We then correlated fields’ rotational complexity with biophysical and policy outcomes factors, using bootstrapped linear mixed models to account for spatial autocorrelation in the data. By identifying spatially explicit predictors of rotational complexity, we illuminate how top-down policy pressures combine with biophysical conditions to create fine-scale simplification patterns that threaten the quality and long-term productivity of the United States’ most fertile soils.We focused our analysis on the eight Midwestern states with the highest corn acreage 2. We considered the six-year period from 2012 to 2017, which coincides with the introduction of the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2012. After deriving a novel field-scale rotational complexity index , we used spatially blocked bootstrapped regression to assess how key landscape factors associated with this indicator. These statistical methods account for overly confident parameter estimates that arise in naive models due to spatial autocorrelation in the data. All analyses were conducted in R47.As crop rotations continue to simplify in the Midwestern US despite robust evidence demonstrating yield and soil benefits from diversified rotations, our ability to explain and understand these trends will come in part from observing the biophysical and policy influences on farmers’ crop choices at one key scale of management: the field. By developing a novel metric, RCI, that can classify rotational complexity over large areas at the field scale, we open the door to regional analyses that can address the unique landscape conditions that impact farmers’ field-level management choices and their subsequent influence on rotational simplification. We find that as farmers are pushed towards simplification by broad federal policies , hydroponics flood tray physical manifestations of these policies like bio-fuel plants are correlated with intensified simplification pressures.

Similarly, we see that the pressure to build soils and boost crop yields through diversified rotations intensifies in fields with lower land capability, while conversely the negative effects of cropping system simplifications are accentuated on the region’s best soils.RCI uses the sequence of cash crops on a given field as a proxy for crop rotation, and sorts these sequences into scores based on the sequence’s complexity and potential for agro-ecosystem health. Because this metric has not been used in previous analyses, we verified RCI’s validity through comparisons to previous estimates of rotational prevalence in the region. For example, two separate surveys of farmers in the Midwestern US showed that between 24% and 46% report growing “diversified rotations” which we consider to be an RCI of greater than 2.24 . In the present study, 34% of fields had an RCI greater than 2.24. This and further comparisons of RCI to previous work show that RCI is capable of capturing previously-noted trends in the region.The ability to analyze rotations at the field scale across the entire Midwestern US allows us to ask how farmers optimize their rotations in complex economic and biophysical landscapes that include pressures to both simplify and diversify. Several biophysical and policy variables show statistically clear relationships with rotational complexity: high land capability, high rainfall during the growing season, and proximity to bio-fuel plants are all associated with rotational simplification. Given policy incentives, farmers often find that “corn on corn on dark dirt usually pencil out to be the way to go,” with farmers growing corn year after year when high quality soil is available. However, when that proverbial “dark dirt” is not available, calculations are not so simple. If growing conditions are sufficiently poor , these intensive corn systems may not be profitable, and farmers will have to rely more heavily on non-corn crops to maintain crop health and profitability in their fields. We see this dynamic at play with land capability in the present analysis.

Despite—or rather because of— the fact that more diverse rotations improve soils, the most degrading cropping systems counter intuitively tend to occur on the highest quality land. Highly capable lands can be farmed intensively without dipping into a production “danger zone” in years with weather that is historically typical for the region, creating a pattern of land use that is likely to degrade these high quality lands in the long term and potentially jeopardize future yields, particularly in the face of climate change. Recent analyses show that enhanced drought tolerance and resilience for crops is one of the key benefits of diverse crop rotations. In the present analysis, mean rainfall during the growing season correlates positively with rotational simplification. Farmers may therefore be employing crop rotation in areas of low rainfall to achieve production levels that will keep a farm solvent, as was seen with rotational complexity increases in Nebraska during a drought period from 1999 to 2007. This trend is further accentuated by the negative interaction between land capability and rainfall variance in our analysis, where higher rainfall variability leads to even more diverse rotations on marginal lands. Proximity to bio-fuel plants, the main policy indicator in our model, showed a statistically clear trend towards rotational simplification, likely due to increased economic profits. Local corn prices increase by $0.06 – $0.12/bushel in the vicinity of a bio-fuel plant, amplifying incentives to grow corn more frequently. Wang and Ortiz Bobea were surprised not to find an impact of bio-fuel plant proximity on county-level frequencies of corn cropping in their own analysis, and the present analysis—done at a field rather than county scale—shows exactly this expected effect: corn-based rotations are simplified when in closer proximity to a bio-fuel plant. In the current economic and policy landscape, farmers are pushed to simplify rotations through more frequent corn cropping, especially in proximity to bio-fuel plants, while marginal soils and low rainfall pull fields towards more diverse rotations.

