Preliminary research shows that vineyards and alfalfa show no significant yield penalties after controlled flooding from the end of winter to early spring when the fields overlay highly permeable soils . Thus, land parcels planted with vineyards, pasture , idle lands , grain and hay crops , and field crops, which likely are fallowed in the wet season, were deemed suitable for Ag-MAR.Geospatial data of existing surface water conveyance infrastructure were provided by nine water management agencies . For the remaining surface water districts, conveyance infrastructure was digitized from publicly available maps and aerial images. In areas where surface water conveyance infrastructure was visible in air photographs, features were digitized at a scale of 1:10,000. GIS data of larger conveyance infrastructure were obtained from the California Open Data Portal . Groundwater well capture zones are defined as the areal extent and volumetric portion of a groundwater system that contribute discharge to a particular well . Captures zones were derived for all domestic wells in rural communities using the California Department of Water Resources’ Online System for Well Completion Reports and the California Central Valley Groundwater-Surface Water Simulation Model .C2VSim was used to extract a generalized groundwater flow field for the study area. C2VSim is an integrated surface water-groundwater model based on the finite element code of the Integrated Water Flow Model capable of accounting for reservoir deliveries, stream flow, stream diversions, canal distribution systems, irrigation, runoff, crop water uses, vadose zone processes, and groundwater-surface water-irrigated landscape interactions typical of irrigated agricultural basins . The model domain covers the entire CV alluvial aquifer. More information on the model development, calibration and validation, and application for Ag-MAR can be found in Brush et al. , Brush and Dogrul , and Kourakos et al. .

The fine grid model version was used to extract a quasisteady-state representation of the regional groundwater flow field ,hydroponic nft channel taken as the mean of the monthly flow fields from October 2005 to September 2015, to best inform recharge efforts.In the State of California, construction of a new well must be reported to OSWCR. Well locations in OSWCR are reported at a 2.6 km2 resolution by stating the centroid coordinates of the 2.6 km2 Public Land Survey System section a well is located within . For this study, well logs of 27,482 domestic wells located within the study area were downloaded from OSWCR. Wells located within a 1.61 km radius of any of the 288 rural communities were extracted, reducing the number of domestic wells to 7,673 . Well logs were screened for completeness of the following well construction information: well depth, depth to the top of the well screen, and depth to the bottom of the well screen . For wells with incomplete records, well status modeling was used to impute missing information, specifically the depth to the top of the well screen and the submergence depth of the well pump .Investigation and mapping of factors that increase vulnerability to or probability of natural and socio-economic hazards can provide a useful way to prioritize where efforts should be focused . To determine community vulnerability to change in groundwater supply, data describing domestic well failures, domestic well reliance, pesticide applications, land subsidence, and socio-economic factors were used.A thematic layer describing “domestic well failures” was generated using domestic well construction logs, groundwater table information, and self-reported drinking water supply shortages . The California Household Water Supply Shortage Reporting System contains information on self-reported household drinking water supply shortages due to well failure, well under performance, or loss of surface water supply. During the 2012–2016 drought, 867 wells were reported dry within our 288 rural communities. However, this is assumed to be an underestimation of the actual water supply shortages experienced during the 2012–2016 drought, since reporting is optional and many rural communities likely lack access to these tools.

Submergence of the well screen and pump intake are desired to ensure proper well function . The initial installation of the pump intake is usually above zt to minimize costs of screen installation and to maximize the capacity for useable water production . It was assumed that the cost of rehabilitating wells to alleviate well production losses caused by falling groundwater levels would be prohibitive for rural communities. Thus, the analysis assumed that pump intakes would remain at some depth above zt and wells would become inactive if the groundwater level dropped below the pump intake . Since the OSWCR contains no information on the pump intake depth, a submergence value, hs, was calibrated using the reported well failures as a validation data set. Submergence in this study is defined as the depth of the top of the well screen below the groundwater table. Depth to the groundwater table and estimated zt values were used to quantify changes in well status between Spring of 2011 and Fall of 2015 . Groundwater depths at each well location were extracted from interpolated seasonal groundwater levels spanning the entire shallow to semi-confined CV aquifer system . To calibrate the required submergence value, hs, zt values were compared to predrought and post drought groundwater levels to identify wells that became inactive as a result of groundwater level declines. Using the reported well failures in rural communities as validation data, the required pump submergence value was calibrated to be hs = 10 m for which the model estimated 923 well failures during the drought period, most of which were concentrated in the northeastern region .Many rural communities in the southern CV are not connected to municipal water supply systems and generally rely on a single water source, typically a groundwater well, which puts them at risk of water supply failures . Water supply connection density is a metric that describes the pressure exerted on community drinking water supply sources, given as the ratio of active public water supply sources to water supply connections in each community .

Lower values indicate a higher per capita reliance on active public water supply sources, indicating the community has lower water supply security. Communities that rely on a single public water supply source are especially vulnerable to shortages and contamination, as the failure of a single source compromises the community’s entire water supply. In the study area, 91 rural communities only have a single public water supply source of which more than 75% rely on groundwater. Communities solely reliant on unregulated domestic wells do not have any access to public water supply sources and as such, are the most vulnerable to shortages and contamination. The communities reliant on single or unregulated sources are concentrated in the northeastern and eastern regions of the southern CV.Prolonged and unsustainable groundwater pumping causes severe settling or sinking of the land surface due to subsurface compaction of earth materials, known as land subsidence . Land subsidence rates estimated with In SAR technology between May 2015 and September 2016 was used in this analysis. The data reveal two major subsidence bowls in the northwestern and eastern regions of the southern CV and the development of a new hot spot between them . Land subsidence is of particular concern because it directly affects major surface water conveyance systems and threatens the integrity of shallow, domestic wells.Socio-economic parameters of poverty status, linguistic isolation,nft growing system and educational attainment were selected as unique and complementary factors contributing to community vulnerability to change in groundwater supply . Socio-economic data were obtained by block group from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey’s 5-year estimates for 2011–2015 and processed using the R library tidycensus .

For each of the three parameters described below, demographic percentages were calculated for all block groups in the region. If multiple block groups intersected a community, an area-weighted average was calculated and the value was applied to each respective community. Poverty status is defined as the percentage of the population for whom the ratio of income to national poverty level in the previous 12 months was below one . Poverty status is believed to contribute to community vulnerability as poorer households have less financial capacity to preemptively address or remediate water supply shortages . Linguistic isolation is defined as the percentage of households that are limited English-speaking households . Households that have limited English-speaking capacity are to a lesser extent able to engage with administrative authorities to voice concerns or resolve problems, and thus have increased community vulnerability . Educational attainment is defined as the percentage of population over 25 years of age, who have completed some education above the high school level . Educational attainment can influence risk perception, skills and knowledge, and access to information and resources, hence less educated populations may be less empowered to prepare and recover from resource shortages .A GIS-based MCDA was used to combine the biophysical, hydrological, and social-ecological data listed in Table 1 to delineate and prioritize locations for multi-benefit Ag-MAR. An equal weighting scheme for thematic layers and proposed rankings of categorical features was adopted in this study following recommendations of Visser and based on the variability present in existing recharge mapping studies . The well status model was used to impute missing well data and provide a more spatially complete estimate of the domestic well failures that occurred during the 2012–2016 drought. Of the 27,482 domestic wells in the study area, 2,907 wells were excluded from the model development because the top of the well screen was shallower than the predrought groundwater levels in spring of 2011. The remaining 24,575 wells were used to estimate the depth to the top of the well screen, zt, using Equation 1. Of the 7,673 domestic wells located within the rural communities, 291 wells were missing zb and the total completed well depth information, thus zt could not be estimated. However, zt was estimated for 279 of the 282 wells only missing zt data. For these 7,673 wells, well capture zones were estimated using groundwater modeling and particle tracking. Most of the capture zones delineated for the domestic wells within rural communities are concentrated in the northeastern and eastern regions of the study area, where the majority of the communities and domestic wells are located . Figures 5b and 5c focus in on the Orosi and Cutler communities east of Dinuba, CA, and the Okieville community, west of Tulare, CA. Both maps show a diverse pattern for the particle exit points of each well highlighting major differences in the groundwater flow velocity, well depths, and lengths of the well screen across the domestic wells in the study area. Well capture zones extend generally between 1 and 6 km upgradient of wells . Some neighboring wells show clear differences in groundwater flow direction and upgradient capture area, which are likely due to differences in well depth and well screen length .Community vulnerability index values were classified into five classes representing “Extreme Vulnerability,” “Very High Vulnerability,” “High Vulnerability,” “Moderate Vulnerability,” and “Low Vulnerability” . Communities classified as extremely vulnerable are concentrated in the eastern part of the study area while highly and very highly vulnerable communities are mainly seen in the northern and northeastern part of the southern CV . There are clear differences in the mean theme scores between the most and least vulnerable communities . For example, in the 30 communities classified as extremely vulnerable, on average, 44.6% of the population live below the poverty line, 30.7% of the households are limited English-speaking, and only 8.1% of the population above 25 years have completed some education above a high school degree. Extremely vulnerable communities are also characterized by higher well failure rates, greater land subsidence, and higher pesticide applications on fields surrounding these communities . In these communities, on average, over 99 households rely on a single water supply source .These communities had, on average, much lower well failure rates during the 2012–2016 drought, less land subsidence, and no reported applications of the seven active ingredients contained in pesticides known to pollute groundwater. These communities also have a much lower percentage of the population living below the poverty line , a lower percentage of households that are limited English-speaking , and a higher percentage of the population above 25 years that have completed some education above a high school degree .

Anthropological considerations about cattle-related beliefs and behaviors along the lines of the bovine mystique problematic were, at bottom, irrelevant. In other words, it did not matter why West African peasants wished to keep their livestock and resisted to interventions aimed at changing their cattle-related practices. The fact was that they did, and it was up to the project to adapt to these circumstances rather than the other way round. This working notion of the milieu paysan in the C-4 countries was, in its broad outlines, the one miniaturized in quantifiable form as the control situation in the adaptive experiments set up in the various project plots. It did not correspond to how peasants actually did things, but to how they were supposed to be doing them if they followed the technical recommendations crafted by the research institutes and delivered by local extension agents. The African partners and their Brazilian counterparts did not however close their eyes to the potential – or better said, inevitable – “noise” between research stations and the peasant environment. Rather, as will be discussed shortly, they recognized that peasants were likely to both follow and not follow the recommendations. This ambiguity reflects the broader “uncaptured peasantry” problematic discussed, among others, by Mamdani . As this author remarked in his critique of two polar approaches in academia and policy-making circles,African peasants are neither capitalists in the waiting, eager to be freed from the shackles of state patronage, nor labor of a pre- or antimarket kind that have failed to be successfully captured by the state or global capital. It is neither one nor the other; the challenge is to trace empirically how processes of capturing peasant labor for global markets have succeed or not,stackable planters but most likely have been caught somewhere in-between. This “in-betweenness” resonates with some of our previous discussions: the cotton filière’s relations with global processes, the technology trap remarked in Chapter 3, or the lag between soft and hard domains discussed in Chapter 2.

