About
29
Publications
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Introduction
As an Assistant Prof in Food System Policy and Innovation
at the University of Rhode Island, my research seeks to learn from practitioner perspectives on navigating competing demands on food production and to identify ways to better support diverse and equitable opportunities in sustainable food systems. Current research topics: politics of farm mechanization/automation,
evaluating equity dimensions of urban ag intensification, & participatory mapping of alternative food provisioning networks.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
February 2017 - present
August 2010 - December 2016
Education
August 2010 - December 2016
August 2003 - June 2007
Publications
Publications (29)
I outline how agrifood systems co-evolved with fossil fuels in the US and how agriculture is embedded in broader social structures that shape possibilities for innovation and adaptation. While farmers can accomplish many changes to farm-level resilience and sustainability on their own, a full energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward a su...
Localizing food production for urban populations promises to shorten supply chains and reconnect producers with consumers, improving sustainability and resilience. This requires technologies that decouple food production from environmental constraints such as seasonal climates and available land base. Proposed systems range from capital-intensive a...
Context
Conservation in working landscapes is critical for halting biodiversity declines and ensuring farming system sustainability. However, concerns that wildlife may carry foodborne pathogens has created pressure on farmers to remove habitat and reduce biodiversity, undermining farmland conservation. Nonetheless, simplified farming landscapes ma...
Regulatory regimes codify complex social objectives for agriculture, and judge producers' compliance relative to the resulting rules and standards. By combining Access Theory with Regulator-Intermediary-Target Theory, we frame farmers' compliance with agricultural rules and standards as a dynamic, relational product of social networks, rather than...
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 Cali...
Fruit and vegetable growers in the US face tradeoffs and synergies between on-farm conservation and pre-harvest food safety as a result of economic considerations, regulatory concerns, and external pressure from other stakeholders. However, detailed data on the frequency and extent of these tradeoffs across US regions remain sparse. We designed and...
Consumption of contaminated produce remains a leading cause of foodborne illness. Increasingly, growers are altering agricultural practices and farm environments to manage food-safety hazards, but these changes often result in substantial economic, social, and environmental costs. Here, we present a comprehensive evidence synthesis evaluating the e...
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods f...
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors’ experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary...
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 distan...
Aspirations to farm ‘better’ may fall short in practice due to constraints outside of farmers’ control. Yet farmers face proliferating pressures to adopt practices that align with various societal visions of better agriculture. What happens when the accumulation of external pressures overwhelms farm management capacity? Or, worse, when different vi...
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 o...
FULL TEXT LINK, view-only: https://rdcu.be/cRvy0.
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 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 underlying human or natural proc...
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...
As the articles in this collection demonstrate, diversifying farming systems recognizes a spectrum of socio-ecological practices that farmers and other agrifood workers can flexibly employ to increase adaptive capacity. Yet critical questions remain. Future work should assess diversifying approaches beyond the farm scale that can complement economi...
Global concerns over foodborne risks to human health have intensified to the point where some experts now argue for prioritizing food safety as a human right (Fung et al., 2018). Recurring foodborne illness outbreaks—even from previously unconventional sources such as fresh fruits and vegetables (Wadamori et al., 2016; Bennett et al., 2018; Machado...
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 examinati...
Leafy greens cause a growing proportion of foodborne illness outbreaks despite heavy investment in surveillance technologies designed to control pathogenic hazards in agriculture. To understand how the governing regime maintains authority despite continual lapses in control, I examine a deadly 2018 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157: H7 linked to ro...
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...
Aspirations to farm ‘better’ may fall short in practice due to constraints outside of farmers’ control. Yet farmers face proliferating pressures to adopt practices that align with various societal visions of better agriculture. What happens when the accumulation of external pressures overwhelms farm management capacity? Or, worse, when different vi...
We conducted a survey of 128 farmers in the Eastern half of the United States from Nov. 2019 to Apr 2020 to better understand the degree to which on-farm food safety decisions are made independently of on-farm conservation considerations. Specifically, this project was motivated by the question, How do U.S. produce growers choose among food safety...
California's Central Coast rose to national food safety prominence following a deadly 2006 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 that was traced to spinach grown in this intensive agricultural region. Since then, private food safety protocols and subsequent public regulations targeting farm-level practices have developed extensively, aiming to avert...
Profound changes in risk regulation have been brewing over the last few decades. These changes include an explosion of new institutional forms and strategies that decenter risk regulation and introduce a role for meta-regulation, a growing reliance on risk-based analysis to organize decision making and management, an increasingly preventive approac...
In an intensifying climate of scrutiny over food safety, the food industry is turning to “food safety culture” as a one-size-fits-all solution to protect both consumers and companies. This strategy focuses on changing employee behavior from farm to fork to fit a universal model of bureaucratic control; the goal is system-wide cultural transformatio...
Controlling human pathogens on fresh vegetables, fruits and nuts is imperative for California growers. A range of rules and guidelines have been developed since 2006, when a widespread outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 was linked to bagged spinach grown in California. Growers face pressure from industry and government sources to adopt specific control me...
In 2006, a multistate Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to spinach grown in California's Central Coast region caused
public concerns, catalyzing far-reaching reforms in vegetable production. Industry and government pressured growers to adopt
costly new measures to improve food safety, many of which targeted wildlife as a disease vector. In r...
Ground level ozone remains a serious problem in the United States. Because ozone non-attainment is a summer problem, episodic rather than continuous controls of ozone precursors are possible. We evaluate the costs and effectiveness of an episodic scheme that requires people to buy permits in order to drive on high ozone days. We estimate the demand...