RCI’s ability to classify rotational complexity across large regions at the field scale and with low computational cost opens doors to future analyses that explore the interplay between localized landscape conditions, management choices, and agricultural, environmental, and economic outcomes. We see a strong potential to employ this metric not only in new regions, but in analyses that address how results from field experiments with crop rotation may scale up to regional levels. We also note that the metric should be used with caution. For example, because RCI cannot recognize functional groups in crop sequences , it cannot capture the added benefits that diverse functional groups often add to a rotation. In addition, though RCI includes a perennial correction that avoids penalizing multiple consecutive years of perennials the metric likely still underestimates the benefits of perennials in rotations. RCI is neutral to the soil benefits of annuals vs. perennials, while in practice the year-round cover and crop species mixes that often accompany perennials may boost soil benefits beyond those of annuals. Consecutive years of perennials are uncommon in our study area , and we encourage caution before applying the metric to regions with a more substantial perennial presence. We therefore recommend using RCI in studies that explore a wide range of cropping sequences where large differences in RCI are very likely to be meaningful, rather than as a tool to rank sequences that give similar scores. It is also important to note that, though the index can be applied to data of any sequence length, RCI values from different sequence lengths cannot be compared to each other; a rotation that results in a 2.2 from examining a six-year sequence will not be a 2.2 when examining a five or seven-year sequence. We also note that in using crop sequence as a proxy for crop rotation, RCI cannot fully capture the cyclical nature of true crop rotations. Because RCI examines a fixed number of years, hydro flood table it may “split up” identical rotations in ways that give slightly different scores or ABBAAB in a six-year sequence. As these discrepancies will decrease when longer sequences are considered, we recommend applying RCI to sequences that are as long or longer than the longest expected rotation in the study region.We hope to see RCI used in future analyses that extend beyond the Midwest; however, regional and historic patterns of crop production likely influence farmers’ rotational decisions and may render RCI scores calculated from disparate geographical regions difficult to interpret when called into direct comparison. We therefore see great promise in RCI as a rotational metric, and caution against applications that are overly narrow and overly broad .The time period chosen in this study, 2012 – 2017, coincides with the introduction of the Renewable Fuel Standard, or “bio-fuel mandate,” which took full effect in 2012. This policy mandates that 7.5 billion gallons of bio-fuel be blended with gasoline annually, and caused bio-fuel plants to open and local corn prices to soar across the Midwestern US. Now in 2021, there is significant political pressure both to maintain the bio-fuel mandate in its current state and to relax the standards, and new exemptions to the mandate have already caused several bio-fuel plants to close in the region. Given the link between bio-fuel plant proximity and rotational complexity, our analysis suggests that these closures, if continued, would likely be associated with an increase in mean RCI in the Midwestern US. Using our current model, simulations of randomly closing 20 of the 198 bio-fuel plants in the region lead to an increase of 0.003 in average RCI in the region, driven by greater distance to the nearest bio-fuel plant. In turn, increasing average RCI by 0.003 represents, for instance, the equivalent of 41,000 ha of cropland switching from corn-soy rotations to the most diverse rotation possible . Rotational simplification near bio-fuel plants is a pertinent example of the influence that policy can have on farm management decisions and its landscape repercussions.

Bio-fuel mandates are one of several policies, including crop insurance and research funding priorities, that currently maintain the profitability of corn production; however, these policies need not be the ones that define rotational landscapes, and increased funding for policies such as the Conservation Stewardship Program could better align farmers’ economic incentives with improved environmental health. When strong economic incentives encourage rotational simplification, our analysis suggests that it is more likely to occur on land with favorable biophysical conditions for corn growth. With our current policy structure, the highest quality lands in the Midwestern US therefore become the most prone to degradation through intensive management.Changing climates are causing agricultural water shortages at unprecedented scales and magnitudes, especially in regions historically reliant on irrigation. Identifying and understanding systems of farming that allow continuity in farming operations in times of water scarcity is an increasingly urgent need. Vegetable dry farming relies on winter rains stored in soils to reduce irrigation to 0-2 events per season and has become prevalent on California’s Central Coast in recent decades. Until now, this system has been unexplored in scientific literature beyond extension publications, despite its promise as a model for low-water agriculture. Dry farm management presents a unique challenge given the low water content in surface soils that restricts nutrient access in the areas farmers usually target for irrigated fertility management. Managing soil nutrients at depth and potentially the microorganisms that provide plant nutrients and alleviate water stress could be crucial to dry farm success, and we engaged in a collaborative research design process with six farmers managing seven commercial dry farm tomato fields to identify and answer three key management questions: 1. What are the depths at which nutrients influence harvest outcomes given low water content in surface soils? Are commercially available AMF inoculants effective at improving harvest outcomes? How does the broader fungal community change in dry farm soils, and do those changes map to harvest outcomes? Only soil nitrate and ammonium concentrations below 60cm depth were correlated with tomato yield and fruit quality, while blossom end rot negatively correlated with ammonium at 30-60cm. We identified a fungal class, Sordariomycetes, as a “signature” fungal group in dry farm soils that distinguished them from irrigated management and correlated with positive quality outcomes, while commercial AMF inoculation showed little benefit. These findings can inform management practices that optimize fruit yield and quality, and can guide farmers and policy makers alike in efforts to minimize agricultural water use.As rainfall becomes more variable with changing climates, farmers around the world are contending with droughts that are increasing in both intensity and duration. For many farmers, restricted water use has become a constant and looming threat, forcing the agricultural sector to confront a key question: how can we adapt to water scarcity without jeopardizing farmer livelihoods? This question is particularly salient for California’s agricultural system, which has become increasingly fragile in recent decades due to its dependence on a shifting and shrinking water supply.