In fact, in its general outlines, it could even be extended to describe the postcolonial condition at large. And as many postcolonial scholars have done , rather than striving to overcome these ambivalences and contradictions, the project tried to work through some of them, with the tools it had at hand. The next section will describe a third spatial-temporal scale assembled by the project, in fact its most visible face: the so-called parcelle.The picture above, taken in October 2011 at the Sotuba research station, shows four Malian peasants who had been randomly approached in a cotton farm not far from Bamako, and invited to come see the project grounds. They were shown how cotton was supposedly grown in the milieu paysan, alongside how cotton would be grown using the new seeds and crop management techniques brought from Brazil. Little by little, the project technician explained to the farmers what was new about the plot with the Brazilian technologies, while pushing off the branches to call attention to the residues from the previous year’s crops in-between the lines; inviting them to feel the temperature difference across the height of the cotton plant, significant enough to be noticed without the need of a thermometer ; and taking them to notill’s chief visual enabler, the pit, where they had access to what was going on with the plants’ roots under the ground . This kind of comparative device is basic to adaptive research and transfer anywhere; new technologies are not just introduced into a random sample of the local environment. It is always against a certain rendition of “business-as-usual” that they will be experimentally calibrated, and comparatively evaluated. This evaluation is done not just by researchers and technicians, but by those who are to be the ultimate recipients of the technologies: in this case, peasant farmers. This rendition of the local context is therefore as constructed as the one to which it will be compared, that includes the travelling technologies.

But the Malian peasants in the picture were impressed by both sides in the experiment: not just the crop lines managed using the Brazilian technologies, but the control situation representing the milieu paysan, yielded beautiful and loaded plants. At a first glance and without expert guidance, the differences between them would not be easily perceived, but both were clearly more productive, healthy and homogeneous than the plants found in their own fields . This is not surprising, given the discussion already made here – even if the seed sowed in the experimental fields and in the farms were the same, the assemblages of which they were part were very different. Research institutes had not only more resources at their disposal, but much more control over their experimental fields; they were in this sense closer to the original context where technologies were developed in Embrapa’s own research stations. This was especially true of the project plot in Sotuba, which enjoyed a budget of its own, full time technicians, and the dedicated presence of the Brazilian project coordinator, himself an agronomist. The only significant environmental variable that was not controlled – in other words, that was fully shared between experimental and farmer fields – was rainfall. What these peasant farmers were seeing however were not finished technologies, ready to be brought to their fields, but adaptive experiments. These fields had a hybrid character. On the one hand, they were experiments, generally structured along the same lines of the ones routinely set up in research stations both in Embrapa centers in Brazil and elsewhere in the African institutes. In this sense, they brought non-humans into the project assemblage in a controlled and directed manner. On the other, they were demonstration sites, assembling various kinds of humans as a supporting public for the project. The project’s main experimental field was located in the Malian institute’s research station in Sotuba, in the outskirts of the capital city of Bamako. Brazilians referred to it as parcela, and the Africans as parcelle – the English equivalent land parcel is close enough to be maintained here. While technically speaking, parcel refers to the area where the experiments were being performed, the word was used more broadly to identify the piece of land that the Malian institute had assigned to the project. Different from its counterparts in the other three project countries, this parcel was supervised closely by the Brazilian project coordinator along with the Malian experts in each of the three components .

The local institute provided the project with two local technicians to be full-time at the researchers’ disposal in order to execute the experimental protocols and other project tasks . The project grounds in Sotuba were made up of two parcels, side by side. The smaller included a varietal test where the ten new cotton varieties brought from Brazil were being adapted and displayed,stacking pots alongside their five regional counterparts. It also contained an in situ seed bank for cover crops brought from Brazil , and part of it grew local cereals as a preparation for future no-till essays. The same written word, vitrine, was used to designate this half of the parcel in both French and Portuguese, so I will keep it here.The remainder of the parcel, twice as large as the vitrine, contained the no-till test fields, the largest and most visible of all plots . At the left corner as one entered the main gate, one could spot the only building within the parcelle, a small shack built by the project to store equipment and seeds. It was located right by one of the few trees that were left to stand within the fenced area, under which visitors and project workers would happily gather for a break from the scorching Sahelian sun. A bit farther behind the shack, in front of the first field stood a couple of panels, identifying the project and displaying a schematic picture of the no-till production system. As one walked further through the aisle that separated this cotton field from the maize field to its right, another couple of panels stood on each side: one showed the symptoms of nutritional deficiencies in the cotton leaves, and the other did the same for maize . Like the pit , these were key visual enablers in the parcelle. Other panels, set up in the vitrine, displayed a schematic description of pest control modalities.When I got there in September 2011, the other half of the maize field grew niébé, a leguminous plant that has abundant biomass and fixates some nitrogen – two common criteria in Embrapa’s no-till research in Brazil. But different from crotalaria, niébé was used locally for food – something which could potentialize adoption of the system by peasants. Towards the end of that season, local women hired by the project harvested the niébé beans and the corn ears, while the stalks and straw – the biomass – were kept in place as a variable to be measured in that experiment. After a sample of the production harvested was carefully weighed and recorded, these and whatever other edible grain was produced were informally distributed to the local community, or donated with a bit more formality at charity events by the Brazilian ambassador and/or his wife. Between the two parcels, I would occasionally see a boy playing a monotonous beat in a drum; it was to scare away the birds, eager to get at the loaded heads of sorghum in the vitrine. On the extreme opposite side of the no-till parcel, behind the crops, a guardian – a middle-aged man from Côte d’Ivoire – would sit down everyday during the evenings and nights. Just a few meters from him stood the wall that separated the Sotuba station from the surrounding community; without surveillance, maize ears would not wait in the stalks to be harvested by the project.

These, as well as the women who harvested the crops and performed other operations such as weeding were recruited from the local community through the channels already available at the institutes, and were paid by the project. Its demonstration aspects were a bricolage of elements from different technology transfer methods commonly deployed by Embrapa in Brazil . Embrapa research units normally include unidades de demonstraçãothat display to farmers the institute’s technologies, so they can be evaluated and perhaps adopted by them. It may include a direct comparison with alternative methods deployed by local farmers, as was the case with the C-4 Project plots. Vitrine, which means “display window”, is also a demonstration device. In Brazil, they are set up in events such as agricultural fairs, where new technologies are displayed and explained through short lectures delivered to farmers and the specialized media. Treino & visita, which involves continuous training of technicians and extension agents in charge of disseminating the technologies among farmers through “visits”, resonates with the project’s capacity-building cycles and more informal training of local technicians. Finally, there were elements of dias de campo , when multiple farmer groups and individuals were invited to come see the technologies at the institute’s experimental stations, or on pilot tests set up in farmers’ land.Who were the addressees of demonstration in this case? The parcel’s first public was the researchers and technicians from the C-4 institutes who worked for the project. They weren’t however mere spectators: researchers participated in the design and evaluation of experimental protocols, while technicians worked in implementing them. Besides this core group, demonstration targeted other researchers and technicians working in the local research institutes and adjacent agencies , but not formally within the project. They were recruited as trainees for the capacity-building cycles, and were expected to become multipliers of the project’s technologies. Much of their training took place outdoors on the parcel, and the chief aim of demonstration in this case was to produce a “paradigm shift” in their minds – in particular, about not tilling the soil, which seemed counter-intuitive to most of them. For the technology to disseminate, this ultimately would have to happen along the entire transfer chain: as a Burkinabe agronomist put it, “in order to succeed in convincing others, we have to be ourselves convinced”.

Indeed, as some of my interlocutors in the African institutes remarked, there can be marked imbalances in terms of access granted by local chiefs to peasants depending on their kin and patronage networks, and differences in ethnicity, age, gender, or migration status. Especially for immigrant peasants and those in areas of high pressure on arable land, the assignment of land plots to households by village authorities is far from secured. “It can be taken from the peasant at any time, if for some reason the elders decide that the true owner of that piece of land is somebody else”, one of the Burkinabe researchers explained to me. These issues stretched far beyond the technical scope of the C-4 Project. Nonetheless, as Brazilian front liners quickly learned, they impinged directly on the possibilities of transferring Embrapa technologies to peasant land. Most germane to the project was the fact that this situation tended to discourage long term planning and farmers’ investment in the land plots they worked. And no-till was considered a technique that necessarily requires long term thinking, since many of the benefits driving its original development are not immediately evident in the short term. In terms of the project’s main problem – productivity –, the benefits of soil conservation are manifested less as immediately rising yields than as preventing their decrease in the long run. And while the agronomist or planner sees both, the peasant – my interlocutors insisted – sees only the former. As will be resumed in the next chapter, the question of evidence – how to convince farmers that the problem exists, and how to demonstrate that the proposed solution is working or will work – became one of the keys to the project’s technology adaptation and transfer strategy. Finally, no-till’s third and last pillar – crop rotation – involved yet another set of context making and scaling operations. Crop rotation is a major piece of context in Brazil’s experience with no-till cotton: if in much of West Africa cotton has been “king” since colonial times, in Brazil’s late-century agricultural boom cotton has thrived on the heels of queen soybean.

In the aftermath of the boll weevil crisis,hydroponic nft system cotton re-emerged during the “soybean cycle” 200 as a succession culture to that which is today the paramount crop in cerrado agriculture, largely aimed at export to Asian markets. In a common configuration, cotton is planted in the window that was opened in the cerrado agricultural calendar by the introduction of more precocious varieties of soybean, with life cycles as short as 100 days. This means that, between the harvest of soybean and the end of the rainy season, there is enough time to plant a second crop , and sometimes even a third one of pasture for feeding cattle. Even though some Embrapa researchers showed nuanced views about this highly intensive and technified production system,it was this configuration – rather than that of smallholder cotton production in the Northeast – that they presented most often to African partners. This seeming in congruence only appears as paradoxical, however, if one takes the scale of property size and capital-intensity. In fact, by and large, Brazilian and African peasants do not grow cotton for the same market: the latter produce for the same world market in which Brazilian large-scale farmers sell their cotton, while Brazilian smallholders produce mostly for domestic or niche markets such as organic or colored cotton. African peasant farmers are faced with higher demands in terms of productivity, timing, or quality standards. Technically speaking, in no-till crop rotation follows a logic similar to that of conventional agriculture: to recycle and better utilize soil nutrients, interrupt the cycle of pests, diseases and adventitious weeds, and improve soil structure by alternating root types. Project front liners did not foresee many difficulties here, as West African peasants already grew cotton amidst a diversified pool of crops, and did some rotation between them. This was however done differently than in the Brazilian cerrado. In West Africa, at current levels of technification of production, rain patterns typically allow for only one crop per year. In-between, there is a long dry season of around seven months – also known locally as “hunger season” – which is, according to many of my local interlocutors, getting increasingly lengthier “due to climate change”.

