As agroecologists worldwide explore pathways for food systems transformations, “evidence” is in high demand. But what is evidence? How is it used? By whom and for what audiences? What does evidence support and why? We contend evidence is inherently political and thus relational. In our article, we connect Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship on evidence with critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and empire, offering a framework to analyze evidence via interlinked levels of practice, political economy, and ontological foundations. Reviewing 3 historical waves in scientific and technological (S&T) evidence, we show how the production and use of evidence has evolved within the capitalist and colonial/modern world to imbue specific food futures with legitimacy and power. We then turn to our case: gene editing of crops for carbon drawdown. Over the past 5 years, university researchers, start-ups, governments, and intergovernmental agencies have asserted that gene-edited crops will sequester carbon, benefit farmers with nutrient-rich soils, and save Earth from runaway climate change. What evidence do they offer? Using the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI) as an example, we explore how HPI generates and uses 3 main types of evidence—institutional and human evidence, scientific and technical evidence, and financial/economic evidence—to identify problems, propose solutions, attract funds, and make plans to scale technologies worldwide. We then analyze the political economy factors that drive the production of HPI evidence and the assumptions about evidence etched into its colonial/modern worldview. A relational evidence approach, we find, illuminates how elite actors mobilize resources to actualize futures for which empirical evidence today is thin. Finally, we suggest strategies agroecologists might pursue in a pluriversal transition toward multiple evidentiary terrains: “a world of many worlds” for knowledge, land, and life.

The challenges faced by organic vegetable farmers in California during the COVID-19 pandemic included uncertainty about food safety rules and best practices, availability of workers, and significant changes to their markets. When the pandemic began, we built on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project with organic vegetable farmers on the California Central Coast to track how those growers adapted to the crisis. We conducted surveys in April 2020 and January 2021 to determine impacts on farmers and how farm size, market channels, and management strategies influenced a farm's ability to adapt to and recover from pandemic-induced disruptions. We found that mid-sized farmers with flexible and diverse marketing channels could navigate changes from the pandemic with minimal losses and, in some cases, economic gains. By contrast, smaller farmers with limited resources, especially those with disadvantaged backgrounds and limited access to technology, experienced more drastic impacts, including lost markets, labor shortages, and increased childcare needs. The lessons learned can inform a transition toward more sustainable, resilient agroecological systems.

Non-crop vegetation, such as hedgerows and cover crops, are important on-farm diversification practices that support biodiversity and ecosystem services; however, information about their rates and patterns of adoption are scarce. We used satellite and aerial imagery coupled with machine learning classification to map the use of hedgerows/windbreaks and winter cover crops in California's Central Coast, a globally important agricultural area of intensive fresh produce production. We expected that adoption of both practices would be relatively low and unevenly distributed across the landscape, with higher levels of adoption found in marginal farmland and in less intensively cultivated areas where the pressure to remove non-crop vegetation may be lower. Our remote sensing classification revealed that only ~6% of farmland had winter cover crops in 2021 and 0.26% of farmland had hedgerows or windbreaks in 2018. Thirty-seven percent of ranch parcels had cover crops on at least 5% of the ranch while 22% of ranches had at least one hedgerow/windbreak. Nearly 16% of farmland had other annual winter crops, some of which could provide services similar to cover crops; however, 60% of farmland had bare soil over the winter study period, with the remainder of farmland classified as perennial crops or strawberries. Hotspot analysis showed significant areas of adoption of both practices in the hillier regions of all counties. Finally, qualitative interviews revealed that adoption patterns were likely driven by interrelated effects of topography, land values, and farming models, with organic, diversified farms implementing these practices in less ideal, lower-value farmland. This study demonstrates how remote sensing coupled with qualitative research can be used to map and interpret patterns of important diversification practices, with implications for tracking policy interventions and targeting resources to assist farmers motivated to expand adoption.

Agroecological transitions in the Global North are inhibited by the cultural and legal norms of a 'ownership model' of property that underpins agrarian capitalism. The resulting property system limits asset transfers to agroecological regimes and co-produces technologically oriented reforms. Scotland's land reforms are emergent legal interventions to reshape land ownership within a Western legal context. By examining legal manoeuvres, mobilizing discourses, and governance considerations in Scotland, we sketch a roadmap for rethinking property in regions where the ownership model is entrenched. This case suggests that existing property law can be leveraged to achieve shifts in property norms towards promoting agroecology.