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, 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, grow rack 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, 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, hydroponic rack 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. Milwaukee’s urban agriculture organizations have worked to secure longer leases for community gardens, but they have not succeeded in purchasing and preserving many of the sites, so most of the city’s gardens remain vulnerable to development. The gardens that exist today are generally clustered around the Near North Side, where poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity are high and development pressure has remained low. Based on the demographics of the Near North Side, the people most likely encounter the city’s gardens are low-income Black residents, however my spatial analysis revealed that gardens associated with citywide programs are also relatively more accessible for neighborhoods with higher rates of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander residents than for neighborhoods that are largely white. These gardens appear to be concentrated where the greatest economic need is, but if development pressure in the disinvested neighborhoods were to increase, the gardens will be vulnerable to displacement. In Philadelphia, development pressure has increased quite dramatically in some neighborhoods, displacing gardens and residents alike. PHS’s effort to concentrate greening interventions in specific neighborhoods has proven the revitalization potential of urban agriculture. However, this revitalization focus seems to limit the benefits for the city’s poorest residents. Based on my spatial analysis, the program’s gardens are likely to be closer to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and higher housing costs .

While Philadelphia definitely needs more affordable housing, the threshold set for “affordable” is 120% of the area median income, or about $73,000 a year. Yet nearly 25% of the city’s population lives under the federal poverty line of $12,490 a year . No housing under the new policy is guaranteed to be affordable for this quarter of the population, nor for anyone in the bottom half of the income distribution, for that matter. Without guaranteeing that it will go to community uses or housing for those most in need, the Land Bank will likely move property back into use at a much higher rate with the new disposition policy. As their recent documents and public statements make clear, Land Bank officials are attempting to respond to criticism from Soil Generation and other community advocates that the process is too slow. However, they are doing so in a context where few resources are flowing toward community housing and the city’s poorest residents, while large amounts of capital are being mobilized for any profitable ventures. Thus, the agency’s reforms are limited by economics and market logic that still hold sway over where and at what price it makes sense to develop land. As it stands in 2021, through the Land Bank and outside of its purview, additional gardens are preserved every year in Philadelphia. These results are achieved through tremendous effort and expense on the part of gardeners, program leaders, and urban agriculture advocates. However, other gardens continue to be lost under the intense development pressure in gentrifying neighborhoods, flood tray and many more gardens still remain vulnerable. Professionalized nonprofits such as PHS and NGT use large donor networks, foundation grants, and insider strategies to nurture political support for urban agriculture and to preserve gardens incrementally.

Soil Generation and the Garden Justice Legal Initiative continue to mobilize and reframe the public conversation around vacant lot disposition, seeking to transform the narrative from one of financial efficiency to one of justice and community control of land. Throughout the implementation of the Land Bank and its biennial strategic planning process, ongoing outsider strategies from these two organizations alongside the Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities , a successor coalition of the CTBVL, have accomplished meaningful progress toward more a transparent and community-oriented land disposition process. Political and economic conditions in Philadelphia still present barriers to garden preservation, and well-resourced developers continue to have advantages in securing vacant land, but the organized efforts underway in Philadelphia—especially the work of Soil Generation and PCAC—represent the most radical movement toward structural change in land use policy of any in the three case-cities at this point. If successful, their work will have an impact on the lives of marginalized Philadelphians that goes far beyond the benefits of well preserved community gardens.Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle has had both political and economic conditions more favorable to community garden development and preservation. The economy and the revenue-generating tools available in Seattle created opportunities for the city to fund desired public investments, including gardens. With the city’s tech sector thriving, Seattle has been a “winner” in the global competition for urban growth for the last 30 years. In this time, public investments in community gardens, green space and other neighborhood amenities have redoubled Seattle’s appeal to the “creative class” . The favorable political economy in recent decades has helped solidify the status of community gardens as a legitimized, permanent feature of the urban landscape. That said, the popularity and security of Seattle’s gardens do not ensure that they are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents.

If the city were facing the kinds of budget crises that Milwaukee and Philadelphia currently confront, open space improvements might not win approval from voters or City Council when tax revenue was direly needed for basic services such as police and schools. Seattle’s city budget contracted in 2000 with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and again in 2008-2010 during the Great Recession. Otherwise, since the early 1990s, the city budget has increased fairly steadily. The growing technology sector has served as a stronger economic base than more traditional industrial manufacturing during this period, in which outsourcing has led to significant economic impacts in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia as described above. Seattle faced population loss between 1960 and 1980, including a steep economic downturn during the “Boeing Bust” when the city’s major manufacturer shed thousands of jobs. However, Seattle began to grow again as the information technology sector expanded, with major companies like Microsoft and Amazon headquartered in the area. The city’s population grew 4.5% from 1980 to 1990, then 9% from 1990 to 2000 , 8% from 2000 to 2010, and a whopping 21% between 2010 and 2020. Economic conditions in Seattle differ significantly from the other case-cities: the poverty rate is 11% , and the median household income of $92,263 is greater than that of Milwaukee and Philadelphia combined. A stronger economy and reasonably comfortable city budget have made allocating public resources to community gardens easier in Seattle than in Milwaukee or Philadelphia. The P-Patch Program is administered by the City, as explained in chapter 2, and public resources have undergirded its entire existence. Seattle has supported gardens as part of its budget since 1973, at first agreeing to pay $950 to cover the property taxes of Rainie Picardo so that his land could continue serving neighbors as a community gardening space. City Council then expanded the program to 10 other sites around the city and took over administration .

