build their legitimacy around social movement activities may be able to push the boundaries of local civic conventions, but organizations that are legitimized for community service provision face an extra challenge in gaining legitimacy for new activities, and thus pressure to conform to extant civic conventions is stronger. Building connections between organizational theory and the literature on social movements, I argue that the local civic conventions can be understood as a combination of political and discursive opportunity structures, working together to shape the terrain on which hybrid organizations cultivate civic participation of various forms among some or all of their members.

When they first form, urban garden organizations must work to establish legitimacy for themselves as community-based service providers. In order for a garden organization to be viewed as legitimate, the gardeners must be seen as contributing to the public good rather than as benefitting unfairly from public resources such as land and water. Even when urban garden organizations become familiar and widely accepted in a city, the use of urban land for agriculture is almost always viewed as a temporary practice . Once gardens are established, they often become quite meaningful to the gardeners and those living nearby; this emotional connection makes the loss or removal of the garden a difficult prospect. Facing an impending removal or changing economic conditions that increase gardens’ vulnerability to development, garden organizations must work to build a new kind of legitimacy for urban agriculture as a permanent fixture of the urban landscape. This effort requires new framing processes and political strategies, often including social movement mobilization. The strategies that can be pursued at this point will depend somewhat on the local civic conventions, as well as the existing frames that have been used to legitimize garden organizations.In this chapter, I highlight the role of civic conventions throughout the life of urban garden organizations and the movements they spur to preserve urban agriculture as a land use. When urban garden programs are building their initial legitimacy, when gardens are about to be replaced with a different land use, or when garden advocates propose a change in local policy that would increase the long-term security of growing spaces, they can build strategies that draw on local civic conventions to amass broader support from the general public . I discuss two main ways that civic conventions can promote garden legitimation at these different points in time. First, civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance can help build the legitimacy of urban agriculture as garden organizations are getting started and seeking out basic resources and support—in other words, as the garden programs are seeking to gain legitimacy as community-based organizations. Like other resident activities and use-value rich land uses, urban agriculture tends to have its strongest base of support at the grassroots level. If the municipal government is generally receptive to resident preferences and interests, this convention creates a relatively easy way for resident demands for urban agriculture to be incorporated rationally into local policy. In Seattle and, to a lesser extent, in Milwaukee, civic conventions which held that city officials should be receptive to bottom-up governance created many opportunities for residents to express their desire to use vacant land for growing food directly to key decision-makers, and the cities’ main garden organizations and policies gained legitimacy through this process. Conversely, in the case of Philadelphia, civic conventions carry far less expectation for bottom-up governance. In this city, cynicism about government runs high in part because of a complex, opaque bureaucracy that seems to discourage formal resident input. In this case, when cultivated lots were being sold without gardeners’ prior knowledge or input, lack of access to decision-making and perceived injustice became rallying cries for broader mobilization around community control of land and urban planning. Comparing the social movement dynamics in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle, in this chapter I show how civic conventions present a landscape of discursive and political opportunity structures that hinder or make possible certain strategies for achieving an organization’s desired policy outcomes. Civic conventions that exist as widely shared ideas about what is unacceptable for, expected in, or salient to the local policy making process can be considered an aspect of the local discursive opportunity structure. That is, these conventions are cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate in the context of local policy making .

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

Beyond the aesthetics, urban gardens and farms are more likely to be seen as legitimate land uses if claims about their benefits are supported with evidence. In all of the case-cities discussed here, garden organizations systematically gathered evidence over time that showed urban agriculture sites providing certain benefits for nearby residents and the city at-large. The major community gardening organizations in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee have developed systematic processes to manage labor and to maintain a narrative about the value of their organizations’ work. In each city, organization leaders framed the value of urban agriculture around particular benefits and then supported this narrative through organizational decisions and data collection. In Milwaukee, urban agriculture’s employment potential was foregrounded, while in Philadelphia the role of greening in neighborhood development was emphasized, and in Seattle garden advocates built a narrative around the food production and community-building benefits of urban agriculture. Importantly, given that urban agriculture cannot provide all of its potential benefits simultaneously, the choices made by organizational leaders in pursuit of some benefits meant less emphasis was placed on others. Over time, as these organizations amplified the narratives that maximized their own resource acquisition and legitimacy, local perceptions of urban agriculture and its physical manifestation across the city were increasingly shaped by the organizations’ touted benefits. With these benefits reinforced in the minds of political leaders and the general public, and less attention given to other potential benefits, in every case urban agriculture has institutionalized discursively and materially toward certain benefits over others. In all three of these cases, the legitimacy of urban agriculture was bolstered by some degree of support from officials in the local government; however, city officials are also broadly committed to the logic of urban growth and increasing exchange value, especially those who have power over land use decisions. At junctures when development pressure threatens the use of urban land for agriculture, indoor garden table a narrative legitimizing gardens around particular benefits is rarely enough to solidify their value as the highest and best use of developable land. In the face of such challenges, social movement mobilization becomes essential. Social movement activity requires significant time and resources, and the main garden organizations in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have not sustained social movement activities for the long-term to the same extent that they have invested in the systematic processes that legitimize their organizational activities. Nevertheless, at critical junctures when gardens have been threatened, each of these organizations has confronted the need for movement-building, or movement-like activities, in order to secure threatened land. In these instances, an organization’s existing commitments, its legitimacy, and the particular narrative used to legitimize urban agriculture often constrain organizational options in pushing for preservation. As this chapter will demonstrate, decisions made by the leaders of large garden organizations have an outsized influence on the public narrative legitimizing urban agriculture in their city. Critically, if organizational leadership is not developed from within the communities most in need , then the local urban agriculture system is unlikely to be tailored to their interests, because the needs of the urban growth machine—which are at odds with the needs of the poor—will impose themselves without fail on any question of urban land use.