Other plants are therefore intercropped with cotton simultaneously, competing against it for land, labor and inputs.This complementary-competitive relationship between cotton and food crops has been one of the defining features of the system in West Africa, and, as will be seen in the next chapter, of peasant decision-making locally. The idea was that the improvement of cotton production within a mixed system would bring in its stead more and better food crops, and vice-versa. “I say that cotton can be the main food crop in these countries”, the project coordinator was fond of saying. This ambivalent coexistence between cotton and food crops is also a legacy of French colonialism. In its modern version,cotton was already born as an industrial and global crop. Since it did not grow well in Europe’s temperate climate, cotton was encouraged in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere by all colonial powers as an export item to metropolitan markets.More than any other crop, it shares the iconicity and global character of the economic sector that raised it to world prominence: the textile industry. A central stage of the origin story of Western modernity so powerfully recounted by Marx in Das Kapital, the textile industry and its associated cotton supply chain played an important part in the process that led to the abolition of the slave trade during the Pax Britannica, and from there to the scramble for Africa later on in the nineteenth century. The “cotton famine” during 1861-65 – a period of acute supply shortages caused by the civil war in the U.S., by then the largest world cotton producer – was a key factor in pushing Britain and other industrializing European nations to tighten their imperial grasp over tropical possessions in Asia and Africa . As Mamdani eloquently framed this link between nineteenth-century colonialism and Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution, “in [the] constellation of raw materials that would feed European manufacturing, the pride of place belonged to cotton. The three c’s that Livingstone claimed would together rejuvenate Africa were cotton, Christianity, and civilization”.In much of colonial Africa, cotton was, as Mamdani put it, the “archetypical forced crop” . As such, it participated in colonialism’s regime of compulsions that gave rise to the overall food versus cash crop dichotomization remarked in the previous chapter. In the case of West Africa, historians prefer to talk about a mixed system featuring both coercion and market incentives, which confronted peasants with “a set of constraints and opportunities over which they often had little control” .

Even today, no peasant farmer is, strictly speaking, forced to plant cotton; but they often have little option outside of it. This may be also reflected at the level of nation-states; as I once heard a group of Beninese agronomists teasing their Chadian colleagues as they arrived early in the morning for one of the project meetings, “What are you guys doing here anyway? Why do you even bother with cotton? You have oil!” As far as the technical make-up of no-till is concerned, however, production scale, market destination, or property size are not constraining factors per se. No-till is a highly flexible crop and soil management system,nft channel and there are endless possibilities of permutation within and between the three pillars; what adaptive research does is precisely to try to find the best fit according to each “context”. In Brazil, the system is applied to a broad variety of crops, from soybean to trees, from beans to pasture; it is found from cold regions in the Brazilian South to hot and humid Amazonic conditions; from large-scale, mechanized, input-intensive industrial agriculture to small agro-ecologic family farms. Moreover, its adaptive potential goes beyond the domain of “nature” proper, including “social” factors in terms for instance of what crops will be chosen , what outcome will be emphasized , or what kind of productive structure is available locally . Thus, adaptation to each production region, and ideally to each production unit, is an inherent feature of the technique itself: research is a continuous effort, even after technology transfer to farmers has been accomplished. It became essential, therefore, to enroll the African researchers into the project’s effort not just formally. In the world of development, participation in projects in itself is not so much the problem; as especially actor-centered approaches have shown, local actors have their own interests in engaging with foreign partners, and will do it even if for only as long as projects last . In the C-4 Project, the effort was, rather, to nourish a commitment with a longer term research enterprise – in other words, to achieve robustness beyond its organizational scope as described in the first section. In this sense, the C-4 researchers were encouraged to gradually take the reins of technical decision-making in the adaptive research process. Brazilian front liners recognized this as a slow and to some extent open-ended process: “What we’re doing here is sowing a seed. The benefits will be not for these children you see, but for their children and grandchildren”, the project coordinator would tell me every once in a while. Note that he did not say “the benefits, if there are any” – despite all the difficulties envisaged in adaptation and especially transfer to farmers, there was a confidence, which the African agronomists tended to share, that the technology was good, and that one day it could bring concrete benefits to West African peasant farmers. At this stage, however, no one could predict the exact form – or most likely, forms – that no-till and its accompanying systemic components would take in their new environment. As one of the Embrapa researchers put it, referring to the difficulties involving soil cover, “who knows, maybe in West Africa no-till will end up with only two pillars”.

As De Laet and Mol’s bush pump, no-till was regarded as fluid enough to remain functional even if one of its three legs went missing as it made its way across the Southern Atlantic. But while the project did take into account the potential constraints involved in transferring the Brazilian version of no-till to West African peasant farmers – especially the problem of cattle, land tenure and agricultural inputs –, not all were incorporated into the experimental work . Many, or perhaps most, of these ended up being bracketed out so that the Embrapa cooperantes would first focus on making sure that their partners in the local institutes acquire robust scientific mastery over the technique itself. The African front liners dealing most immediately with no-till, usually agronomists by training, had at least basic knowledge about its underlying logic, and local versions of no-till could be found in some patches of rural areas for instance in Burkina Faso.But these were quite limited in number and scope, and few of the local agronomists had received systematic training or done specialized research on the system previously to the project. An important exception was the project’s head agronomist in Mali, who worked for a few years on no-till as part of a project with the French CIRAD210 and wrote his PhD dissertation based on that experience. But even the agronomists from the other institutes seemed to have developed a particular interest in the technique, and along with it, in the project itself. In fact, my impression was that within this project, agronomists were more valued and enjoyed a leading role that they may not normally have in their institutes, at least when compared to breeders, weed scientists, entomologists and other researchers whose work tend to relate more closely to the development of commercial products such as improved seeds and agrochemicals. On the other hand , the kind of research work agronomists did often brought them closer to farmers and the latter’s own ways of taking care of the crops and the land. In the project’s two other technical components, the adaptation process unfolded at a slower pace.

This is a different kind of engagement than the one described in the literature about traditional aid, based on a highly bureaucratized apparatus aimed at intervening in broad swaths of local realities in a planned manner, subsidized by authoritative knowledge specialized in the field of development – which I will synthesize here under the rubric of “intervention” . The concluding section will elaborate on the notion of demonstration to characterize this alternative mode of engagement, and suggest some of its effects on Brazilian cooperation’s potential for robustness.The previous section begun with the hope, manifested in President Lula’s words when he inaugurated the CECAT in 2010, that Embrapa’s technical cooperation would help raise Africa’s crop production to Brazilian levels. The account of the capacity-building trainings provided in this chapter made evident however how little technical and hands-on they in fact were. I was left wondering, then, exactly what type of capacity was being built there? My suggestion is that, rather than effectively transferring knowledge or technology across the Southern Atlantic, this work of capacity-building could be better characterized as an effort to make a context for relations that had little precedent. There was, above all, a clear diplomatic aspect to the trainings. With them, their sponsor, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, realized its guideline of concentrating resources in order to make cooperation more standardized, less costly, and more visible to a wider African public. In each round of trainings, Brazilians had access to representatives from a broad sample of African countries at a relatively low cost. There were moments in which this drive became explicit, such as when the campaign of José Graziano, a former minister of Lula and then candidate to head the FAO,blueberry box was briefly discussed in CECAT and pamphlets were distributed to the African trainees. But most often, diplomacy’s intentions were loosely articulated, consisting simply in advertising Brazil to African countries.

In the words of one of the Embrapa speakers, “it is hoped not only that particular technologies will be discussed here, but that each of you will take home a message that Brazil is a brother country, which wants to share what it has learned with its African brothers”. The demonstration of Brazil’s “developmental success” involved elements and procedures that came out of Embrapa’s, not Itamaraty’s, experience as a research institute. I would like to conclude by suggesting that this mode of engagement through demonstration has two vectors. On the one hand, it relates to the broader organizational assemblage of Brazilian cooperation, which, as argued in Chapter 1, has led to a more “hands off” approach. On the other hand, it stems from the kind of work that Embrapa employees were used to perform domestically – and which also happens to resonate well with the general principles of South-South cooperation described in Chapter 1. Early on in this dissertation and elsewhere , I claimed that Brazilian cooperation has been inspired less by the international development apparatus’ expert protocols and policies than by sector-specific, domestic experiences, and that institutions operating at front line like Embrapa, and even their individual agents, enjoyed significant autonomy from the level of policy to design and implement projects and trainings. In the case of Embrapa, this has been reflected in the fact that demonstration as display of technological achievements is not something crafted specifically for its South-South cooperation activities. It is a major part not only of its techno-political domestic routine, but also of technology transfer in agriculture at large. In this sense, Embrapa cooperantes’ mode of engagement with African partners has been largely mirrored on their relations with the Brazilian government and public on the one hand, and farmers on the other. In the emic jargon, technology transfer, or TT, is the stage that follows Research & Development ; it refers to the transfer of technologies already validated by research to farmers. Agronomic research is itself carried out with an eye on adoption by farmers, for instance by taking into account the cost of technologies being developed.

In the Embrapa decentralized units visited by the African trainees, crop technologies are not confined to trial fields; they are set up in demonstration units that are both experimental sites and displaying windows for farmers and other kinds of lay publics. Embrapa researchers occasionally carry out terrain TT activities such as dias de campoand treino e visita . Many of these techniques are based on models disseminated globally by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, but Embrapa and other local institutions have improved and adapted them over the decades. Even though extension services to farmers are not really part of Embrapa’s mandate, 164 the institute does engage in other modes of technology transfer. It has a TT department centered on seed production and “technological business” , for dealing with more entrepreneurial types of farmers. It also makes its own investment in reaching out directly to all kinds of farmers through different media . During the CECAT trainings, African partners were taken on a tour to Embrapa’s modern media facilities, including its own TV and radio studio, and a large graphic press for producing booklets, manuals, and other dissemination and publicity materials targeting farmers and the general public. Embrapa also participates regularly in other modalities of technology transfer held by the private sector, such as agricultural fairs and expositions. In all these, new technologies are demonstrated to farmers, who will adopt them only if they see advantages relatively to what they already deploy, usually conceived in the form of productivity gains or some other economic parameter. This is, as one of the cooperantes put it, part of an “open” system where technical recommendations are not imposed on farmers but demonstrated to them. It is up to the farmer to go on the market after the seeds, fertilizers, and whatever other inputs he decides he needs – be it at Embrapa or elsewhere. As will be seen in the chapters that follow in the case of cotton, this contrasts with the picture found in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, more akin to the colonial development “toolkit” mixing coercion and market signals, and to a “Green Revolution” model of technology diffusion166 where formal extension channels are top-down and “closed”, whatever falls outside of it being largely left to little regulated informal markets.