For the P-Patch program’s first two decades, the city budget allocated roughly $15,000-50,000 to the program for 1-2 staff positions, plowing costs, and money for tools and materials. In 1983—in part due to contracting federal support for local governments that affected all of the cities in this study—a municipal budget crunch forced cuts in the P-Patch program that led to the first notable site vacancies in the program’s ten-year history. With two part-time staff working far more than the hours they were paid for, and significant volunteer contributions to make up the difference, the program survived and continued to add new sites through the late 1980s. When the city was facing budget cutbacks again in 1992, gardeners organized a letter-writing campaign and visited council members to advocate for fully funding the program. Successful in this effort, they received a $50,000 budget increase for 1993. For the next 14 years, as Seattle’s economy and city budget saw gradual but nearly uninterrupted growth, the P-Patch program garnered increases in staff and funding that enabled them to administer more and more sites. During this period, the program more than doubled in size—from 30 gardens and 2 staff positions in 1993, to almost 70 gardens and 7 staff in 2007. Although the city froze the program staff size during the Great Recession, funding from open space tax levies continued to facilitate expansion in the number of gardens. As of 2021, there are nearly 90 P-Patches reaching across every neighborhood in Seattle. The program is well known and popular, in part because of its expanse and its stable administrative capacity; these features result from the substantial public resources that the City of Seattle has been able to dedicate to the program over the last 40 years. In addition to the annual budget allocation that supports P-Patch administration, the garden program has been able to expand because of funding from tax levies. Washington state allows cities and counties to raise revenue through taxes of different types; many such tax increases require voter approval with turnout requirements and at least 60% support at the ballot. Seattle voters typically see at least one tax levy question on their ballots every year, 4×8 grow tray either for the City of Seattle or for King County. Not all of these measures receive the necessary 60% support, but since 2000 voters have approved several tax levies related to parks and open space improvements at both the city and county levels. These measures have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for parks and open space, including at least $4 million specifically for the acquisition and improvement of P-Patches. Such an infusion of cash into citywide community gardening efforts has only been possible because a) the P-Patch program is a public entity; b) county and city governments in Washington state have the ability to raise revenue with tax levies; and c) the citizens of Seattle and King County are willing to pay higher taxes in order to improve and secure open spaces. The levy funds have been used for the City to acquire land for P-Patches in high-demand parts of the city and, importantly, levy funds have also been used to enhance existing P-Patches with features such as picnic tables, gazebos, or benches designed to make the sites more inviting for the general public. As discussed in chapter 3, the P-Patch gardeners and program administrators undertook a concerted effort to design community gardens so that they are accessible, usable and therefore valued by the general public. This effort ramped up in 1998, shortly before the first of the munificent open space bonds was approved in 2000, putting P-Patch advocates in a perfect position to apply the flush funding in a way that would yield visible returns for the public at-large. Seeing the benefits of improved P-Patch gardens likely made voters more amenable to approving the next open space tax levy that came before them—a positive feedback loop made possible by the particular political-economic conditions in Seattle.

The City of Seattle was willing to dedicate resources to the P-Patch community gardens in part because of the stable city budget and revenue from tax levies, and in part because of how local garden advocates have framed the value of urban agriculture. In addition to legitimizing urban agriculture as a community-building tool and source of food for those in need, leaders of the P-Patch nonprofit built a narrative around the value of community gardens as an amenity that would keep Seattle neighborhoods green and livable as the city took on more residents. Building off of existing ideas about what made Seattle special, such as its environmental amenities and pleasant neighborhoods, the P-Patch advocates constructed an effective framing for the value of community gardens in contributing to Seattle’s place-legacy . As the city grew and neighborhoods densified, community garden advocates argued that the P-Patch program should also grow as a way to maintain residents’ quality of life . Essentially, garden advocates used a framing that would appeal to the growth coalition: exchange value could continue to increase along with concession of a relatively small amount of the city’s land preserved for use value. Seattle’s garden advocates had constructed this sophisticated narrative by the mid- 1990s, and in the early 2000s Richard Florida outlined a theory of “creative cities” that essentially describes the alignment of certain kinds of use value with exchange value. 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 .

Seattle residents have organized resistance to more local political concerns in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, with campaigns to change the municipal government’s direction and increase its accountability. The officials elected under these campaigns were integral in creating and supporting the P-Patch Program, providing public funding and land for an activity that residents wanted to enjoy. Civic conventions in Seattle include ideas about organizing to challenge elites in order to assert resident interests, and also about neighborhood-level governance. The public is used to local initiatives and expects that residents in a particular neighborhood will be able to participate in decisions about their community . These conventions have formalized into civic infrastructure such as a large, active network of neighborhood associations; district councils that represent hyper-local interests in conversation with the city; and a Department of Neighborhoods that is tasked specifically with responding to resident interests. As described on its website, the Department of Neighborhoods exists to “provide resources and opportunities for community members to build strong communities and improve their quality of life. Through our programs and services, we meet people where they are and help neighbors develop a stronger sense of place, build closer ties, and engage with their community and city government” . The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods oversees a Neighborhood Matching Fund, similar to Milwaukee’s CIP grants, that awards public resources to proposals that engage the community in making improvements that residents desire. Civic conventions in Seattle dictating an active, grow tray ongoing role for the public to participate in governance have contributed to the creation of robust infrastructure for asserting and actualizing resident interests. Both the ideas and infrastructure in Seattle’s civic conventions have benefitted the PPatch community gardens and advocates’ efforts to preserve them. With a multi million-dollar annual budget, the Neighborhood Matching Fund has proven invaluable for building, improving, and legitimizing the city’s community gardens .