Existing research shows that local food initiatives and other interventions to make cities more “sustainable” are still likely to manifest as uneven development that further privileges some neighborhoods and groups over others . While many of the potential benefits of urban agriculture are promising vehicles to alleviate symptoms of inequality, such an outcome is not automatic; instead, benefits sometimes accrue to more privileged groups while further disadvantaging those at the margins . Furthermore, organizational leaders may be more focused on treating the symptoms of injustice, rather than changing the underlying structural causes, if they do not have lived experiences of inequality and marginalization . Even if movements and organizations do pursue structural policy change, they may still reproduce unequal power dynamics in day-to-day practices and interactions . Thus, the extent to which organizational leadership comes from poor urban residents, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized groups will impact the organization’s outcomes through both the movement strategies pursued and the organization’s everyday activities. The following sections will show how organizational decisions have been key to the successful legitimation of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle, while noting that the issue of developing leadership from within marginalized communities is still being worked out within urban agriculture organizations, just as within the broader alternative food and environmental movements. The chapter will highlight how organizational goals and decision-making affect the local narrative constructed regarding the benefits of urban agriculture and, ultimately, its role in the urban milieu. In so doing, this chapter strengthens the connections between urban political ecology and sociological theories regarding legitimacy, institutionalization, and social movements, by analyzing how community-based organizations’ pursuit of legitimacy over time reflects their relationships with the organizational environment and extends narratives of legitimacy into that environment, as well as the physical environment, which then shape possibilities for social movement framing and mobilization.As in many other US cities, interest in urban agriculture and growing food increased in Milwaukee amidst the economic downturn of the 1970s. Residents cultivated vacant land in Milwaukee through the Shoots n Roots program, established by the city in the early 1970s and taken over by the Milwaukee County University Extension from 1978 onward, as well as through more loosely organized activities on lots across the city. When a community garden in the rapidly appreciating Riverwest neighborhood was lost to development in the late 1990s, the displaced gardeners decided to form an organization to protect other sites like theirs. This is how Milwaukee Urban Gardens originated. MUG first formed as a land trust to purchase and preserve community gardens. In its early years, the organization was largely funded by a local benefactor who made a substantial anonymous donation that covered office expenses and one staff person’s salary for about 5 years. During this time, the organization’s goal was to build a name for itself, draw attention to the need to preserve local urban gardens from development threats, secure funding from additional sources, and purchase land for gardens—in other words, to gain legitimacy and attract the resources to sustain itself. However, without a robust donor base or relationships with large grant making foundations, the organization struggled to raise the additional money needed for land purchases. Operating on such a small budget, MUG was only able to preserve land opportunistically rather than based on the biggest threats facing existing gardens. Of the 5 sites that MUG eventually came to own, 3 of them were donated and only 2 were existing gardens. MUG worked to find interested residents and build new community gardens on the donated sites, but these gardens tended not to last. In 2010 MUG convened a land use policy task force in partnership with the Milwaukee Food Council. MUG’s director at the time, Bruce Wiggins, was a retired urban planner with experience in Philadelphia and Kansas City who prioritized addressing the city’s policies towards urban agriculture as a way to improve prospects for garden preservation.