Finally, as we have seen, demonstration has also been part of Embrapa’s daily routine in another way, this time addressing less farmers than another kind of public: government and the Brazilian society at large. Since its early beginnings, the institution and its employees have been constantly called to give an account of themselves in terms of impacts on national development, lest they would run the risk of going underfunded or even perishing. In their demonstrations during cooperation activities, cooperantes were providing a similar kind of self-account, convinced as they were that part of the solution for their African partners,blueberry package at least from the point of view of research, would be to do the same. Therefore, by carrying out demonstration in both technical and non-technical domains, Embrapa cooperantes were not doing anything radically different than they used to do domestically. But here they were being asked by an external agency to address a public they did not have significant relations with. For these relations to multiply and produce concrete effects on the African landscape, researchers and other cooperantes did not count with the established channels they enjoyed in Brazil, linking them to other research institutions, farmers, politicians, the media, and so forth. As a result, Brazilians came to regard African partners themselves less as recipients of cooperation than as vital and necessary mediators for its initiation and reproduction. Much of the former’s efforts during the trainings were towards enticing the latter’s interest in the Brazilian experience, and their participation in the comparative effort being proposed. From these attempts at engagement, however, something may or may not come out. There are those who participate in international cooperation activities mostly as an opportunity to travel around, to meet and network with new people for a variety of purposes, or simply to save some money on daily allowances. Embrapa personnel consciously tried to avoid having trainees who privileged these motivations, but they had little influence over assignment procedures, which happened back in African countries. But even when this was not the case, networking could take a life of its own and become largely self-referred, as happens in much of traditional aid . In CECAT, indeed, rarely did interactions show a potential for robustness. This would require not only extending interpersonal and inter-institutional relations beyond the scope of cooperation itself, but embedding them in preexisting socio-technical assemblages. From the point of view of the Brazilian cooperantes, this kind of follow-up was a next step to be taken by the African partners, if so they wished. Demand-drivenness had to be therefore constant, not just a kick-start for beginning a relation – much the less a nice word to put on a PR brochure or institutional power point. Many of the Africa trainees did express interest for instance in returning to Brazil for long-term study, or in proposing joint scientific projects with Embrapa researchers. But most of them expected that further support for this would come from their partners; and although Brazil does have some provisions in this respect such as research funding and scholarships for the global South, they were limited in number and scope, and were not generally streamlined with technical cooperation activities.

Today, moreover, these same African countries, institutions, and even individuals are being courted by a growing number of international partners – just like Brazil, China, Australia, India and many others have been eager to generously share with Africa their successful agricultural experiences. But rather than creating a smooth, enclosed context for themselves, these relations become inevitably caught up in Africa’s rugged “entangled landscapes”, where “multiple spatialities, temporalities, and power relations” meet and combine in manifold, overlapping assemblages. The two chapters that follow will describe one of these assemblages, formed around the C-4 Project in West Africa, and look at how context-making, demonstration and the question of robustness have appeared in the case of a full-fledged technology transfer project.A corollary to this naturalization is that, as the technology travels from center to periphery, it is no longer seen as having social ties to its departure point. That is why, in policy oriented views on technology transfer, this process is reduced to closing the gaps between the technology and its new, less developed context: this, a truly “social” one. Correspondingly, people – local farmers, researchers, technicians, policymakers – become the chief challenge: in order for the gaps to be closed, they are expected to change themselves according to the new technology, more than the other way round. Indeed, STS scholars working from / on the global South have variously noted how, in Latin America and elsewhere, the “social” entanglements of techno-science come to the fore more visibly . Much of this perception stems from the perceived lag between techno-scientific practices in the peripheries and those in the centers. What happens, then, when technology travels along a South-South axis? It must be clear by now that, more than geographic locations, center and periphery indicate a kind of relation, and that South-South relations may be ambivalent and even contradictory in this respect. Thus, as I will try to show below, in the C-4 Project relations were asymmetrical in terms of the direction in which knowledge, technologies and resources flowed, and of the relative availability of these on both sides. Yet, they were not marked by the intervention, imposition, or patronizing – in one word, the verticality – often remarked for Northern aid. Moreover, similarly to what was argued in the previous chapter for the capacity-building trainings, more than “rendering technical” , engagement through demonstration most often denaturalized the travelling technologies by laying bare some of their socio-technical entanglements on both the provider and recipient sides. The transfer process therefore appeared as a co-production between technology and context in a more explicit and reflexive way than is described in the STS literature referenced here. Neither is this literature sufficiently attentive to two key dimensions of technology transfer foregrounded in my account: the scaling moves that are performed by the actors themselves, and the asymmetries they perceive not only between recipient and donor countries, but between different levels of context within these countries.

Elsewhere I have suggested how both Freyre’s original oeuvre and its subsequent popularization have been tied to postcolonial concerns stemming from Brazil’s historical experience of double colonization . Here I will retrace how the interest in culture Freyre bequeathed to Brazilian diplomacy has been shaped by a similarly multi-layered postcolonial topography, directed both inwards and outwards to the Brazilian nation-state.After reading Black Skin, White Masks, Freyre’s reference to the Brazilian mestizo sailors as “caricatures of men” has retrospectively stricken me as a somewhat Fanonian moment. But the situation here is different: it is not about seeing oneself being seen by a other, as tragically happened with Fanon in the train . This was a member of Brazil’s white elite looking at exemplars of the mixed-race Brazilian populace and seeing them as they would have been seen by a other – this time not a French child but an “American traveler”. Freyre’s gaze at the mestizo seamen is that of internal colonialism; but this inferiorizing gaze is itself profoundly shaped by another relation of subalternity, vis-à-vis a hegemonic other. In this sort of two-directional double consciousness – to use Du Bois’s term –, the Creole elite intellectual’s subjectivity is torn between these two relations, one where he is the master and the other where he is the slave, and where both counterparts are at once other and self to him. In these recollections,growing bags a disheartened young Freyre would have been comforted had somebody convinced him that those men’s “mongrel aspect” stemmed less from biology than from an unfavorable environment that made them “sick”.

A few years later, Freyre would – according to Pallares-Burke , in retrospect – identify that somebody with no one other than Franz Boas, the founding father of American culturalist anthropology. In a context of “intense preoccupation” with “Brazil’s destiny”, Boas’s defense of culture as an analytical alternative to race came in handy as a solution for the “age-old question” of miscegenation faced by Freyre and “others of his generation”. At that moment in Brazil, race-based thinking was not only prevalent among many scientists and intellectuals, but sustained a whitening ideology that proposed the augmentation of the European component of the Brazilian population through immigration as a way out of the degeneration straitjacket imposed by miscegenation . The Master and the Slaves’ tour-de-force therefore consisted precisely in turning what was up to then regarded as a hindrance to the flourishing of “Brazilian civilization” into a unique positive asset for the country’s nation-building at a moment when this was in high demand.The replacement of an analytics of race with one of culture allowed not only for discounting biological explanations according to which the solution to the problem of miscegenation would be a dubious whitening process,but for a shift in self-consciousness whereby Brazil came to see itself as more “civilized” than racially segregated nations like the United States. Even though Freyre’s story is itself more complex, what came down in history as Brazil’s nation-building commonsense was the notion of the Brazilian Volksgeist as a harmonious mixture of the three races, with the African component occupying center stage side-by-side the Portuguese.In the miscegenation of races prompted by the Portuguese’s supposedly inherent tendency to mix with tropical peoples would lay Brazil’s national character, its unique contribution to the Herderian garden of the common good – one could hypothesize, another echo of the Romantic vein Freyre shared with the Boasian school. As the dimension of culture was brought to the foreground, its underbelly – race – became eclipsed without however disappearing: it became a spectral presence in Brazil’s dealings with Africa and African-Brazilians.

As I have argued , Freyre’s postcolonial thrust was therefore not anticolonial strictly speaking, but was a response to a context of “double colonization” where the cultural legacy of the former Portuguese metropolis became not only a sort of “friendly colonialism”, but itself an element of subaltern affirmation vis-à-vis a new hegemony, that of Western Europe . But The Masters and the Slaves was also predicated on a sort of internal postcolonial thrust whereby Freyre tried to simultaneously rescue the lost prestige of his own subaltern region, the Brazilian Northeast, by elevating the status of its culture from regional to national. Colonial sugar estates in the Northeastern coast are, after all, the stage on which the foundational myth of Brazilian nationhood is played in Freyre’s masterpiece. By the time he was writing it, this region had long lost the political and economic weight it held during colonial times to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the Southeast. From the standpoint of this new domestic hegemony, the Northeast came to be seen in terms of the same dichotomies through which Brazil saw itself in relation to Western normativity – traditional/modern, backwards/progressive, rural/urban . Finally, a couple of decades later, Freyre’s ideas folded back into Portugal’s own colonial imaginary: while his 1933 classic focused on the cultural formation of the Brazilian nation, from the 1950’s onwards similar claims were extrapolated to the second wave of Portuguese colonization, in Africa and Asia . Lustropicalismo thus became a transnational alternative to Western European normativity based on “a distinct mode of ‘assimilation’ engendered by the Portuguese colonial presence in the tropics based on the three pillars of miscegenation, cultural fusion and absence of racial prejudices” . Just as the racial harmony ideology appealingly catered to nationalist appetites in Brazil, Lusotropicality was eagerly taken up by the ideological apparatus of the Estado Novo regime to shore up its colonial project against mounting independence struggles in Africa and international pressure by, among others, the United States, the United Nations, and the nascent non-aligned movement.