The infrastructure of neighborhood associations and district councils was tapped in the 1990s both to legitimize residents’ desire to save a threatened garden and to mobilize the public around Initiative 42, a policy that effectively makes permanent all of the gardens on public land . Ideas about challenging elite control and respecting neighborhoods no doubt helped galvanize the public to support Initiative 42, which garnered almost 24,000 signatures in a matter of months. The flow of resident input in governance through structured channels, such as from neighborhood associations to district councils to the Department of Neighborhoods or from residents participating in the formalized neighborhood planning process of the 1990s, has made clear the widespread appreciation for P-Patch community gardens and legitimized their continued presence. Overall, Seattle has very strong civic conventions supporting citizens’ role in governance, creating numerous opportunities for garden advocates to both provide input directly to city officials and mobilize the public when more pressure was needed.Comparing against Milwaukee and Philadelphia, data from interviews and documents demonstrate the prominence of participatory civic conventions in Seattle. Codes for neighborhood association, citizen advisory committee, bottom-up governance, citizen voice, elected official accountability, neighborhood planning, and public hearing were all the most frequent in Seattle documents and interviews out of the three cities I investigated. Civic ideas and infrastructure have supported public engagement in governance decisions related to PPatches and also the assertion of how much use-value residents get from the gardens. Furthermore, as the P-Patch Program expanded over time, encompassing more land and requiring more public resources for administration, the infrastructure created by Seattle’s civic conventions facilitated feedback that helped program leaders and garden advocates adjust their operations in accordance with the wider public interest and thereby insulate the program from any challenges to its legitimacy.

Aligning gardening sites, activities, and communication with widespread values and concerns ensured that the P-Patch program remained popular and continued to receive public resources over time. Since the program’s inception, P-Patch leaders had invited city officials to “harvest banquets” and other opportunities for positive press. In the 1990s, leaders of the nonprofit supporting the P-Patches encouraged gardeners to significantly increase their contact with the city’s elected officials beyond the annual meeting. Over the course of the 1990s, as their interactions with elected officials made clear what aspects of the program were most valued by the broader public, P-Patch advocates worked to demonstrate the contributions that the community gardens made to widely shared civic priorities such as serving low-income communities, fostering multiculturalism, and cultivating a community atmosphere in Seattle’s neighborhoods. As the P-Patch program grew and increasingly formalized its operations, P-Patchers articulated the benefits of their program in terms of broadly shared values, taking advantage of another discursive opportunity structure that Seattle’s culture presented. Many gardeners made donations to food banks, and in the 1980s the program administrators began tracking contributions. When one of the program’s most active volunteers Wendy McClure organized a produce collection and delivery system called Lettuce Link, the reported food bank donations gradually increased. In editions of the P-Patch Post newsletter from the 1990s, gardeners were asked to measure and report the total pounds of produce they donated if they weren’t giving through Lettuce Link. The regular column for requesting help and equipment also noted the need for produce scales to ensure that donations could be weighed and tracked. In these ways the gardeners’ food donation activities were rationalized over time, and along with publicized events like the Day of Giving that began in 1994, the quantified donations helped build legitimacy for the P-Patch program as one channeling civic action to help low-income people. In addition to their food bank donations, P-Patch administrators and volunteers demonstrated their program’s commitment to low-income Seattleites by tracking how many low-income participants the program had, and by working with residents of the city’s public housing to build gardens specifically for them.

Especially once the program hit political turbulence in the mid-1990s, when gardeners mobilized the public in a somewhat confrontational strategy to preserve threatened gardens, city officials scrutinized the extent to which the P-Patch Program was serving a truly public purpose. The program’s leadership and its most vocal advocates were homogenously white and middle- or upper-middle class, so opponents of the program may have wished to paint it as a giveaway to already-privileged people. However, surveys of the gardeners in the mid-1990s showed a diverse constituency, with higher percentages of renters, low- and moderate-income people, and people of color than the city’s overall demographics. The program’s demonstrated diversity, and the addition of an initiative specifically benefitting immigrant gardeners in public housing, served to align the program with the value of multiculturalism important to many Seattle voters at the time. In order to ensure that the gardens continued to serve the public equally, officials in the Department of Neighborhoods worked with the program’s advocates to prioritize building new gardens in under served areas of the city . Over time, this has meant that the distribution of P-Patches across the city is genuinely more equitable in terms of access for low-income residents. 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, hydroponic trays 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, 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 lawyer for the Parks Department, whom they had met at one of the neighborhood association meetings, park proponents drafted the Protect Our Parks Initiative, or Initiative 42. The initiative would prevent the city from repurposing any land used for parks purposes without immediately supplying a space of equal size and quality for the same purpose, in the same neighborhood. As they circulated the initiative to collect the necessary signatures, the group added an extra layer to their framing by highlighting how the Bradner Gardens Park site had been purchased with funds allocated specifically for park development, arguing that under the mayor’s logic for selling it, no parks in the city were safe from development. Longstanding civic conventions opposed to political elites making backroom deals and instead promoting neighborhood-level planning meant that this argument resonated widely. Advocates for the Interbay P-Patch similarly framed their development threat as a betrayal by the city. Interbay P-Patch had been built in 1974 on land intended for a golf course. The garden was relocated in 1992 to make room for the long-planned course, and gardeners were told this new location would be permanent. The mayor even buried a time capsule at Interbay commemorating the 20th anniversary of the P-Patch program, to be unearthed on the 40th anniversary in 2013. In the golf course design Request for Proposals, the Parks Department stipulated that the P-Patch had to stay in its current location. However, the winning bidder followed up by saying that a north-facing driving range could increase revenue, a change to the design which would require moving the P-Patch again. Public hearings for the plan saw strong citizen input on both sides of the issue, and it was well covered in the local newspapers. In their letters to the editor and public comments, the gardeners invoked the idea that elected officials were reneging on their previous deal.