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

These frames would then influence organizational activities, grant applications, and policy deliberations going forward. I find that in all three cities, the main garden organizations came to emphasize an economic framing—employment in Milwaukee, blight removal in Philadelphia, and neighborhood amenity creation in Seattle—while placing relatively less emphasis on potential social and ecological benefits. I demonstrate how the different organizations’ economic frames have succeeded to varying degrees in convincing city officials that garden sites deserve long-term land access, funding, and other forms of public support. At the same time, I note how these frames leave unquestioned the assumption that economic concerns should have primacy over social and ecological ones, setting the stage for future conflicts as the political-economic system has continued to produce inequality and environmental degradation. In discussing Philadelphia, I highlight the role that Soil Generation has played in producing a counter-narrative that reframes the value of urban agriculture as a facet of community self-determination. Soil Generation’s framing subverts economic arguments and calls attention to the need for more just urban land use policy writ large. This chapter reveals how an organizational imperative— gaining and maintaining legitimacy—can inadvertently structure the subsequent framing process that is so important for a social movement’s scope, strength, and success. Thus, I provide new insights into the challenges that community-based organizations are likely to face when they attempt to hybridize into social movement work, and I offer practical lessons for urban agriculture enthusiasts seeking to build and legitimize new garden programs.Chapter 3 considers the organizational environments within each city, particularly the locally shared expectations around governance and policymaking, or “civic conventions,” which have differently constrained or enabled various kinds of garden advocacy, movement organizing, and land-use governance in each locale. In this chapter, I build on the concept of civic conventions theorized by Beamish and others by reconceptualizing civic conventions as a facet of both political and discursive opportunity structure at the urban scale. My analysis of interview and archival data shows that local civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance in Milwaukee and Seattle have supported the legitimation of urban agriculture as a land use by bringing resident interests to the attention of policymakers and by facilitating the development of garden projects in line with broader public priorities. In contrast, commercial greenhouse supplies in Philadelphia many gardens have remained informal because gardeners see no benefit in engaging with the city government. Local civic conventions hold that the government is often ineffective, and gardeners are also wary of top-down interventions that could threaten their use of the city’s vacant land. Compared to Milwaukee and Seattle, garden informality and suspicion of the government in Philadelphia may have hindered gardener organizing efforts and the public legitimacy of gardens; however, in the last decade, widely shared cynicism about Philadelphia’s city government has provided a discursive opportunity structure in which urban agriculture advocates have effectively framed the loss of gardens in terms of perceived injustice and lack of access to decision-making. This frame, advanced by Soil Generation and its coalition partners, has become a rallying cry for broader mobilization around community control of land and resistance to gentrification.

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

In congruence with the vertical metaphors utilized by those on the farm, the remainder of this article will move ethnographically from those considered at the top to those considered at the bottom.This farm is owned and run by third-generation Japanese-Americans whose parents’ generation lost half their land during the internment in the 1940s. Their relatives, with hundreds of acres on Bainbridge Island, Washington, were interned suddenly and the government sold their land out from under them. Those in the Skagit Valley had time to entrust their farm to a white family, and thereby avoided the same fate. Today, the third generation of Tanaka brothers makes up the majority of farm executives. The following are abbreviated profiles of key farm executives, focusing on their anxieties. In these profiles, we see that the growers’ worries are focused on farm survival in a bleak landscape of competition with increasing corporate agribusiness, expanding urban boundaries, and economic globalization. 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 cannotimagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. Thus, cannabis vertical farming 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. They promptly instructed all crop managers to treat all workers with respect. Perhaps instead of blaming the growers, 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, drying cannabis 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 withoutprivacy. They are in charge of reception, interacting with white local residents and businesspeople 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, 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 deskwork 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.

Essentially, farmers were asked, “Can you think of a field that you would consider ‘least challenging’ in terms of building soil fertility on your farm?” and “Can you also think of a field that you would consider ‘most challenging’ in terms of building soil fertility on your farm?” . Farmers would often select several fields, and through back-and-forth dialogue with the field researcher, together would arrive at a final field selected for each category . Only fields with all summer vegetable row crops were selected for sampling. For each site, farmers delineated specific management practices, including information about crop history and crop rotations, bed prepping if applicable, the number of tillage passes and depth of tillage, rate of additional N-based fertilizer inputs, and type of irrigation applied. Following field site selection, soil sampling was designed to capture indicators of soil fertility in the bulk soil at a single timepoint. This sampling approach was intended to provide a snapshot of on-farm soil health and fertility. Because the farms involved generally grow a wide range of vegetable crops, we designed the study to have greater inference space than a single crop, even at the expense of adding variability. As such, we collected bulk soil samples that we did not expect to be strongly influenced by the particular crop present. Field sampling occurred over the course of four weeks in July 2019. To sample each site, a random 10m by 20m transect area was placed on the field across three rows of the same crop. Within the transect area, vertical grow system three composite samples each based on five sub-samples were collected approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth of 20cm using an auger .

