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September 2006 - July 2007
Publications
Publications (75)
Substantial evidence has shown that involvement in peer-to-peer farming networks influences whether a farmer decides to try a new practice. Formally organized farmer networks are emerging as a unique entity that blend the benefits of decentralized exchange of farmer knowledge within the structure of an organization providing a variety of sources of...
The use of the internet for sales and marketing has been on an upward trend in the past decade. The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted an increase in direct market farmers’ use of online sales and marketing. This paper analyzes California direct market farmers’ use of online sales and marketing technologies during the first ten months o...
The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effecti...
CONTEXT: Publications in agroecology have been growing rapidly in recent decades. With roots in the biophysical sciences, social sciences, and peasant movements, agroecology is a transdisciplinary field bringing together different ways of knowing. Agroecological research has two main foci: a biophysical focus which operationalizes agroecology as th...
Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires’ impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both...
Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires’ impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278991.].
The proliferation of AI-powered bots and sophisticated fraudsters poses a significant threat to the integrity of scientific studies reliant on online surveys across diverse disciplines, including health, social, environmental and political sciences. We found a substantial decline in usable responses from online surveys from 75 to 10% in recent year...
This policy brief delves into the challenges and needs of California farmers impacted by wildfires, particularly between 2017 and 2023. The brief synthesizes findings from a comprehensive survey involving 440 farmers across 56 California counties, all of whom were affected by wildfires in various capacities, including evacuations and significant lo...
Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires’ impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both...
We present a practical and accessible template for quantitative survey data analysis designed for non-academic researchers in order to facilitate engagement from community collaborators. The template, created in Google Sheets, is mainly for computing cross-tabulations, but it also displays frequency distributions and p-values for determining statis...
Wildfires increasingly threaten California's agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires' impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both...
This paper examines the use by California’s direct market farmers (DMFs) of online sales and marketing during the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, from March through December 2020. The pandemic caused market disruptions that accelerated the trend toward market digitalization. This paper reports quantitative findings ba...
The proliferation of AI-powered bots and sophisticated fraudsters significantly threatens the integrity of online surveys, leading to a substantial decline in usable responses from 75% to 10% in recent years. Monetary incentives attract sophisticated fraudsters capable of mimicking genuine open-ended responses and verifying information submitted mo...
Assessments of pesticide impacts globally and holistic policies to address them require accurate pesticide use data, but good use data are difficult to find. For comparable estimates across countries, researchers and poli-cymakers depend upon pesticide use data collected by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). We analyze the FAO database...
Farming systems that support locally diverse agricultural production and high levels of biodiversity are in rapid decline, despite evidence of their benefits for climate, environmental health, and food security. Yet, agricultural policies, financial incentives, and market concentration increasingly constrain the viability of diversified farming sys...
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields of inquiry and action have been important academic frontiers in recent years. The field of agroecology is a prime example of transdisciplinarity. With roots in the biophysical sciences, social sciences, and peasant movements, publications in agroecology have been growing rapidly in recent decades. Here...
CONTEXT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused substantial shocks to U.S. food systems at multiple scales. While disturbances to long-distance supply chains received substantial attention in national media, local supply chains experienced mixed impacts. As broad closures of schools, restaurants, and other businesses sourcing from local farmers removed key ma...
Agrochemicals are synthetically-derived compounds used in industrial agricultural production. Starting in the second half of the 20th century, agrochemicals profoundly changed agriculture and food, and, with them, many aspects of society. This chapter focuses on the effects of agrochemicals on humans, divided into two main sections, direct and exte...
In the face of rapidly advancing climate change, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity, it is clear that global agriculture must swiftly and decisively shift toward sustainability. Fortunately, farmers and researchers have developed a thoroughly studied pathway to this transition: agroecological farming systems that mimic natural ecosystems, creati...
Sustainable agriculture is among the most urgently needed work in the United States, for at least three reasons: we face an environmental crisis, a health crisis, and a rural economic crisis. Addressing these pressing crises through sustainability transition will require growing our agricultural workforce: both because the current farm population i...
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is one response to major ecological and social problems in the conventional agrifood system. Here we are concerned with how CSA management can enhance the economic sustainability of CSAs. More specifically, using a survey of 111 CSA farms in California, we analyze how specific variables in five domains—CSA mana...
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) faces substantial challenges in increasingly saturated and competitive markets in which competitors highlight their localness. Retention of members is crucial for the model to provide benefits to farmers; otherwise, excessive losses of members requires considerable recruitment efforts and undercuts farmer well-...