An emerging discourse about automated agricultural machinery imagines farms as places where farmers and workers do not need to be, but also implicitly frames farms as intolerable places where people do not want to be. Only autonomous machines, this story goes, can relieve farmers and workers of this presumed burden by letting them 'farm at a distance'. In return for this distanced autonomy, farmers are promised increased control over their work-life balance and greater farm productivity from letting 'smart' robots assume control over the operational environment. Drawing upon the ways that these machines are promoted by manufacturers in various media, we trace the nascent contours of what we term a liberatory sociotechnical imaginary for agricultural automation across three cases-automated milking systems, self-driving tractors, and robotic strawberry pickers. We show how promises for new freedoms and autonomy are flexibly deployed to respond to distinct frictions that farmers, workers, and even farm animals experience in different modes of industrial agriculture. However, underlying these promises is the purposefully understated self-interest of manufacturers, who stand to gain further control over farms if automated technologies assume a central role in agriculture. Through the liberatory rhetoric, we contend, the imaginary seeks to enroll farmers into a socio-technical network that creates new relations of dependence upon the companies who design, sell, maintain, and often retain ownership over automated technologies. While potentially powerful, this imaginary may nonetheless fail to coalesce as farmers, workers, and agroecosystems exert their own agency on automated imaginaries and technological futures for agriculture.

In this chapter I consider the ways in which attempts to achieve sustainable agriculture pose significant ethical concerns, in both developing and industrial country contexts. To be sustainable, agriculture must incorporate social and economic justice, not only ecological viability. Examining the ethics of farming methods, labor, and local food illustrates this broader sense

The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that the observed nonlinear dynamics in these coupled systems rests within either the underlying human or natural processes rather than the rates at which they interact. Using adoption of agricultural diversification practices as a case study, we show how two stable management paradigms (one dominated by conventional, homogeneous practices and the other by diversified practices) can emerge purely from temporal feedback between human decisions and ecological responses. We explore how this temporal mechanism of tipping points provides insight into designing more effective interventions that promote farmers' transitions toward sustainable agriculture. Moreover, we present a flexible modeling framework that could be applied to other cases as well as questions in social-ecological systems research and environmental policy design.

In the face of myriad environmental challenges associated with industrial agriculture, some farmers and researchers have looked to diversified farming systems as a promising alternative. Despite well-documented ecological benefits, diversification practices remain rare in many regions of the U.S, even amongst organic farmers. Our study focuses on organic farmers in the Central Coast region of California, an area that has played a crucial role in the rise of organic agriculture over the last several decades. Through 20 interviews with farmers who all grow lettuce and 8 interviews with technical assistance providers, we investigate the persistent barriers that growers in this region face in adopting diversification practices including cover cropping, compost application, crop rotation, insectary strips, and hedgerows. We find that high land rents, the predominance of short-term leases, stringent food safety standards, and other supply chain pressures significantly hamper the adoption of diversification practices. In order to surmount these barriers and increase adoption, solutions must be pursued at three interconnected levels: innovation at the farm level, and policy change at the technical and structural levels. Locally-informed, integrated, and innovative policies across these three levels must be explored to support the creation of a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food system.

Universities and colleges are fertile foodscapes for action-based education. They are physical and socio-cultural sites where pressing food systems problems play out at micro to macro scales. Structural inequities based on race, class, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, dis/ability, and other forms of marginalization affect both access to food and to agri-food learning opportunities. In this article, we propose that students can learn through their everyday experiences of engaging with their physical and socio-cultural environment, namely the campus food system, by conducting foodscape mapping. Since 2015, the University of California Berkeley Food Institute has supported the Foodscape Mapping Project, in which students, staff, and faculty generate food systems knowledge while developing practical interventions to advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). We investigate how campus foodscape mapping might generate substantive learning about JEDI in food systems education; the kinds of learning that take place through foodscape mapping; and the educational practices and institutional structures that can support learning through foodscape mapping. We identify at least eight forms and processes of expansive learning that emerged through mapping work, using students' own insights into what they were learning. Finally, we reflect on our learning experiences in running the project, and develop broader design elements that other campuses can apply.

the To the several Mandaya women in cus-tomary dresses with intricate patterns and jewellery are fl oating through the atmosphere, accompanied by other mythical birds with glowing curlicues. These women look tranquilly at a Rousseau-like dreamy forest and down at women swimming in the river. But a disquieting sight exists in one corner: a plane dropping agrochemicals over farm fi elds and further a metropolis. this that

Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980-a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes-tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in 'human vs. nature' conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper 'human vs. human' conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today.

Disabled people are highly susceptible to climate change impacts and disasters, yet they often remain sidelined or largely invisible. Policy makers, humanitarian agencies, and governments need to address the climate-related vulnerabilities that disabled people encounter during acute events and in the course of more creeping forms of climate change. As deaf researchers, we call for integrating disability justice into climate and disaster preparedness policies and practices worldwide. A disability justice approach can embrace the strengths that disabled people bring to disaster planning and climate mitigation and advocacy efforts. In this article we present case studies from different global regions to illustrate how disability is overlooked in responding to climate-related health impacts and disaster planning. We also draw particular attention to mutual aid networks led by disabled people in adapting to climate-related health impacts. We then suggest questions to help policy makers and practitioners integrate disability justice into their work. Above all, disabled people, organizations, and service providers should take ownership over the process of developing policies and actions to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to climate disasters.