Subsamples were composited on site and mixed thoroughly by hand for 5 minutes before being placed on ice and immediately transported back to the laboratory.Soil samples were preserved on ice until processed within several hours of field extraction. Each sample was sieved to 4mm and then either air dried, extracted with 0.5M K2SO4, or utilized to measure net mineralization and nitrification . A batch of air-dried samples were measured for gravimetric water content , which was determined by drying fresh soils samples at 105oC for 48 hours. Moist soils were immediately extracted and analyzed colorimetrically for NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations using modified methods from Miranda et al. and Forster . Additional volume of extracted samples were subsequently frozen for future laboratory analyses. To determine soil textural class, another batch of air-dried samples were further sieved to 2mm and subsequently prepared for analysis using the “micropipette” method . Water holding capacity was determined using the funnel method, adapted from Geisseler et al. , where a jumbo cotton ball thoroughly wetted with deionized water was placed inside the base of a funnel with 100 g soil on top. Deionized water was added and allowed to imbibe into the soil until no water dripped from the funnel. The soil was allowed to drain overnight . A sub-sample of this soil was then weighed and dried for 48 hours at 105oC. The difference following draining and oven drying of a sub-sample was defined as 100% WHC. Additional air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground and then analyzed for total organic carbon , total soil nitrogen , soil protein, and pH at the Ohio State Soil Fertility Lab . The former two analyses were conducted using an elemental analyzer . Soil protein was determined using the autoclaved citrate extractable soil protein method outlined by Hurisso et al. .

Remaining air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for POXC using the active carbon method described by Weil et al. , but with modifications as described by Culman et al. . In brief, 2.5g of air-dried soil was placed in a 50mL centrifuge tube with 20mL of 0.02 mol/L KMnO4 solution, shaken on a reciprocal shaker for exactly 2 minutes, and then allowed to settle for 10 minutes. A 0.5mL aliquot of supernatant was added to a second centrifuge tube containing 49.5mL of water for a 1:100 dilution and analyzed at 550 nm. The amount of POXC was determined by the loss of permanganate due to C oxidation . After the initial field visit and following summer field sampling, all 13 farmers were contacted to participate in a follow up visit to their farm, which consisted of a semi-structured interview followed by a brief survey. The semi-structured 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. Inperson interviews were conducted in the winter, between December 2019 – February 2020; three interviews were conducted in December 2020. All interviews were recorded with permission from the farmer and lasted about 2 hours. To develop interview questions for the semi-structured interviews , we established initial topics and thematic sections first. 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. We used an openended, qualitative approach that relies on in-depth and in-person interviews to study farmer knowledge . In the semi-structured interview, farmers were asked a range of questions that included: their personal background with farming and the history of their farm operation, their general farm management approaches, as well as soil management approaches specific to soil health and soil fertility, such as key nutrients in their consideration of soil fertility, and their thoughts on soil tests . A brief in-person survey that asked several key demographic questions was administered at the end of the semistructured interviews. 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 . Through structured analysis of the interview transcripts, key themes were identified and then a codebook was constructed to systematically categorize data related to soil health and soil fertility . We summarize these results in table form. To unpack differences between Fields A and Fields B across all farms, we applied a multi-step approach. We first conducted a preliminary, global comparison between Fields A and Fields B across all farms using a one-way analysis of variance to determine if Fields A were significantly different from Fields B for each indicator for soil fertility. Then, to develop a basis for further comparison of Fields A and Fields B, we considered potential links between management and soil fertility. To do so, we developed a gradient among the farms using a range of soil management practices detailed during the initial farm visit. These soil management practices were based on interview data from the initial farm visit, and were also emphasized by farmers as key practices linked to soil fertility. The practices used to inform the gradient included cover crop application, amount of tillage, crop rotation patterns, crop diversity, the use of integrated crop and livestock systems , and the amount of N-based fertilizer application. Cover crop frequency was determined using the average number of cover crop plantings per year, calculated as cover crop planting counts over the course of two growing years for each field site. Tillage encompassed the number of tillage passes a farmer performed per field site per season. To quantify crop rotation, a rotational complexity index was calculated for each site using the formula outlined by Socolar et al. . To calculate crop diversity, cannabis grow supplies we focused on crop abundance, the total number of crops grown per year at the whole farm level was divided by the total acreage farmed. To determine ICLS, an index was created based on the number and type of animals utilized . Lastly, we calculated the amount of additional N-based fertilizer applied to each field . In order to group, visualize, and further explore links with indicators for soil fertility, all soil management variables were standardized , and then used in a principal components analysis using the factoextra package in R . In short, these independent management variables were used to create a composite of several management variables. Principal components with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 were retained. To establish the gradient in management, we plotted all 13 farms using the first two principal components, and ordered the farms based on spatial relationships that arose from this visualization using the nearest neighbor analysis . To further explore links between management and soil fertility, we used the results from the PCA to formalize a gradient in management across all farms, and then used this gradient as the basis for comparison between Field A and Field B across all indicators for soil fertility. 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, 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. The importance of crop health as an indicator for soil health also surfaced for five out of 13 farmers. 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 .