This article is a description of data related to the research article entitled “The (un)making of ‘CSA people’: member retention and the customization paradox in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in California” (Galt et al., in press). The data presented were collected through two statewide surveys, conducted via internet-based questionnaire, r...
In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do...
Many consumers are trying to reduce their food's environmental impact by purchasing more locally sourced food. One choice for local food is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which farmers provide a share of produce on a regular basis to pre-paying farm members. The number of CSAs in the USA has grown from two in the mid-1980s to perhaps as...
Concerns are growing over the ability of the modern food system to simultaneously achieve food security and environmental sustainability in the face of global change. Yet, the dominant tendency within university settings to conceptualize and address diverse food system challenges as separate, disconnected issues is a key barrier to food system tran...
The following are a series of essays that originated from panel on Chemical Geographies at the American Association of Geographers meeting in 2016. Although the essays explore different topics, collectively they call into question the relationship of geographic scholarship to chemistry.
There are arguably several alternative food movements (AFMs) rather than a singular one. Most exist to challenge the negative consequences of the industrial food system. Geographers and allied scholars have been central to a number of scholarly debates about AFMs centered on neoliberalism, accessibility, and the wellbeing of farmers and farmworkers...
The region as a concept continues to hold promise as a way of breaking through the many binaries that often divide political ecology. Operationalizing a regional political ecology approach allows the researcher to generate a large number of insights and conclusions that a more narrow disciplinary (disciplined) focus and non-scalar approach would mi...
The region as a concept continues to hold promise as a way of breaking through the many binaries that often divide political ecology. Operationalizing a regional political ecology approach allows the researcher to generate a large number of insights and conclusions that a more narrow disciplinary (disciplined) focus and non-scalar approach would mi...
The effects of competition within alternative food networks (AFNs) remain largely unexplored. Using a study of farms that operate Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programmes in California, the state in the USA with the most CSAs, we empirically examine the effects of competition within alternative food networks. We conducted a statewide survey...
Book review forum: Review of Ryan E. Galt's "Food Systems in an Unequal World: Pesticides, Vegteables, and Agrarian Capitalism in Costa Rica"
New undergraduate degree programs that address food systems have appeared at a number of North American universities in the past decade. These programs seek to complement established food- and agriculture related courses of instruction with additional curricular elements that build students’ capacity to address complex food-systems issues (e.g., fo...
Pesticides, a short-term aid for farmers, can often be harmful, undermining the long-term health of agriculture, ecosystems, and people. The United States and other industrialized countries import food from Costa Rica and other regions. To safeguard the public health, importers now regulate the level and types of pesticides used in the exporters’ f...
This paper examines relationships between beginner farmers and land trusts in coastal California. Set within the context of land consolidation in agriculture and increasing land values, some beginner farmers have created innovative land tenure relationships with land trusts in order to gain access to affordable farmland. To examine the relationship...
This article describes Dig Deep Farms & Produce, a food justice organisation and urban farm working to stimulate local economic development, create jobs, and improve the quality and accessibility of food in Ashland and Cherryland in California's Bay Area. Their practices are based on self-determined values although they take a flexible, anti-essent...
According to the United States Census, California is the most urban state in the nation. Although there are many outstanding examples of urban farms in California, in general, urban agriculture (UA) has been slower to gain momentum here than in some other states with large urban populations. Over the past several years, urban agriculture's populari...
In this article I develop a political economic understanding of community-supported agriculture (CSA). I first develop the relevance of three concepts—economic rents, self-exploitation, and social embeddedness—to CSA and then introduce a framework that relates CSA farmers’ earnings to the average rate of profit, economic rents, and self-exploitatio...
In this paper, I review recent political ecological scholarship on first world agrifood systems and advocate for further development of the field. To do so, I first briefly examine the themes of first world political ecology and argue that food systems is an underdeveloped topic in first world political ecology relative to other themes because of t...
: Through empirical analysis and theory, this paper critiques technocratic regimes of protection vis à vis pesticide use, which are efforts limited to technical rationality and didactic communication of pesticide risks that model pesticide users as self-responsible individuals (ie Homo economicus). Data reveal that knowledge of pesticide risk does...
This is a partial update to the Community Food Systems Bibliography, originally published in April 2012. This bibliography gathers published literature on local and regional food systems and categorizes the literature by key topics. The original bibliography covered literature published from 2000-2011, and contained approximately 1650 articles. In...
Agriculture education programs that provide integrative learning experiences that reflect the complexities, values, and challenges inherent to sustainable agriculture and food systems (SAFS) continue to evolve as faculty, staff, and students implement, experience, and modify them. Higher education institutions, especially land-grant universities, h...