The case of Seattle’s P-Patch Program, and the volunteer-led nonprofit advocacy organization that arose alongside it, demonstrates the clearest example of how an organization was able to pivot from community-based service provision to movement organizing , while largely maintaining its own legitimacy and augmenting the legitimacy of urban agriculture with a more compelling narrative about its potential benefits. The Seattle P-Patch Program was founded in 1973, when the City of Seattle stepped in to pay the property taxes of Rainie Picardo , who had been allowing neighborhood residents to garden individual plots on his former truck farm. The $950 expense from the city’s general fund was legally justified as support for residents’ recreation, and Council members advocating for the move also argued that it was a unique opportunity tohelp needy families feed themselves during an economic downturn. In 1974, due to the program’s huge success, the Picardo Patch was joined by ten additional community garden sites in different neighborhoods; since then, the P-Patch Program has continued its expansion to now include nearly 90 gardens citywide. At first, the program was administered by the Department of Human Resources because of its goal of feeding people. In 1997, the program was moved to the Department of Neighborhoods with the recognition that one of its primary effects was to build community among residents who wouldn’t otherwise know each other. In the Department of Neighborhoods, the P-Patch Program thrived under the leadership of department director Jim Diers. With a background in Alinsky-style organizing, Diers took to heart the department’s mission to act on residents’ ideas rather than imposing initiatives from the top down. With Diers leading the Department of Neighborhoods, how to trim cannabis new gardens were added in many neighborhoods where residents wanted them, and existing gardens made improvements that increased their appeal for the non-gardening public.

Diers provided steady leadership that saw the program grow and become more popular, but the framing to legitimize urban agriculture in Seattle had been established in earlier decades through the organizing efforts of volunteers leading the P-Patch nonprofit. Only a few years after the city government established the P-Patch Program, gardeners organized a nonprofit that has continued to operate alongside the program and fulfills functions that the public entity cannot take on. Originally named the P-Patch Advisory Council and now called GROW Northwest, the P-Patch nonprofit has had a different structure and has undertaken different initiatives over the years. Some of its primary, long-running activities have been advocating for favorable municipal policy, fundraising, paying plot rental fees for low-income gardeners, purchasing and holding title to gardens that were formerly privately owned, purchasing liability insurance for the gardens, serving as the fiscal sponsor for individual garden fundraisers, and facilitating communication among gardeners . The P-Patch nonprofit has effectively coordinated gardener activities and talking points, helping to streamline the program’s operations, maximize its impact, and legitimize PPatches in the eyes of the wider public. Evidence from interviews and issues of the P-Patch Post newsletter makes clear that over the program’s history, gardeners consciously organized their efforts and built the legitimacy for urban agriculture around the food production and community building aspects of the P-Patches. In the late 1980s, dedicated P-Patch volunteer Wendy McClure started an initiative called Lettuce Link that systematized food bank donations by coordinating a schedule of drivers from different gardens and providing information about the closest food banks for different sites. Over time, Lettuce Link installed storage bins, scales, and tracking lists at many of the gardens in order to facilitate measurement and annual reporting of the program’s donations to food banks.

Gardeners I interviewed in 2016 would readily emphasize that the program had donated over 40,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce to local food banks the previous year. These interviewees understood that reporting a specific amount of food donated helps to make the gardens’ public benefit clear for city officials and any potential skeptics. As a result of Lettuce Link and the gardeners’ efforts to demonstrate the extent of their food bank donations, P-Patches were incorporated into the city’s strategic planning for food security, first undertaken in the mid-2000s. The P-Patch Program director was included on the Interdepartmental Team developing the city’s Food Action Plan, a group which also included at least one P-Patch gardener among the city employees involved. In order to increase food security and local food production, the Seattle Food Action Plan makes recommendations under Strategy 1, “Prioritize food production as a use of land,” and Strategy 2, “Develop and support programs to produce food on City-owned land,” that specifically advise implementing policies to support and expand the P-Patch program . The process of gardeners systematizing their activities, and then gaining additional recognition and legitimacy through the city’s actions, is characteristic of the interplay between city staff and the P-Patch nonprofit over the history of the P-Patch Program. The case of Seattle suggests that an organizational structure of a city gardening agency supported by a gardener-led nonprofit is a stable and effective model for developing, maintaining, and defending urban agriculture. Through a similar process, P-Patch participants gradually amplified the community building benefits of community gardens. In all three cities, the benefit of increased social cohesion among diverse people is widely understood by gardeners and urban agriculture advocates .