To understand crop available N more holistically, there is a need to measure actual flow rates of soil N—in addition to—static pools of inorganic N . Soil indicators that adequately capture N availability to crops are therefore necessary to move beyond the legacy of the Law of the Minimum in organic agriculture. Unpacking the soil processes that mediate flows of N may ultimately provide a more accurate characterization of soil N cycling and in turn, N availability to crops. Unfortunately, gross N mineralization and nitrification rates are very difficult to measure in practice, particularly on working organic farms . While net N flows are easier to measure in comparison to gross N flows and can provide a useful measure of N cycling dynamics as a complement to measurements of inorganic N pools, net N flows still pose serious limitations— namely that net rates cannot detect plant-soil-microbe interactions and therefore are not adequate as metrics for determining crop available N . In particular, relying on net N flows as a measure of N availability does not account for the ability of plants to compete for inorganic N, and assumes plants take up inorganic N only after microbial N demands are satisfied . It is also possible that measuring soil organic matter pools could help indicate N availability because SOM supports microbial abundance and activity, and because SOM is also the source of substrates for N mineralization . Several studies have proposed measuring soil organic matter levels to complement measuring inorganic N pools, understand soil N cycling, dry racks for weed and infer N availability . Assessing the total quantity of organic carbon and nitrogen within soil organic matter represents one established method for measuring levels of soil organic matter, and is morereadily measurable than gross N rates.

Additional indicators for quantifying “labile” pools of organic matter, such as POXC and soil protein, have also become more widely studied in recent years, and applied on organic farms as well . When used in combination with more established soil indicators that measure organic C and N pools , this suite of indicators may potentially provide added insight to understanding crop available N . Importantly, applied together these four indicators for soil organic matter levels may also more readily and accurately serve as a proxy for soil quality—generally defined as a soil’s ability to perform essential ecological functions key to sustaining a farm operation . Despite the availability of these soil indicators, very few studies have systematically examined the way in which SOM levels on working farms compare to N cycling processes, and specifically how SOM levels compare to microbially mediated gross N rates. Further, it is still unclear to what degree the interactions between soil edaphic characteristics and soil management influence N cycling and N availability to crops . For instance, soil texture may play a mediating role in N cycling, where soils high in clay content may limit substrate availability as well as access to oxygen, which in turn, may restrict the efficiency of N cycling . In this sense, it is important to understand the role that soil edaphic characteristics play in order to identify the underlying baseline limits imposed by the soil itself. Equally important to consider is the role of soil management in mediating N cycling. Compared to controlled experiments, soil management regimes on working farms can be more complex and nonlinear in nature due to multiple interacting practices applied over the span of several years, and even multiple decades. To date, a handful of studies conducted on working farms have examined tradeoffs among different management systems , though few such studies examine the cumulative effects of multiple management practices across a gradient of working organic farms. However, understanding the cumulative effects of management practices is key to link soil management to N cycling on working farms .

Likewise, it is important to examine the ways in which local soil edaphic characteristics may limit farmers’ ability to improve soil quality through management practices. Though underutilized in this context, the development of farm typologies presents a useful approach to quantitatively integrate the heterogeneity in management on working organic farms . Broadly, typologies allow for the categorization of different types of organic agriculture and provide a way to synthesize the complexity of agricultural systems . Previous studies that make use of farm typologies found that differences in total soil N across farms are largely defined by levels of soil organic matter. To address these questions, we conducted field research at 27 farm field sites in Yolo County, California, USA, and used four commonly available indicators of soil organic matter to classify farm field sites into farm types via k-means cluster analysis. Using farm typologies identified, we examined the extent to which soil texture and/or soil management practices influenced these measured soil indicators across all working organic farms, using Linear Discriminant Analysis and Variation Partitioning Analysis . We then determined the extent to which gross N cycling rates and other soil N indicators differed across these farm types. Lastly, we developed a linear mixed model to understand the key factors most useful for predicting potential gross N cycling rates along a continuous gradient, incorporating soil indicators, on-farm management practices, and soil texture data. Our study highlights the usefulness of soil indicators towards understanding plant-soil-microbe dynamics that underpin crop N availability on working organic farms. While we found measurable differences among farms based on soil organic matter, strongly influenced by soil texture and management, these differences did not translate for N cycling indicators measured here. Though N cycling is strongly linked to soil organic matter, indicators for soil organic matter are not strong predictors of N cycling rates.All farm sites were on similar parent material according to soil survey data .