Many Brazilians joined Portugal’s ranks in this ideological struggle, not the least Gilberto Freyre himself, who “found a patron in the Portuguese government, and seized upon what he saw in the Portuguese African colonies as a present-day laboratory demonstrating the processes of cultural and racial mixture that he described in colonial Brazil” . Freyre’s vulgarized after-life in Brazil and in Portugal unfolded largely through channels like diplomacy, the educational system, and dimensions of popular culture such as music or soccer . As is often the case, in this process of popularization the richness of Freyre’s genius was reduced to a simplistic, usable version. As such, it was able to circulate farther and amalgamate into later waves of nation-building and international projection efforts in Brazil and elsewhere, reaching up to present South-South cooperation activities. Along this way, as we saw, contradictions inevitably sprang up between such imaginations about Africa and Brazilians’ concrete engagements with Africans. The way Brazilians’ views on Africa have been infused by Freyre’s ideas is highly suggestive of parallels with Edward Said’s Orientalism. In this, I am particularly inspired by Said’s claim that when the West looks at the East as its other,nursery grow bag it sees it less in its coeval actuality than in terms of imaginations that have more to say about the seers than those who are being seen – that respond “more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object” . Thus, as in Orientalism, in Brazil’s official discourse on Africa the latter does not always figure as an actual, coeval, heterogeneous continent; much too frequently, it is an imagined Africa, homogeneous and frozen in time somewhere between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries – when the last wave of African slaves arrived in Brazil. But differently from Said’s original notion, this imagination stems not from the imperial impetus of Western powers, but from ideologies supporting the construction of Brazil as a nation, and more specifically, the place of Africans in it. Here, the African appears less as an ambivalent other or as a clearly distinct part of the self than as part of a hybrid self that is distinguishable through dimensions like arts, music, bodily techniques, food, language – in one word, culture. Here I will refer to this modulation of Orientalist discourse as nation-building Orientalism. Nation-building has been a more commonly deployed term to describe the historical process that I am otherwise referring to here, following subaltern studies and Latin American postcolonial scholars, as internal colonialism . This terminological option conveys more clearly what is for me the key contrast vis-à-vis Said’s account of Orientalism: the empire-building character of British, French and U.S. discourse on the Orient. Other than that, the discursive mechanics follows similar lines, and the nation-building version of Orientalism may be even thought of as a historical outgrowth of it. Said himself had suggested as much when he envisaged the potential of this kind of discourse to travel beyond hegemonic centers and be appropriated by the subaltern: in Orientalism, he had wished to call the attention of “formerly colonized peoples” to “the dangers and temptations of employing this structure [Orientalism] upon themselves or upon others” .

This is precisely what Brazil and other post-colonial nation-states have done, in relation to subaltern groups such as Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples . But as our discussion of Freyre has shown, the addressee of nation-building discourse is not limited to those who are being internally colonized. This inward coloniality implicates an outward one, directed to hegemonic centers in relation to which post-colonial nations see themselves as subaltern, and from which they seek recognition. To become a donor is, as I have suggested in Chapter 1, one of the ways in which this pursuit of recognition has been currently carried out by Brazilian diplomats.Much of the mismatches and contradictions pointed out in this chapter, both historically and contemporarily, have to do with the notion of culture implicit in Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism. The culture Africans are assumed to share with Brazilians has an essence, is bounded, and has changed very little throughout the centuries; it has an ontological quality that is conducted through specific material and ideational channels , being therefore separable from other domains like politics, the economy, and so forth. Although anthropologists have helped create it, this is a notion of culture that most of them have abandoned by now. Norbert Elias’s classic historical discussion of the emergence of the German Kultur in opposition to the French and English civilization or civilisation had already pointed to how culture has always been, from its modern beginnings, fundamentally political: a productive notion in certain historical formations attending to situated political stakes; in short, a cultural politics. The foregrounding of presumed affinities in the domain of culture prevalent in Brazil’s views on Africa may seem to fall in line with academic arguments stressing the centrality of nontextual forms of “embodied subjectivity” in Africa’s trans-Atlantic diaspora, in prominent works such as Gilroy’s Black Atlantic .But from the point of view of this dissertation, what it indicates most forcefully is the peripheralization of both regions during the rise to hegemony of the West, and its dominance in other dimensions such as economy, political institutions, and knowledge. Thus, what would be the proper terrain for relations across the Southern Atlantic was eventually left to what is understood, according to Western modernity’s normativity, to belong to the domain of culture . This is also linked to the fact that, to a large extent, it is in this dimension that African-Brazilians have most often excelled in Brazil. Both fieldwork and the historical literature show that Brazilian diplomats, government officials, businessmen, or technical professionals were and are mostly fair-skinned; most black Brazilians involved in cooperation with Africa, on the other hand, have been “cultural” agents such as athletes, musicians, or actors. In other words, internal coloniality has largely reproduced its external counterpart, which relegated Africa itself to the most peripheral end of the world system . One of my suggestions therefore is that the insistence in bringing culture to the fore of Brazil-Africa relations is an outwards projection of an unresolved internal problem of how to deal with Brazil’s domestic race relations – what I wished to indicate here through the notion of nation-building Orientalism. In this sense, the problem is not that questions of race and culture have been misplaced or misconceived in Brazil’s diplomatic discourse on Africa; it is, rather, that these should not have been there at all, at least not at forefront position they have occupied throughout the decades. In this sense, assertions that domestic race-based movements would be an “internal arm” of Brazil’s Africa policy , or that quilombola communities and other African-Brazilian groups should mediate South-South cooperation efforts , may make little practical sense, especially in technical fields like agriculture.

Conversely, early season water deficits are typically avoided due to the risk of poor fruit set , and irrigation is often ramped up at the end of the growing season to prevent root damage due to low soil moisture at dormancy in some regions . Based on our observations, the North Coast vineyards effectively use irrigation to regulate water supplies, yet in the vineyards over the Lodi and Madera regions irrigation closely satisfies atmospheric water demands. Different viticultural strategies across vineyards are also noticed by the trajectories observed in LAI . Unstressed water conditions led to significantly larger canopies in the Central Valley vineyards, which play as feedback in terms of water demands. Thus, larger canopies have a greater transpiration potential, which is well satisfied based on our observations. Different production goals in terms of yield and fruit quality underline the magnitude of targeted irrigation inputs across California’s viticultural regions. While irrigation management in viticulture aims to balance maximizing yield and achieving high-quality fruit, different regions are subject to different fruit quality expectations. Such expectations are related to reputation and the overall expected fruit quality potential recognized as terroir .In the Madera region, a focus on high yield is more prevalent since the area does not seem to have a special recognition for wine production. The Lodi area has some recognition as an emerging wine region,nursery pots therefore production goals are not as biased towards yield or quality as in the former regions. Vine water use throughout the season is largely supported by irrigation. ETa fluxes represent vine water use across different viticultural regions and illustrate the use of irrigation management as a tool to accomplish distinct production goals within a viticultural production program.

For instance, growing season water use in the North Coast is about half in comparison to vineyards in the Madera region, and so it is the expected resulting yield.Based on our results, for any given meteorological condition, we would expect a wide range of ETa depending on the different aspects of viticultural management. Therefore, further developing tools that can accurately estimate plant water use and stress has been addressed as a key aspect of further advancing ET modeling methods and irrigation tools . As vineyards’ water demands highly depend on production goals and viticultural management, it seems unlikely that any derivation of ETc or ETo could provide enough information to effectively fine-tune irrigation while controlling stress levels. A comparison of daily ETo and ETa for vineyards in the three viticultural areas analyzed in this study shows that there is not a reliable relationship between these two variables across sites and years . When assuming a linear response between ETo and ETa is not possible to distinguish a consistent pattern in the regression coefficients underlying these relationships. The intercept range is greater than 5 mm day−1 while the slopes could lead to ETa estimates of near half to twice ETo. Independent of a given viticultural production goal, our results highlight the need for accurate estimates of ETa. Estimates of ETa in combination with ETo can provide a clear depiction of the amount of water demanded by a vineyard in comparison to a reference well-irrigated crop. Then, irrigation management could aim at a consistent ratio of these two variables that would satisfy plant water demands and regulate stress when needed. For the studied sites within the GRAPEX project, water managers in the North Coast vineyards might have more water available than their counterparts in the Central Valley; they routinely require accurate ETa information to regulate vine water stress to optimize the relationship between fruit quality and yield. On the other hand, when yield is a priority, such as in many vineyards across California’s Central Valley, water demands can be much higher. In these cases, optimizing irrigation to satisfy atmospheric demands throughout an entire growing season becomes more relevant, especially during drought years.

A comparison of daily ETa, ETc, ET0, and vine water demands following RDI strategies shows that irrigation management can lead to a wide range of vine water use . Our results also show that in all study sites, ETa tracks closely or is usually above ETc, indicating that limited stress conditions are prescribed across these vineyards. Consequently, important water-saving opportunities could be possible if RDI strategies were effectively implemented. Considering the time–frequency and latency resulting from satellite remote sensing ETa estimates, ground-based sensors can offer a unique complement to timely inform irrigation decisions within an RDI program. Unfortunately, there is limited availability of commercial products able to measure ETa, and further advancing these technologies might be a critical component to develop as part of irrigation management tool kits. Further studies within the GRAPEX project will integrate the relationship between water use and yield as well as fruit and wine quality for these vineyards. Those studies will aim to advance the understanding of how much water is needed to achieve a given production goal, and also explore potential water-saving opportunities while not compromising yield and quality objectives.This is the case of Embrapa, to which we now turn.Embrapa is currently Brazil’s chief provider of technical cooperation in agriculture to Africa and elsewhere, and even of Brazilian South-South cooperation at large. It is a publiclyowned national research institute, created during Brazil’s military rule in the early 1970’s as part of a broader governmental effort to enhance domestic food supply and open up new agricultural frontiers in the country’s hinterlands. This historical background is itself key to understand Embrapa’s cooperation, and it will be discussed in Chapter 3. According to its own self-account, Embrapa engages in two main types of international cooperation: scientific cooperation with Northern research institutions and other emerging economies in the global South; and “technology transfer to developing countries”, or SouthSouth cooperation. The first type follows the so-called Labex model, where Embrapa researchers spend time doing cutting-edge research in the facilities of partner institutions abroad, in the United States, France, England, and more recently South Korea and China.

The second type involves transferring technologies and building capacity in countries considered as being ata lower level of development than Brazil. The Secretariat of International Relations , a centralized units linked to Embrapa’s Presidency located at the institute’s headquarters in Brasília, is in charge of articulating and managing these activities, and many of Embrapa’s decentralized research units also have their own international relations personnel. When I did fieldwork, Embrapa offered four modalities of technical cooperation to African countries. The first were small-scale, short-term projects normally involving small teams of researchers from both sides . Embrapa researchers would eventually engage in this kind of cooperation even before the recent South-South cooperation wave. It typically involves study visits, technical training, and occasional transfer of small pieces of equipment and materials, and may also involve the production of new knowledge. I have followed up one such projects, with Ghana’s Center for Scientific and Industrial Research ,plastic planters which was not carried up to its conclusion. These smaller projects are supposed to be gradually phased-out in favor of more robust forms of engagement,the so-called structuring projects – this is a second modality, which will be described later on in this dissertation. A third modality of cooperation consisted in capacity-building trainings offered to trainees from Africa and elsewhere in a new center built for that purpose at Embrapa’s headquarters in Brasília, named Strategic Studies and Training . I participated in the first two trainings the center offered to Africans, in October 2010 and April 2011 . CECAT was literally built from scratch within a few months as part of the “PAC-Embrapa,” a generous supplement to the institute’s budget provided by Lula’s administration. Its small but hard-working team was recruited from other Embrapa units or hired anew, and a learning process was taking place as they accumulated experience with each new training cycle .Finally, there was the Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace, a triangulation between Embrapa, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa , and several Northern agencies. This virtual platform provided relatively small research grants for bilateral teams made up of researchers from Embrapa and partner research institutes in Africa.Its format seems to be the closest to established models in the international development community, notably the World Bank’s Development Marketplace. This is certainly due to the involvement of one major donor and major multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development , the FAO and the Inter-American Development Bank. I attended the forum of the first round of applications held in Brasília in October 2010, the only time when all 125 applicants gathered face-to-face. Due to the virtual and widely scattered nature of this platform, the Marketplace remained a secondary field site. To complement the ethnographic effort – and access to field sites was always negotiated ad hoc with the various actors, sometimes with success, sometimes not –, I conducted semistructured interviews with African and Brazilian participants in all these four modalities, as well as with ABC personnel working with Embrapa. Excluding the CECAT and Marketplace participants, to whom I had access mostly through informal conversations during the cooperation activities or after them through the internet, the remaining poll of more permanent actors in my research scope was no larger than twenty people.