The need to develop students’ professional and personal competencies via sustainable agriculture and food systems education has recently received much attention; however, implementing competency-based education is challenging. This paper demonstrates how educators can approach identifying and teaching foundational competencies and assessing their s...
In this paper we use a critically reflective research approach to analyze our efforts at transformative learning in food systems education in a land grant university. As a team of learners across the educational hierarchy, we apply scholarly tools to the teaching process and learning outcomes of student-centered inquiries in a food systems course....
Community Supported Agriculture operations (CSAs) have grown rapidly in recent years. The original model, in which members support a farming operation by paying for produce in advance and receive a share of the farm’s produce in return, has been adapted, with much innovation. Since little research existed on CSAs in the Central Valley, we surveyed...
This review by a multidisciplinary team maps key components and emerging connections within the intellectual landscape of agroecology. We attempt to extend and preview agroecology as a discipline in which agriculture can be conceptualized within the context of global change and studied as a coupled system involving a wide range of social and natura...
The Rural Visioning Project, a community-based research project in Elk Grove, California, emerged from collaboration between two local community groups and researchers from the University of California, Davis. It is presented as “an exercise in community development,” which lends insight into community processes, the meaning of “community” and perc...
Using a critical cartography/GIS approach and multiple data sets on community supported agriculture (CSA), this paper addresses two questions. First, how accurate was the 2007 United States Census of Agriculture’s counting of CSAs? Second, where are CSAs concentrated and how does their distribution compare with that of farming generally and populat...
Compliance with regulations on pesticide residues in food is a major health and safety issue, as well as a signal about the complex set of ecological, social, and regulatory relationships. This article presents a multiscale analysis of data from analytical chemistry tests of pesticide residues conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on f...
This paper addresses pesticide residues on vegetables in developing countries through the specific case of Costa Rica. Pesticide residues are often very high on vegetables in developing countries, generally considerably higher than in industrialized countries. Using a political ecology approach, I combine qualitative and quantitative primary data w...
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) registers pesticides and sets crop-specific tolerances while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforces EPA regulations by testing plant-based foods for pesticide residues. Pesticide treatment histories are almost always unknown, especially on imported produce, posing an empirical...
Background/Question/Methods
The Mississippi River Basin is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions and exemplifies the multiple ecological and human health risks of industrial agriculture. For decades, significant research and extension efforts have been directed at mitigating the environmental impacts of nitrogen fertilizers. Thes...
Background/Question/Methods This paper questions two of the most important boundary assumptions under which most academics continue to operate even as we increasingly hear, and respond to, calls for inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinarity in the face of socio-environmental crises. In most disciplines, "the human" remains ontologically separate from...
Background/Question/Methods
Ecological knowledge has the potential to significantly enhance agroecosystem function, the provision of ecosystem services, and agricultural sustainability. Currently the application of ecological knowledge to agricultural systems lags behind our scientific understanding. In other words, agricultural practice does not...
Understanding the factors that influence the adoption of synthetic pesticides has to date overshadowed explanations of variation
in pesticide intensity. I conducted a survey of vegetable farmers in Northern Cartago and the Ujarrás Valley, Costa Rica,
in 2003–2004 with the goal of explaining differences in pesticide intensity with reference to socio...
Almost 30 years after its introduction, the “circle of poison” remains a common conceptualization of the global pesticide complex among scholars and especially in popular understanding. The circle of poison describes a situation in which, pesticides banned in industrialized countries continue to be manufactured there and exported to developing coun...
The environmental impact of agro-export production in developing countries remains an important research topic. The political economy-inspired literature on developing country agro-exports maintains that export crops are pesticide intensive – or, more generally, environmentally destructive – while local and national market crops are less pesticide...
In a globalizing economy, agri-food regulation in the industrialized world increasingly affects food-producing industries and farmers in developing countries. Discussions of these transformations remain mostly disconnected from the literature on pesticide use in developing countries, which emphasizes widespread pesticide misuse and abuse. Previous...
This study is focused on the global expansion of protected-area coverage that occurred during the 1980--2000 period. We examine the multi-scale patterning of four of the basic facets of this expansion: i) estimated increases at the world-regional and country-level scales of total protected-area coverage; ii) transboundary protected areas; iii) cons...
This study is focused on the global expansion of protect-ed-area coverage that occurred during the 1980–2000 period. We examine the multi-scale patterning of four of the basic facets of this expansion: i) estimated increases at the world-regional and country-level scales of total pro-tected-area coverage; ii) transboundary protected areas; iii) con...
This graduate seminar explores the interactions between societies and their environment from the perspective of geographical political ecology. Political ecology, a subfield with contributions from geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, ecologists, and biologists, integrates political economic analysis — and increasingly...
Typescript. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (214-232).