All fields had soil textural class that was either loam, clay loam, or silty clay loam, based on soil texture analyses. To identify potential participants for this study, we first consulted the USDA Organic Integrity database and assembled a comprehensive list of all organic farms in Yolo County . Next, with input from the University of California Cooperative Extension Small Farms Advisor for Yolo County, we narrowed the list of potential farms by applying several criteria for this study: 1) grow fruit, vegetables, and other diversified crops; 2) located within Yolo County; 3) at least 10 years of experience in organic farming; 4) at least five years of farming on the same land. This significantly reduced the pool of potential participants to 16 possible farms. In the end, 13 organic farms and 1 local research station agreed to an initial field interview in early summer 2019 and field sampling in mid-summer 2019. Farmers who agreed to participate were not asked to change their management or planting plans.During the initial field visits in June 2019, two field sites were selected in collaboration with farmers on each participating farm; these sites represented fields in which farmers planned to grow summer vegetables. Therefore, only fields with all summer vegetable row crops were selected for sampling. At this time, farmers also discussed management practices applied for each field site, including information about crop history and rotations, bed prepping if applicable, tillage, organic fertilizer input, and irrigation . Because of the uniformity of long-term management at the field station , hydroponic rack system only one treatment was selected in collaboration with the Cropping Systems Manager—a tomato field in the organic corn-tomato-cover crop system. Since the farms involved in this study generally grew a wide range of vegetable crops, we designed soil sampling to have greater inference space than a single crop, even at the expense of adding variability. Sampling was therefore designed to capture indicators of nitrogen cycling rates and nitrogen pools in the bulk soil at a single time point. Fields were sampled mid-season near peak vegetative growth when crop nitrogen demand is the highest. Using the planting date and anticipated harvest date for each crop, peak vegetative growth was estimated and used to determine timing of sampling. We collected bulk soil samples that we did not expect to be strongly influenced by the particular crop present. This sampling approach provided a snapshot of on-farm nitrogen cycling. Field sampling occurred over the course of four weeks in July 2019. To sample each site, a random 10m by 20m transect area was placed on the field site across three rows of the same crop, away from field edges. Within the transect area, three composite samples each based on 5 sub-samples were collected approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth of 20cm using an auger . Sub-samples were composited on site, and mixed thoroughly by hand for 5 minutes before being placed on ice and immediately transported back to the laboratory. To determine bulk density , we hammered a steel bulk density core sampler approximately 30cm from a plant at a depth 20cm below the soil surface and recorded the dry weight of this volume to calculate BD; we sampled three replicates per site and averaged these values to calculate final BD measurements for each site. Soil samples were preserved on ice until processed within several hours of field extraction. Each sample was sieved to 4mm and then either air dried, extracted with 0.5M K2SO4, or utilized to measure net and gross N mineralization and nitrification . Air dried samples were measured for gravimetric water content and BD. Gravimetric water content was determined by drying fresh soils samples at 105oC for 48 hrs. Moist soils were immediately extracted and analyzed colorimetrically for NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations using modified methods from Miranda et al. and Forster .

Additional volume of extracted samples were subsequently frozen for future laboratory analyses. To determine soil textural class, air dried samples were sieved to 2mm and subsequently prepared for analysis using the “micropipette” method . Water holding capacity was determined using the funnel method, adapted from Geisseler et al. , where a jumbo cotton ball thoroughly wetted with deionized water was placed inside the base of a funnel with 100g soil on top. The soil was allowed to drain overnight . A sub-sample of this soil was then weighed and dried for 48 hours at 105oC. The difference following draining and oven drying of a sub-sample was defined as 100% WHC. Air dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for total soil N and total organic C using an elemental analyzer at the Ohio State Soil Fertility Lab ; additional soil data including pH and soil protein were also measured at this lab. Soil protein was determined using the autoclaved citrate extractable soil protein method outlined by Hurisso et al. . Additional air-dried samples were sieved to 2mm, ground, and then analyzed for POXC using the active carbon method described by Weil et al. , but with modifications as described by Culman et al. . In brief, 2.5g of air-dried soil was placed in a 50mL centrifuge tube with 20mL of 0.02 mol/L KMnO4 solution, shaken on a reciprocal shaker for exactly 2 minutes, and then allowed to settle for 10 minutes. A 0.5-mL aliquot of supernatant was added to a second centrifuge tube containing 49.5mL of water for a 1:100 dilution and analyzed at 550 nm. The amount of POXC was determined by the loss of permanganate due to C oxidation .To measure gross N mineralization and nitrification in soil samples, we applied an isotope pool dilution approach, adapted from Braun et al. . This method is based on three underlying assumptions listed by Kirkham & Bartholomew : 1) microorganisms in soil do not discriminate between 15N and 14N; 2) rates of processes measured remain constant over the incubation period; and 3) 15N assimilated during the incubation period is not remineralized. To prepare soil samples for IPD, we adjusted soils to approximately 40% WHC prior to incubation with deionized water. Next, four sets of 40g of fresh soil per sub-sample were weighed into specimen cups and covered with parafilm. Based on initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations determined above, a maximum of 20% of the initial NH4 + and NO3 – concentrations was added as either 15N-NH4 + or 15N-NO3 – tracer solution at 10 atom%; the tracer solution also raised each sub-sample soil water content to 60% WHC.