While this reflects the circumscribed nature of Brazilian cooperation teams even in its largest initiatives, it has posed some challenges to writing and anonymizing research subjects. My narrative strategy is therefore a mixed one, combining omission of names and institutional or national affiliations, occasionally changing gender, expertise or other personal information, and, in some cases, slightly fictionalizing the narrative or making partial claims based on pieces of information that I assessed could be safely made available to other field interlocutors or the public at large. Here I will draw on my experience with all four modalities of cooperation, but the focus will be on the CECAT trainings and on a structuring project with four West African countries, the Cotton-4.In her ethnographic work on development as the “will to improve”, Tania Li described the aid apparatus in terms of a double process: what she called problematization and rendering technical . As was suggested earlier in this chapter, Brazilian South-South cooperation lacks a robust bureaucratic apparatus comparable to those of Northern agencies; neither does it have effectively centralized, standardized, across-the-board protocols for the design and execution of projects. Cabral and Shankland have recently characterized this as a “policy of no policy”. But as remarked earlier, here I am avoiding looking at it from a perspective of lack; indeed, more prominent during fieldwork were the ways in which what would be seen, from the perspective of “mature” development agencies, as lack may be turned into a positive asset for South-South cooperation. As both the historical and the organizational accounts above suggest, to look empirically at South-South cooperation in its own terms does not yield a coherent, alternative model to Northern development aid. It evinces, rather, a set of emerging interfaces loosely assembled around key nodes at the three organizational levels outlined here: principles, policy, and front line practice. Different from development aid as described by the literature, relations between these levels are not over-determined by a bureaucratized path that continuously recycles the messiness of practice back into the technicalities of policy; most often, these paths are loose, heterogeneous and intermittent. Principles are only partly translated into policy, and their deployment in front line practice has to do less with policy prescriptions than with the practical conditions under which cooperation is implemented. This section will bring some examples of the forms such relations may take, and suggest some of its differential effects vis-à-vis Northern aid. In their claims about South-South cooperation’s comparative advantages over Northern aid, which always implies a somewhat caricatured picture of it,emerging donors often argue that it would be better suited to other countries in the global South not only because of the supposedly similar experiences shared by provider and recipient, but because it would be tailored to each particular case. Indeed, due to its organizational architecture, Brazilian South-South cooperation is necessarily heterogeneous. Each initiative is to some extent tailored, because its technical content and implementation process are not over-codified by ABC’s policy and management apparatus, but are the task of the multiple institutions operating at the front line.

The first official account of Brazil’s South-South cooperation, published in 2010 by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency and the Institute for Economic and Applied Research , defines technical cooperation in terms of federal resources spent on “training and capacity-building activities, related administrative costs, and expenses with various materials and equipment” .Behind the apparent straightforwardness of the phrase South-South technical cooperation lies a sea of ambiguities and controversies for each term, not all of which will be discussed here.Among emerging donors, the preference for terms like cooperation or partnership over development or aid is a strategic marker of the claims to difference discussed above . But at least in Brazil, cooperação became the preferred word for what is better known in the North as development or développement because desenvolvimento is most promptly associated with a national endeavor. Sometimes, cooperação para o desenvolvimento is a term of choice that merges the two ideas. For aid, there is the Portuguese term ajuda, but in the field I never heard this term designating the cooperation provided by Brazil. In contrast with Africa, then, where development most often refers to a blurred interface between national states and foreign agencies , the notion of development in Brazil has been more thoroughly “nationalized”. The Green Revolution is a good example of how the Brazilian actors “nationalized” a model of agricultural development originally crafted at the level of the international development system. A similar process is taking place today in the construction of Brazil’s South-South cooperation apparatus, which has involved on the one hand borrowing models and procedures from the international development community , black flower buckets and on the other drawing on the sector-specific work Brazilian institutions have carried out domestically.

The first level is that of foreign policy, from where demands for stepping up South-South cooperation efforts have come, and where the general principles for delivering it are crafted as official discourse. The core institution here is Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, commonly known by the name of its headquarters in Brasília, the Itamaraty Palace. Individual actors include diplomats and officials linked to diplomacy or other parts of the federal government. The second, intermediary level is that of policy and management, concentrated in a small cooperation bureaucracy centralized in the Brazilian Cooperation Agency , itself institutionally submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The third level is that of implementation, or front line practice, where one finds a wide range of institutions in charge of carrying out projects and other cooperation initiatives on African or Brazilian grounds. This dissertation will focus on the work of one such institutions, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation – like the ABC, also submitted to a federal ministry, that of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply. As the diagram seeks to show, Brazil’s South-South cooperation presents a singular kind of architecture where the mid-level of managerial policy is less prominent than the other two.In Northern development aid, on the other hand, even if in practice projects follow less “high modern” grand planning designs than “are pulled together from an existing repertoire, a matter of habit, accretion, and bricolage” , the level of policy is generally regardedas over-determining both front line practice and principles. It is in this sense, for instance, that Li and others will claim that the development apparatus depoliticizes relations by rendering technical historically constituted power asymmetries at the scale of both local politics and global political economy. On the other hand, after half-century of Western development aid, its principles have been largely rationalized into technical policy guidelines. Even a controversial mechanism such as aid conditionalities has been justified based on technical claims : while many recipients of aid see it as a humiliating assault on their sovereignty, donors brand it as an evidence-based tool for promoting good governance and ownership among them.

Finally, besides bureaucratic organization, significant differences are to be found in the other arm of the transnational development apparatus :the private industry of NGOs, academics, think-tanks, consultants and other development workers in charge of drafting, delivering and assessing projects, whose pipeline is fed by professionals trained in specialized development studies programs. Although it does exist at a small scale in Brazil and seems to be growing, this industry is not significant in the delivery of official technical cooperation. Different from Northern aid and similar to other emerging donors , in the provision of Brazilian cooperation there has been a prevalence of state institutions at all organizational levels, from principles and policy to implementation. Let us turn to the ones within the scope of my fieldwork.The fact that Brazilian cooperation is essentially foreign policy-driven means that, by and large, the demand for enhancing technical cooperation with African countries and others in the global South has come from Itamaraty.The institutions in charge of project implementation are however many – according to the 2010 IPEA/ABC Report, they can be counted by the dozens, and the vast majority are state institutions .The system is therefore highly decentralized at the implementation level, and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is supposed to provide a core policy and managerial node to this otherwise widely dispersed network. The ABC is Embrapa’s main institutional partner in most if not all its technical cooperation activities in the global South; indeed, its agents were a continual presence within my ethnographic scope. The Brazilian Cooperation Agency came into being in the mid-eighties as a rearrangement of preexisting federal bodies involved in managing development aid received by Brazil. Since the recent spike in South-South cooperation, it has increasingly accumulated the function of coordinating of the full cycle of technical cooperation that is both received and provided. The agency is supposed to receive and negotiate demands for cooperation coming from countries in Africa and elsewhere, and channel Itamaraty’s funds for implementing them. The ABC is not a full-fledged, autonomous agency like the ones providing Northern aid; like many of their counterparts in the global South , it is a department and operational arm of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. High-level strategic planning is not, according to a recent report , part of the agency’s purview. The life of the ABC changed considerably during the Lula administration , when demands for South-South cooperation skyrocketed. The agency’s budget tripled accordingly, from a meager 19 million in 2006 to 52 million reais in 2010.Although a historic record high, this is almost negligible compared to the budgets of Northern agencies like USAID, which are counted by the billions. One of the ABC’s claims is that every dollar allocated to projects can be further multiplied if indirect costs are factored in. The most significant of these are salaries paid to front line staff.Since state institutions implement the bulk of technical cooperation, and it involves mostly capacity-building with only limited transfer of materials and equipment,french flower bucket most of this kind of expense would have already been covered by the Brazilian state. This is the case of Embrapa, whose staff includes highly qualified personnel, often research scientists holding PhDs and other advanced degrees.Staff has increased in the last few years along with the agency’s budget, albeit not at the same rate.But since it is not an autonomous agency, none of its personnel in fact “belongs” to it; they come, rather, from two main sources: Itamaraty and UNDP. The former’s appointees are career diplomats, chancellery officials or assistants, whom, in my experience, tended to occupy higher rank positions. Most of the agency’s staff was hired through UNDP as project consultants to carry out functions of project management, or operational tasks like translation. A practical effect of this configuration is that the ABC has exceptionally high staff turnover.Itamaraty appointees may be – and indeed, eventually are – relocated elsewhere, to diplomatic representations and embassies abroad.