However, in Seattle this social benefit was more clearly documented, and mobilized more in framing the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use, than it was in either Milwaukee or Philadelphia. As will be described more in Chapter 3, the process for documenting community-building in Seattle’s gardens was first evident in the PPatch Post, which ran a series of statements called “I Love My P-Patch Because…” from 1989-1993. These gardener testimonials offered many reasons to value the P-Patches that span almost the full “panacea narrative” attesting to urban agriculture’s wide range of potential benefits, but among these testimonials the community-building power of P-Patches is the most commonly noted benefit, with comments such as “I like my neighbors too: There’s always someone nice to talk to when I go to the garden” . In 1995-1997, when P-Patch advocates were pressuring the city to preserve a threatened P-Patch, and then appealing to the public to pass an initiative preventing the city from repurposing its garden sites, they emphasized how the gardens brought different kinds of people together and contributed to the neighborhood character of Seattle . In a 1998 edition of the P-Patch Post, the president of the P-Patch nonprofit explained the feedback advocates had received about how much the community-building potential of gardens mattered to decision makers and the public. Analysis of P-Patch documents shows that from the late 1990s onward, codes for diversity and design for community were much more frequent than they had been in the 1970s and 1980s. The latter code reflects interplay with city program staff who began to discourage fencing in the gardens, and the wider Department of Neighborhoods staff, who approved numerous grant applications from individual gardens seeking to add publicly accessible community-building features, such as picnic tables and benches, in garden improvement projects. Over time, the work of both the P-Patch Program and the P-Patch nonprofit have contributed to the longevity, popularity and security of community gardens in Seattle. Through the early 1980s when the city faced budget cuts, vertical growing system funding for the P-Patch Program shrank dramatically, and higher plot fees combined with reduced services caused foreboding rates of attrition . During these lean years, the program survived with two part time staff, Barbara Donnette and Barbara Heitsch, who according to interviewees familiar with the program’s early history and the P-Patch Post from that time, worked well beyond the hours they were being paid for. Moreover, the P-Patch nonprofit has relied solely on volunteer labor for its entire history. Almost every P-Patch Post newsletter contains a long list of acknowledgements for donations, tasks completed, and group initiatives fulfilled; indeed, the production of the P-Patch Post itself has been accomplished almost entirely through volunteer labor . The P-Patch nonprofit has been led by a series of extremely dedicated volunteer presidents, board and committee members, and the P-Patch Post attests to the organization’s ceaseless effort to recruit and train new leadership from among the program’s gardeners. Reviewing the program’s history through its newsletters reveals a remarkable level of dedication on the part of many gardeners, and even some non-gardeners, whose combined efforts have built, maintained, enhanced, and defended Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens for almost 50 years. The contributions of these volunteers should not go underappreciated, for the program would never have achieved such reach and longevity without them; however, making such a prodigious time commitment is not possible for everyone. Relying on volunteers and people who can accept low salaries to run an organization means that its leaders are likely to be relatively privileged. Indeed, for much of the P-Patch Program’s history, the leadership demographics have been far whiter than that of program participants overall .

The PPatch Program has counted significant numbers of Southeast Asian refugee families among its gardeners since the mid-1980s, and surveys in the 1990s showed that the program’s demographics were more racially diverse than the city overall. However, program staff and nonprofit leadership alike were virtually all-white until the mid-2000s. 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, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order to identify farm typologies based on indicators for soil organic matter levels, we first used several clustering algorithms. First, a k-means cluster analysis based on four key soil indicators—soil organic matter , total soil nitrogen, and available nitrogen —was used to generate three clusters of farm groups using the facoextra and cluster packages in R . The cluster analysis results were divisive, nonhierarchical, and based on Euclidian distance, which calculates the straight-line distance between the soil indicator combinations of every farm site in Cartesian space , and created a matrix of these distances . To determine the appropriate number of clusters for the cluster analysis, a scree plot was used to signal the point at which the total within-cluster sum of squares decreased as a function of the increasing cluster size. The location of the kink in the curve of this scree plot delineated the optimal number of clusters, in this case three clusters . To further explore appropriate cluster size, we used a histogram to determine the structure and spread of data among clusters. A Euclidean-based dendrogram analysis was then used to further validate the results of the cluster analysis. In addition to confirming the results of the cluster analysis, the dendrogram plot showed relationships between sites and relatedness across all sites. To visual cluster analysis results, the final three clusters were plotted based on the axes produced by the cluster analysis. One drawback of cluster analyses is that there is no measure of whether the groups identified are the most effective combination to explain clusters produced by soil indicators, or whether they are statistically different from one another. To address this gap, vertical grow rack we used ANOSIM to evaluate and compare the differences between clusters identified with the cluster analysis above. We calculated the global similarity in addition to pairwise tests of each cluster.

To formally establish the three farm types and also make the functional link between organic matter and management explicit, we used the three clusters that emerged from the k-means cluster analysis based on soil organic matter indicators, and explored differences in management approaches among the clusters. We then created three farm types based on this exploratory analysis. Specifically, we first analyzed management practices among sites within each cluster to determine if similarities in management approaches emerged for each cluster. Based on this analysis, we used the three clusters from the cluster analysis to create three farm types categorized by soil organic matter levels and informed by management practices applied. Using the three farm types from above, we then analyzed whether our classification created strong differences along soil texture and management gradients using a linear discriminant analysis . LDA is most frequently used as a pattern recognition technique; because LDA is a supervised classification, class membership must be known prior to analysis . The analysis tests the within group covariance matrix of standardized variables and generates a probability of each farm sites being categorized in the most appropriate group based on these variable matrices . To characterize soil texture, we used soil texture class . To characterize soil management, we used crop abundance, tillage frequency, and crop rotational complexity—the three management variables with the strongest gradient of difference among the three farm types. A confusion matrix was first applied to determine if farm sites were correctly categorized among the three clusters created by the cluster analysis. Additional indicator statistics were also generated to confirm if the LDA was sensitive to input variables provided. The LDA was carried out using the MASS R package. To build on the results of the LDA, we performed a variation partitioning analysis to determine the level of variation in soil organic matter indicators explained by the soil texture variables, soil management variables, and their interactions .