Jones and Halstead demonstrate this same concept with maslins in Europe, where minor contaminants such as wild herbaceous species are difficult to remove and also tend to be tolerated within agricultural fields. When the life forms of the weedy species identified within Cerén milpas are taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that the majority of these weeds would have been manageable if desired. The majority of weedy seeds and achenes recovered from the maize agricultural fields at Cerén come from annual plants , which would have been relatively easy to control by farmers. Annuals that only live for a single season and generally have more shallow root systems can be removed much more effectively than perennial weeds . Annual weeds do grow much more rapidly than perennials , but the deeper root system of perennials make them considerably more difficult to control. Perennial weeds have a minimal presence within the fields at Cerén, both in terms of quantity and ubiquity. The utility and the abundance of the weedy species found within these agricultural fields raise speculations concerning whether or not these species were deliberately cultivated here or were tolerated. The dichotomy between wild and cultivated food plants does not have a clear distinction; many wild species are thought to actually fall along a continuum where various levels of intervention and human management take place during growth cycles . Cerén farmers clearly managed the landscape in a manner that would have allowed for harvest from both agricultural and non-agricultural species simultaneously. Ethnographic work in Mesoamerica has suggested that the main goal of agriculture for the Maya is to “use the land constantly and keep it covered, as far as possible, with useful plants” .

Farmers aim to design agricultural systems that yield the greatest return. Perhaps these ancient agriculturalists conceptualized weedy plants in a much different way than modern views on such plants. The Cerén farmers tolerated and possibly even encouraged the growth of wild and weedy species within their maize fields. All of the weedy species recovered from these fields have known uses nutritionally, medicinally, pipp racking system or for other purposes where they were incorporated into ceremonial activities or valued as a decoration . Amaranthus, Crotalaria, and Portulaca are all significant contributors towards Mesoamerican diets today and are often intentionally integrated into milpa agroecosystems . Kekchi villagers in Belize only remove weeds if a particularly dangerous variety has encroached, such as those with thorns or spines . The Kekchi Maya do not view weeds as a threat to their crops and consider their constant removal to be futile. Weeds can be useful additions whether fertilizing the soil, increasing moisture, or serving as a foodstuff. In fact, milpa agricultural systems in Mesoamerica commonly incorporate weedy species that are considered nutritious and edible, what is called quelites . Ethnobotanical records show that the majority of species procured for medicinal purposes are collected from disturbed habitats, such as agricultural fields, where weeds are predominant . Nine of the wild and weedy species within the Cerén fields have known medicinal applications to present day Mesoamerican groups . Eleven of them are edible and are incorporated into meals as herbs. Amaranth was the second most ubiquitous herb within the fields, occurring in all operations excavated except for Op. AN, and is an important edible green and grain throughout Mesoamerica . The overwhelming amount of Spilanthes acmella achenes recovered could have been used as an herb or spice to flavor daily meals.

The S. acmella achenes were so abundant that their distribution within agricultural contexts can reveal how the herb is significantly more prevalent within the fields closest to the households , suggesting that the farmers encouraged its growth. This follows Killion’s assessment that mono-cropped agricultural fields may have been farther from domestic structures, whereas multicropped or polyculture fields would have been located closer to where people lived. Alternatively, farmers may be more tolerant of weeds during the final stage of a cultivation cycle, as the maize crop is ready to be harvested . Many of the maize stalks recovered here via plaster casts were bent over so that they can dry within the fields , as if the agriculturalists were just about to collect that season’s harvest. The bent stalks prevent moisture from entering the fruits since water can no longer be taken up through the stem and rain can no longer enter the cobs as easily either. The apparent abundance of wild and weedy species within Cerén’s milpas provides further evidence that these fields were at the end of their growing season and perhaps the weedy herbs were simply not an issue that required manual removal. Many milpa agroecosystems burn the entire field in order to prepare the landscape for the next planting cycle, thus managing any weed populations that had become overgrown. Relatedly, it has been documented that the Lakandon Maya take ashes from piles of collected weeds and leftover crop residue and spread them throughout their fields to provide organic matter as a fertilizer . Since the soil samples collected for flotation in this study were taken from the interior of the agricultural ridges, it is unlikely that these herbs were only present from burned organic matter spread throughout the area. If this was the case, the distribution of the weedy species would be more irregular, rather than the pattern of weedy seeds being more prevalent in fields closer to the village structures . It is more probable that their existence in the flotation samples is due to their growth within the fields.