And most UNDP employees are hired on short-term contracts, normally of one year with limited renewal possibilities. The rest of the staff – cargos de comissão appointed by the Agency’s Director, himself a diplomat – usually lasts only as long as the latter’s management cycle. It is at this level that strategic functions such as planning and coordination tend to be concentrated . For carrying out its mandate, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency has to rely heavily on other organizations: national institutions like Embrapa at the implementation level, but also international agencies at the level of policy and management. As of the writing of this dissertation, there was no specific legislation regulating the provision of cooperation by Brazilian institutions. In practice, this means that those implementing projects in Africa and elsewhere are not legally allowed to perform basic tasks such as buying and contracting abroad for the benefit of non-Brazilian institutions and citizens . A chief way by which the ABC has been getting around this is by partnering up with the UNDP or other international organization, which then acts as the implementing agency.Moreover, different from many Northern agencies and like most other emerging donors , the ABC does not maintain permanent offices abroad. Instead, the agency makes ample use of UNDP’s extensive worldwide network, present in almost every country, in order to procure goods and services as well as hire staff to work in Brazil’s projects. While some have remarked that this partnership allows to overcome “legal and bureaucratic obstacles [facing] Brazilian government agencies working overseas” , fieldwork indicated that, from the perspective of those working at the front line of projects, this may appear as itself an obstacle to practical engagements . Besides the red tape implied in this scheme – resources have to flow from the ABC to the UNDP office in Brazil, and then to UNDP’s counterpart in the recipient country before it gets to project front liners –, there are supplemental financial costs, as the United Nation’s agency charges a non-negligible fee for performing such bureaucratic mediation.The UNDP has been also providing support to the ABC for mapping and strengthening a network of South-South cooperation stakeholders, including a pool of volunteers and specialists as well as staff of the Brazilian embassies abroad.This and other emerging networks make up a nascent cooperation industry in Brazil formed by professional experts in managing and delivering cooperation.As already remarked, the implementation of official cooperation has been mostly a job for staff from national state institutions, rather than consultants and NGO workers trained in development studies and related academic fields, and experienced in the international development industry. Today, thus, Brazilian cooperation front liners’ professional affiliation and commitment lie not in the development industry but in their home institutions; for the most part, they do not rely on the provision of cooperation neither for a living nor for their career advancement. This is not a trivial fact in light of the literature’s claims about international development as a self-referential, inertial organizational apparatus. At a micro scale of cooperation practice, however, there seems to be no fixed correlation: while the work in South-South projects may bring personal or professional benefits to particular individuals, in other instances the opposite might as well be the case, like in the not uncommon situation when participation in a project implies removing individuals from their regular work activities back in Brazil. Not all technical personnel is willing to commit to cooperation projects abroad, and this acceptance seems to be always the outcome of situated negotiations between individuals and their home institutions. Moreover, if the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is taken as an organizational equivalent to, say, USAID or the World Bank, it would suggest the misleading conclusion that Brazil’s cooperation is fragile in all aspects of the project cycle, from strategy and design to execution and evaluation. Indeed, according to Mawdsley , with the exception of the main Arab donors, emerging donors’ cooperation institutions tend to be bureaucratically feeble: most Southern counterparts to the ABC also have “insufficient numbers of trained personnel”, are “constrained by path dependency”, and “lack power relative to other parts of government”. But if we look from a different scale, the relative institutional flimsiness of the ABC is “compensated” by the preponderance, upstream, of Itamaraty as a policy guide, and, downstream, of implementing institutions like Embrapa. This is salient especially in the case of the latter, which enjoys an institutional robustness and national prestige that the ABC can hardly dream of ever matching.Moreover, some implementing institutions are building up their own expertise for managing their South-South activities, including by establishing or strengthening of international relations units whose operational functions may even overlap with those of the ABC.

In contrast, Watsonville Slough had its highest SRP concentrations from fall through spring, with concentrations declining to an annual low point in mid summer . High SRP concentrations in the winter rainy season may be associated with increased surface runoff from agricultural fields located along the slough. Tile drains may also facilitate subsurface loses of phosphorus . In Carneros Creek, which is dry from approximately May until December each year, a third seasonal pattern emerged . SRP concentrations were moderately elevated at both upstream and downstream sites following the first winter rains, which suggests that soil phosphorus accumulates over the summer months and is flushed into the creek with the first rains. At Dunbarton Road where there is little cultivation upstream, sources may include natural decomposition in grasslands, cattle grazing, and rural residential land use; at downstream sites sources also include agricultural land use. At San Miguel Canyon Road, the downstream location, SRP concentrations increased again in the late winter and spring of 2002 and 2003, reaching very high levels that frequently exceeded 1 mg/L. Nutrient concentrations were highly erratic in 2002 and 2003, and subsequently declined in 2004, suggesting that nutrients originated from a point-source that has ceased to discharge. No seasonal concentration trends were observed in the upstream tributaries of the Pajaro River . At these locations SRP concentrations remained low throughout the year. We calculated the SRP load discharged by each tributary ,procona buckets and found loads varied seasonally corresponding with discharge . The SRP load was greatest at Chittenden during January and February, when discharge was also greatest. San Juan Creek was not sampled during this period, but likely accounts for a significant portion of the unaccounted load because it has elevated SRP concentrations and year round flow. In the Pajaro River, there is a strong seasonal trend in SRP concentrations .

Concentrations decline after the rainy season ends. Because SRP concentrations remain relatively high in the winter, rainfall probably transports SRP to surface waters. Furthermore, the loss of SRP from Santa Clara/San Benito Counties is highest during these rainfall periods . Because concentrations and export of SRP in the Pajaro River are rainfall dependent, it is difficult to determine long-term trends independent of recent rainfall patterns.Elevated phosphorus concentrations can cause excessive algal growth in waterways, and preventing excessive growth is the primary reason phosphorus concentrations are regulated. Algal biomass in the water column can be determined from the concentration of chlorophyll a, which indicates the degree of excessive algal growth. We monitored chlorophyll a concentrations at several sites in the Pajaro River watershed on a biweekly basis and compared these concentrations to phosphorus. The lack of a direct correlation between chlorophyll a and phosphorus levels indicates that P availability is only one of the factors controlling algal growth. Canopy cover and turbidity , algae-eating organisms , substrates that allow different types of algae to attach, and algae sources also play a role in algal growth and chlorophyll a concentrations. Furthermore, additions of nitrogen can stimulate algal growth in streams and rivers, which challenges the commonly held belief that phosphorus is the nutrient that controls the growth of algae in freshwater ecosystems. Our research group from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems has begun efforts to assess the growth patterns of algae in order to determine how elevated phosphorus and nitrogen levels influence these patterns. Under state legislation known as the Agricultural Discharge Waiver that took effect in January 2005, farmers are required to develop farm water quality plans to protect surface waters along the Central Coast. One goal of our research is to inform growers of current water quality conditions in waterways adjacent to their land so that they can take steps to reduce their impacts on waterways while continuing to farm profitably. Because phosphorus is transported to waterways in storm and irrigation runoff, reducing soil erosion and surface runoff is an important step in reducing phosphorus losses from the farm .

Subsurface flow is also an important mechanism of phosphorus losses from the farm . Growers can address these losses by matching P demand in plants with fertility management, keeping P concentrations in soils at agronomically responsive levels , and managing irrigation to minimize or eliminate runoff. It is important to note that many growers on the Central Coast and throughout the state have already initiated practices to reduce the loss of phosphorus from their farms. The University of California has several research projects in progress to document the impacts of changes in farm management, and a number of government agencies and NGOs are working with growers to improve water quality .Despite growers’ efforts, the target level of 0.12mg/L or lower for ortho-P set by the RWQCB may be difficult to attain in the lower Pajaro River and Elkhorn Slough watersheds, where natural sources of phosphorus may be high, and tile drainage systems facilitate losses of phosphorus to surface waters. Even with changes in agricultural practices, the ambient water quality improvements may not be detected for several years, which makes enforcing the water quality regulations difficult on the short-term. Thus, long-term monitoring programs are important to determine the success of changing management practices.Nitrate contamination of freshwater resources from agricultural regions is an environmental and human health concern worldwide . In agriculturally intensive regions, it is imperative to understand how management practices can enhance or mitigate the effect of nitrogen loading to freshwater systems. In California, managed aquifer recharge on agricultural lands is a proposed management strategy to counterbalance unsustainable groundwater pumping practices. Agricultural managed aquifer recharge is an approach in which legally and hydrologically available surface water flows are captured and used to intentionally flood croplands with the purpose of recharging underlying aquifers . AgMAR represents a shift away from the normal hydrologic regime wherein high efficiency irrigation application occurs mainly during the growing season. In contrast, AgMAR involves applying large amounts of water over a short period during the winter months. This change in winter application rates has the potential to affect the redox status of the unsaturated zone of agricultural regions with implications for nitrogen fate and transport to freshwater resources.

Most modeling studies targeting agricultural N contamination of groundwater are limited to the root zone; these studies assume that once NO3 – has leached below the root zone, it behaves as a conservative tracer until it reaches the underlying groundwater or, these studies employ first order decay coefficients to simplify N cycling reactions . However, recent laboratory and field-based investigations in agricultural systems with deep unsaturated zones have shown the potential for N cycling, in particular denitrification, well below the root zone . For example, Haijing et al. found denitrifying enzyme activity as deep as 12 metersin an agriculturally intensive region in China. Lind and Eiland reported N2O production in sediments taken from 20 meter deep cores. Other studies have reported the capability of deep vadose zone sediments to denitrify in anerobic incubations with or without the addition of organic carbon substrates . Moreover,procona florida container in agricultural settings, especially in alluvial basins such as in California with a history of agriculture, large amounts of legacy NO3 – has built up over years from fertilizer use inefficiencies and exists within the deep subsurface . It is not yet clear how this legacy nitrogen may respond to changing hydrologic regimes and variations in AgMAR practices, and more importantly, if flooding agricultural sites is enhancing nitrate transport to the groundwater or attenuating it by supporting in situ denitrification. Denitrification rates in the subsurface have been reported to vary as a function of carbon and oxygen concentrations, as well as other environmental factors . While total soil organic carbon typically declines with depth , dissolved organic carbon can be readily transported by water lost from the root zone to deeper layers and can therefore be available to act as an electron donor for denitrification . Oxygen concentration in the vadose zone is maintained by advective and diffusive transport, while oxygen consumption occurs via microbial metabolic demand and/or abiotic chemical reactions . The effects of drying and wetting cycles on oxygen concentrations in the deep subsurface are not well documented. However, in 1 meter column experiments, there is some evidence that O2 consumption proceeds rapidly as saturation increases and rebounds quickly during dry periods . These variations in oxygen concentration can influence N cycling and thus, transport to groundwater. Variability in nitrate concentration has also been linked to heterogeneous subsurface properties, rainfall events, seasonality of flow and other local geochemical conditions across a diversity of settings However, a gap currently exists in quantifying N attenuation and transport from agriculturally intensive regions with a “deep” vadose zone while accounting for the many competing N cycle reactions and transformations, as impacted by different hydrological regimes imposed under AgMAR.