VPA was performed using the vegan package in R . Using indicator variables for soil organic matter levels, we performed a k-means cluster analysis to develop a meaningful classification of farms. Scree plot results indicated that three clusters produced the most consistent separation of field sites. As shown in Figure 1, the two dimensional cluster analysis produced a strong first dimension , which explained 86.7% of the separation among the 27 field sites. Total N, total C, POXC, and soil protein variables strongly explained this separation of farm types, as shown by the lack of overlap among the clusters along the Dimension 1 axis. Histogram results provide a visual summary of linear difference among the three clusters and further confirms minimal overlap among clusters; however, Cluster I and Cluster II fields showed low dissimilarity between values 0 and -2 . Results from the average distance-based linkages of the dendrogram analysis similarly further established the accuracy of field site groupings determined by the cluster analysis. These results indicated that Cluster II sites were more closely related to Cluster III sites compared to Cluster I sites . ANOSIM showed strongly significant global differences among the three clusters , where a value of 1 delineates 0% overlap between clusters. Overall, ANOSIM verified the farm types obtained from the cluster analysis. In addition, ANOSIM pairwise t-tests that compared each individual cluster in pairs confirmed strongly significant dissimilarities between Cluster I and Cluster III sites . ANOSIM pairwise t-tests also indicated that Cluster I sites were significantly divergent from Cluster II sites; however, Cluster I and Cluster II showed less dissimilarities than Cluster II and Cluster III sites . ANOSIM pairwise t-test results were in congruence with the results provided by the histogram . Classification of farm sites using k-means clustering closely matched differences in on-farm management approaches . It is important to note that while general trends between clusters and management emerged, the management practices analyzed here do not fully encompass the management regimes of each farm field site, and are intended to be exploratory rather than definitive. Several general trends emerged across the three farm types . For instance, Farm Type I, comprised of six field sites, consisted of fields with higher crop abundance values and fields that more frequently planted cover crops compared to Farm Type III.

These sites used lower impact machines and applied a lower number of tillage passes compared to Farm Type II and III. In contrast, Farm Type II, also comprised of six field sites, and Farm Type III, comprised of fifteen field sites, represented fields on the lower end of crop abundance values and sites that applied cover crop plantings at a lower frequency than Farm Type I. Farm Type III on average applied a higher number of tillage passes and on average were on the lower end of ICLS index compared to both Farm Type I and Farm Type II. In general, Farm Type II used management approaches that frequently overlapped with Farm Type III, and less frequently overlapped with Farm Type I. Overall, farm types significantly differentiated based on indicators for soil organic matter levels . For all four indicators displayed in Figure 2, hydroponic shelf system differences among the three farm types were highly significant . As visualized in the side-by-side box plot comparisons for all four indicators for soil organic matter levels, Farm Type I consistently showed the highest mean values across all four indicators, while Farm Type III consistently showed the lowest mean values across all four indicators. Farm Type I had mean values of 0.21 mg-N kg-soil-1 for total soil N, 2.3 mg-C kg-soil-1 for total organic C, 787 mg-C kg-soil-1 for POXC, and 7.4 g g-soil-1 for soil protein; compared to Farm Type I, Farm Type III had means values 43% lower for total soil N, 48% lower for total organic C, 58% for POXC, and 66% lower for soil protein. Compared to Farm Type I, Farm Type II had mean values 38% lower for total soil N, 26% lower for total organic C, 28% lower for POXC, and 30% lower for soil protein than Farm Type I. Standard errors for all four indicators are shown in Figure 2.Results of the LDA showed that both linear discriminant factors are most strongly explained by soil texture , as shown by the LDA loadings . Management practices all equally, but weakly, influenced LD1 and LD2 . LD1, which explained 66.3% of the variance, was effective at separating the Farm Type I and Farm Type III . However, Farm Type II overlapped with both Farm Type I and Farm Type III for LD1. In contrast, LD2, which explained 33.6% of the variance, did not display a definitive separation between the Farm Type I and Farm Type III; however, LD2 was effective at separating Farm Type II from Farm Type I and Farm Type III. LDA accurately discriminated between the three farm types, with an overall accuracy of 90.1% , as shown in Table 8. Model accuracy was high for all three farm types . The model had the greatest sensitivity to Farm Type II and Farm Type III , and low sensitivity to Farm Type I . Both Farm Type I and Farm Type III displayed minimal confusion with Farm Type II, as the comparison of training and validation data details . We determined the proportion of variation in the three farm types accounted for by management and by soil texture . Soil textural class contributed 28% of unique variation , while management contributed 18% of unique variation . The shared contribution for all predictors was 1%, and the overall contribution of all predictors was 47%.We found across all 27 farm sites sampled that gross N mineralization rates ranged from 0.05 – 4.82 µg-NH4+ -N g-soil-1 day-1 and gross N nitrification rates ranged from 0.55 – 5.90 µg-NO3- -N gsoil-1 day-1 . We determined net N mineralization rates ranged from 0.07 – 1.51 µg-NH4+ -N g-soil-1 day-1 , while net N nitrification rates had a wider range from 1.53 – 25.18 µg-NO3- -N g-soil-1 day-1 . We visually compare the six key N cycling variables—pools of inorganic N , and net and gross N rates—across the three farm types . Despite the variation in net and gross N mineralization and nitrification rates, using the farm types developed above, we found that N cycling variables were not significantly different across the three farm types for all six variables examined—based on ANOVA results . Given the variation in gross N rates reported above, we further explored the drivers of this variation in gross N rates using mixed modelling approaches.

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