These weeds’ strong presence in the fields suggests that they could have held a positive relationship with the villagers and were part of a complex agricultural system; at the very least the weedy species were tolerated within the fields. Recent excavations at the site encountered a roadway feature, a sacbe, leading south out of the village, likely beginning near the village plaza . ‘Sacbe’ is the Maya term for a white road; sacbeob were typically constructed using a white material such as plaster. In the case of Cerén, the causeway was covered with a layer of Tierra Blanca Joven, a white volcanic ash derived from Ilopango, and was about 2 m in width and elevated an average of 20 cm above the ground surface . The earthen sacbe found traveling through the maize agricultural fields could be interpreted as a boundary marker between agricultural plots. During the 2013 excavations, more than one maize field was often present within each operation, separated by the causeway . When the paleoethnobotanical remains recovered from the agricultural fields on either side of the causeway are compared, management practices differ between the western and eastern milpas. The western fields reveal a larger percentage of weedy species per sample than the eastern fields . Yet, the eastern fields exhibit a more diverse assemblage of weedy species compared to the western fields. This distinction could indicate varying levels of attention to weed removal in terms of time and intensity. This variation suggests that different individuals or households practiced varying agricultural management strategies, perhaps even distinct timings for planting, pipp vertical racks and that the earthen sacbe served as a boundary marker within the fields. Perhaps the varying presence of weedy species between the eastern and western fields is also indicative of varying perceptions of what a “weed” is to the different farmers tending these fields. Since the western fields exhibits a more limited set of weedy species, the agriculturalists tending this space may have had a more limited set of weedy species that they considered to be of value. The weedy species in the western fields are more limited to those that would have been used as nutritional herbs and foodstuffs, whereas the eastern fields’ more diverse weed assemblage includes more species that have known medicinal applications. Sheets and Dixon characterize this milpa area as the intermediate agricultural zone at Cerén, which exhibits irregular fallowed areas and a great variability in cultivation strategies. Each household likely devoted varying amounts of time toward gardening and management of their fields, with weed removal taking place secondary to other tasks, if at all. The distribution of the most abundant herbaceous species in the assemblage, S. acmella , across the maize agricultural fields reveals a lower abundance of these achenes within the fields closer to the village center. Around roughly 40 m south of the village plaza , the maize agricultural fields begin to exhibit significantly lower counts of herbaceous species within the flotation samples. The species is still quite prevalent in this area, but only amounts to at most half of the quantity of achenes recovered from field contexts closest to the main village. This stark contrast could be indicative of a possible boundary within the milpa where different farmers were responsible for managing the fields to the north and south of Op. AI.

Perhaps the farmer who managed the milpa closest to the plaza was more tolerant of wild and weedy plants compared to the one who managed the area farther away from the village. Variation in management of agricultural fields is also visible within the manioc fields south of the village. While the composition of the manioc beds differs greatly from both the home gardens and the milpas in that it was apparently monocultural, each manioc field was managed by individual cultivators and families, as evidenced by land use lines encountered in 2009 excavations . The land use lines were also aligned 30° east of north, just as the structures and milpas were. The community shares this dominant organizational scheme related to the importance of water coming from the river. Land was still subdivided into distinct plots with clear access by individual cultivators and households. Also found within the agricultural field excavations were quite large carbonized wood fragments from fallen branches in the middle of the maize fields, identified through anthracological analysis. The ancient Maya did not necessarily clear their land of all existing plants in order to grow their crops , so the practice of leaving some trees still standing in the middle of the fields should not be a surprise. We see at least two examples of large branches found within the agricultural fields, Terminalia buceras C. Wright, better known as the bullet tree , and Clusia sp., or what is known as matapalo . These branches suggest that forest taxa were not completely eradicated in ancient Mesoamerican agricultural systems. T. buceras is considered a hard, durable wood so it is commonly used in construction, additionally tannin can be extracted from the bark . The black bark is used medicinally to treat skin eruptions . The wood charcoal from the T. buceras was located within Operation Y , located among the agricultural fields at Cerén and adjacent to a possible boundary marker between two maize fields. This marker was an eroded furrow that was not cultivated. Small eroded furrows throughout the milpas suggest a delineation of farming duties between the various households. This eroded surco could have possibly separated a northern from a southern section of the maize agricultural field. Since large quantities of T. buceras charcoal were recovered from this location, it is possible that the tree once stood near this location and could have also served as a boundary marker. The matapalo branches were recovered from Operation AD, again an agricultural context, and it lies just east of where the rubber tree branch fragments were found. The charred remains were recovered in a stratum of ash that would have been deposited after the Cerén inhabitants evacuated the village . Because of this, we know that these charred remains are part of a tree that remained standing until the very hot tephra [composing Unit 4] landed, with larger particles hotter than 575 °C . This species is known to have been used by Mesoamericans medicinally with the latex used to treat toothaches and the wood also has been used for construction and as a fuel source. Forest ecosystems attract many pollinators, so incorporating them within close proximity to agriculture, perhaps on the margins, can be extremely beneficial. Additionally, the accumulation of plant litter on forest floors can serve as fertilizer for agricultural systems and tree root systems can help prevent erosion . Ethnographic work in the Sierra Tarahumara shows that over seventy percent of food resources for communities in that region comes from forest ecosystems , so their incorporation into agricultural systems makes sense.