The true costs of farming practices that do not protect soil health have far-reaching implications on a global scale for our ecosystems, livelihoods, and ability to produce food. Understanding the different motivations and barriers that farmers face related to the adoption of practices that enhance the soil is key in designing policies and programs to protect this important resource. In this chapter we explore a case study of almond production in California as an example of how farmers navigate different sustainability goals and production pressures when it comes to soil health. Greater understanding of the true costs of soil health impacts together with greater appreciation for soil health building practices is needed along every part of the agricultural supply chain, from farmers to food retailers to end consumers.

Scholar-activism is attractive to researchers who want not just to learn about the world, but about how to change that world. Agri-food studies have experienced a surge in the past two decades in researchers who see closer ties to social move­ments as key to food systems change. Yet to date, much scholar-activism depends on individually negotiated researcher-movement relationships, which may or may not be sustained long term and where knowledge can remain siloed. The Agro­ecology Research-Action Collective (ARC) seeks something different. Born of a desire to subordi­nate scholarship for scholarship’s sake to the needs and exigencies of movements, ARC envisages collective processes, horizontal non-exploitative learning among ourselves and with movements, and mechanisms for multidirectional accounta­bility. This reflective essay is the story of how ARC set out to “get our house in order”: to organize ourselves as scholars committed to systematizing more accountable and reciprocal relationships with frontline communities and grassroots movements. We first share the Principles & Protocols that guide our actions and the process through which we developed them. We then discuss two intercon­nected arenas in which ARC is developing a com­munity of practice guided by the Principles & Protocols. The first arena is through integrating participatory education into our everyday teaching and mentoring. The second arena is working to achieve broader social and institutional change by sharing methods and strategies for mobilizing resources and legitimating knowledge, both old and new.

Humanity faces a triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. In response, increasing the general adaptive capacity of farming systems is essential. We identify two divergent strategies for building adaptive capacity. Simplifying processes seek to narrowly maximize production by shifting the basis of agricultural production toward centralized control of socially and ecologically homogenized systems. Diversifying processes cultivate social-ecological complexity in order to provide multiple ecosystem services, maintain management flexibility, and promote coordinated adaptation across levels. Through five primarily United States focused cases of distinct agricultural challenges—foodborne pathogens, drought, marginal lands, labor availability, and land access and tenure—we compare simplifying and diversifying responses to assess how these pathways differentially enhance or degrade the adaptive capacity of farming systems in the context of the triple threat. These cases show that diversifying processes can weave a form of broad and nimble adaptive capacity that is fundamentally distinct from the narrow and brittle adaptive capacity produced through simplification. We find that while there are structural limitations and tradeoffs to diversifying processes, adaptive capacity can be facilitated by empowering people and enhancing ecosystem functionality to proactively distribute resources and knowledge where needed and to nimbly respond to changing circumstances. Our cases suggest that, in order to garner the most adaptive benefits from diversification, farming systems should balance the pursuit of multiple goals, which in turn requires an inclusive process for active dialogue and negotiation among diverse perspectives. Instead of locking farming systems into pernicious cycles that reproduce social and ecological externalities, diversification processes can enable nimble responses to a broad spectrum of possible stressors and shocks, while also promoting social equity and ecological sustainability.

In the past few decades, farmers and researchers have firmly established that biologically diversified farming systems improve ecosystem services both on and off the farm, producing economic benefits for farmers and ecological benefits for surrounding landscapes. However, adoption of these practices has been slow, requiring a more nuanced examination of both barriers and opportunities to improve adoption rates. While previous research has demonstrated that both individual and structural factors shape farmers' decisions about whether to adopt diversification practices, this study aims to understand the interaction of these individual and structural factors, and how they relate to farm scale. Based on 20 interviews with organic lettuce growers on the Central Coast of California, as well as 8 interviews with technical assistance providers who work with these growers, we constructed a typology to help elucidate the distinct contexts that shape growers' decisions about diversification practices. This typology, which reflects the structural influence of land rent and supply chains, divides growers into three categories: limited resource, mid-scale diversified, or wholesale. In this economic context, limited resource and wholesale growers both experience significant barriers that constrain the adoption of diversification practices, while some mid-scale diversified growers have found a “sweet spot” for managing agroecosystems that can succeed in both economic and ecological terms. The key enabling factors that allow these farmers to choose diversification, however, are not directly related to their farm size, but have more to do with secure land tenure, adequate access to capital and resources, and buyers who share their values and are willing to pay a premium. By focusing on these key enabling factors with targeted policies, we believe it is possible to encourage diversification practices on farms at a variety of scales within California's Central Coast.