The application of AgMAR itself can vary in terms of the hydraulic loading and rates used, as well as the duration between flood water applications. These can in turn affect water retention times, O2 availability, consumption of electron donors and consequently, denitrification rates . For example, denitrification rates were found to increase with increased hydraulic loading and with shorter times between flood applications within the vadose zone of a rapid infiltration basin system used for disposing of treated wastewater . In shallow, sandy soils, high flow rates – above an infiltration threshold – were negatively correlated with denitrification rates, suggesting that an optimum infiltration rate exists for a given sediment stratigraphy to maximize NO3 – reduction . Given the immense stratigraphic heterogeneity in alluvial basins, such as in California’s Central Valley, a range of optimum infiltration rates may exist with implications for managing AgMAR differently based on the geologic setting of the intended site. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to: a) understand the effects of varying stratigraphy and hydrologic regimes on denitrification rates, and b) identify AgMAR management scenarios that increase denitrification rates, such that the potential for N leaching to groundwater is decreased. Herein, we focus on an agricultural field site in Modesto, California located within the Central Valley of California, which is responsible for California’s $46 billion-dollar agricultural economy . The field site typifies the deep vadose zones prevalent in this region, which are characterized by heterogenous layered alluvial sediments intercalated with discontinuous buried clay and carbon rich paleosols . These discontinuous, layered features, especially the paleosols and areas of preferential flow, are typically associated with enhanced biogeochemical activity, higher carbon content and availability of metabolic substrates such as nitrogen . These regions respond to and change depending on environmental conditions such as water content and oxygen concentration in situ that are influenced by the hydrologic regime at the surface and may be important for NO3 – attenuation and reduction prior to reaching the water table. Therefore, this study considers varying hydrologic regimes and stratigraphic variations that are prevalent in the region. More specifically, at the Modesto field site , large amounts of legacy N already reside in the vadose zone, while N fertilizer application and irrigation occurs throughout the spring and summer months. AgMAR, if implemented, occurs during the winter months as water becomes available. Therefore, we focus here on quantifying the effects of AgMAR on N cycling in the deep vadose zone and implications for NO3 – contamination of groundwater at this characteristic agricultural field site. We also investigate the specific AgMAR application rates that would increase the effectiveness of in situ denitrification under different stratigraphic configurations through the development and testing of a reactive transport model. We believe such an analysis provides important insights for the successful application of AgMAR strategies aimed at improving groundwater storage in a changing climate. Reactive transport models can be beneficial tools to elucidating N fate and transport in deep vadose zone environments. Herein, we develop a comprehensive reaction network incorporating the major processes impacting N transport and attenuation, such as aqueous complexation, mineral precipitation and dissolution, and microbially mediated redox reactions. While using the same reaction network, we implement several numerical scenarios to quantify the range of denitrification rates possible under different AgMAR implementation strategies and stratigraphic configurations . For the latter, we used four different stratigraphic configurations with a low permeability layer on top including i) two homogeneous textural profiles, ii) a sand stratigraphy with a discontinuous silt band, iii) a silt stratigraphy with a discontinuous sand band, and iv) a complex stratigraphy more representative of the field conditions investigated by electrical resistance tomography .

Our environmental correlation results provide evidence for a habitat filtering process in which agricultural adapters are promoted by vineyard expansion, while co-occurrence of and negative interactions between agricultural adapters and oak woodland birds provide evidence for indirect detrimental effects of land conversion. These findings support a more pluralistic hypothesis that community structure is not influenced solely by habitat filtering or by species interactions, but rather is influenced by both mechanisms and interactions between them. It is not surprising that agricultural adapters and woodland dependent birds co-occur in oak woodlands where they can take advantage of woodland resources, such as food or nesting sites that may not be abundant in the vineyard matrix. Habitat filtering can act as a driver of change in communities ; considering that vineyards favor agricultural adapters , the relatively high abundance of these species within the agricultural matrix may increase the probability of percolation of these species into oak woodlands. Accounting for the influence of the vineyard matrix and other environmental site and landscape variables, our results reveal negative interactions between several agricultural adapters and a host of native woodland species – some of which are species of conservation concern. To the best of my knowledge this is the first report of these types of indirect interactions, in addition to predation and parasitism, related to birds near agroecosystems. Vineyards appear to influence bird communities at different scales, with increased vineyard influence in small fragments of oak woodland, which are more likely to be used by agricultural adapters and perhaps more vulnerable to indirect spillover effects that could devalue the remaining wild lands. The species identified by our study as agricultural adapters are among the most commonly recorded species in Californian vineyards suggesting that vineyards likely promote these species more broadly. My results suggest that vineyard expansion threatens bird diversity not only directly via habitat conversion, but also by promoting changes in community composition and species abundance that then have indirect, negative consequences for species in remaining natural habitat. Over time,plastic plant pot competitive interactions could change the community composition of oak woodlands, undermining their conservation value.

The combined impact of habitat conversion and reduced habitat quality is concerning for bird conservation. For instance, body condition and fitness are important for successful migration for Neotropical and altitudinal migratory species and are related to habitat quality. Abundance of some Neotropical migrant species is associated with large forest patches and negatively associated with agricultural/urban landscapes . Equally important are impacts to species with declining populations, in our context Spotted Towhee, Orange-crowned Warbler, and Bewick’s Wren or oak woodland specialist species as Nuttall’s Woodpeckers. The method I used does not explicitly model species unidirectional interactions, instead it directly estimates reciprocal interactions . I assume negative interactions to be negative effects of agricultural adapters on oak woodland birds. Several mechanisms documented in other studies may help interpret our results. Firstly, direct biotic interactions may be at play. For instance, starlings are extremely aggressive birds that displace other species from nest sites they want to use, which are mainly cavities , and are considered among the most spread invasive species worldwide that threaten species with extinction . Aggressive behavior by native birds towards European Starlings has also been observed during nesting . Similarly, nest usurpation and/or depredation by starlings has been recorded . Studies in fragmented forest reported a higher predation by birds or parasitism by Brown headed cowbirds on Neotropical migrants birds in small than in larger fragments . I suggest that European starlings can have similar effects on oak woodland birds, but with a different mechanism. There is at least three mechanism of species loss, high predation, low dispersal abilities, and detrimental conditions of the environment .Other evidence of these direct interactions include American crows, which aggressively chase away other birds and eating the eggs and nestlings of other birds , and Brown headed cowbirds, which are a brood parasite of several bird species . Secondly, indirect biotic interactions also be a role but are more difficult to observe and understand than direct interactions and could make community dynamics difficult to predict . In some cases, the mere presence of one bird can affect another’s feeding behavior or the inter specific interactions of the community .

This gap in behavioral knowledge for some of these species could be elucidated with future research. Thirdly, changes in bird community composition could affect the ecosystems functions and services through promote or attenuate complex interactions, that can cause cascade effects that change the ecosystem properties and affect biodiversity . Changes in composition of the landscape matrix, in our study vineyard extension, influence the bird community composition. Other studies previously documented the importance of landscape context and habitat quality for wildlife communities. Species benefitting from exotic plantations were promoted by mechanisms such as habitat filtering , temporal changes in the surrounding matrix causing shifts in species interactions , and new species introductions that change co-occurrence patterns in a community . Some of the relationships in our analysis appear to have a complex pattern of interactions with an unclear mechanism, for instance, the negative relationship of Orange-crowned Warbler with shrubs at the plot scale. Previous studies report varying bird-habitat relationships depending on the landscape context or interaction between species, such as in the case of a negative relationship between some Neotropical migrants and forest patch size . It is probable that for some species the proportion of oak woodland forest will be a better predictor than the proportion of vineyards, but these variables have a highly negative correlation at the landscape scale so are hard to address independently. Different landscape scales may more accurately predict the relationship between landscape variables and different species according to biological and ecological traits . Fragmentation and agricultural intensification have led to reductions in beta diversity and biological community homogenization in many temperate and tropical systems . These changes in native communities can have cascading effects on ecosystem function and resilience . Here, I show that vineyards can lead to regional biotic homogenization of neighboring natural areas through the expansion of the vineyard matrix, by increasing the abundance of birds adapted to vineyards, and by increasing competition between agricultural adapter and oak woodland birds. It is unlikely that all species will be equally affected , as habitat specialists are more likely to be threatened than generalists .

The underappreciated, indirect effects need to be considered as the agricultural footprint continues to expand across California’s coastal ranges and vineyards regions globally. Agriculture land conversion is recognized as one of the main threats to biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In this study I found that the effects of agricultural land can spill over into natural areas. I see a clear relationship between the extent of agricultural land and bird species detection rates in adjacent natural areas. More surprisingly, I detected strong negative interactions through co-occurrence patterns between agriculturally adapted bird species and oak woodland associated birds. This research provides evidence that competition from species adapted to agricultural land use could be another driver of biotic homogenization in addition to habitat loss and fragmentation associated with habitat conversion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of these types of indirect interactions beyond predation or parasitism between birds related to agroecosystems. Conserving biodiversity in agroecosystems is a global challenge . Agricultural impacts on biodiversity are widely recognized, and land use change and fragmentation are major drivers of species extinction and ecosystems degradation . Wine grapes are one of the most important crops in terms of land cover surface and economic relevance in Mediterranean type ecosystems worldwide,plastic planter pot which also overlapping with a designated biodiversity hotspot . Future projections for vineyards predict advancement to new areas, where climatic conditions will be favorable for wine grape production, in addition to demand from new markets, can increase vineyard expansion . Different strategies are proposed to increase biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes . Some studies indicate that biodiversity can best be conserved while increasing yield by dividing surface area into conservation zones and intensively managed agriculture . Others propose that increasing the quality of agroecosystem as habitat via agroecological management, enhances biodiversity. Still others propose an integration of both aforementioned strategies according the specific traits of the area of study/species . Finding new alternative approaches that enhance biodiversity within the agricultural matrix is part of the current policy efforts of “protect wildlife beyond the protected areas” of Chilean President M. Bachelet . The spatial configuration of the natural vegetation surrounding agriculture can significantly influence in the occurrence and abundance of bird species . It is recognized that increasing landscape complexity within agroecosystem can increase niche availability and thus host higher levels of biodiversity . An increasing number of studies indicate that remnant native vegetation can contribute to the persistence of birds. Birds can be favored by the presence of forest fragments , forest edges, and riparian vegetation in agroecosystems . Assessing the impacts of the native habitats on biodiversity in a dominant agroecosystem such as vineyards in central Chile is vital for conservation management within this biodiversity hotspot, and could provide management insight for other Mediterranean type ecosystems.

I used a natural experiment based on a gradient of landscape complexity within vineyards to investigate: whether bird trophic guilds change between continuous forests, fragments and vineyards, if changes in the presence and/or proportion of forest fragments influence birds communities, and if the proportion of continuous native vegetation influence birds communities. I hypothesized that vineyards promote some species, and that these functional guilds are different between vineyards and fragments within vineyards. My aim is to disentangle the changes in bird communities due to vineyards at different landscape scales. Conserving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is an unresolved challenge, in particular in Mediterranean type ecosystems in where agricultural expansion and unique wildlife habitat overlap. I found that fragments of native vegetation within vineyards significantly retained bird communities in vineyard landscapes. Fragments significantly increased abundance and richness compared to the vineyards in which they are located, and also affected assemblages of endemics, insectivores, granivores and omnivores . An equally important finding is that the proportion of fragment native vegetation within a given landscape area affected similarly species than the mere presence of fragments. This highlights the important role of remnants of native vegetation within agroecosystem, particularly remnant size. Our evidence supports a land sharing approach, where more structurally diverse habitat within agroecosystems and habitat heterogeneity at landscape scale can enhance biodiversity in working landscapes . The results coincide with other studies finding that fragments, as well as hedge proportion and small woods within vineyards, support higher bird richness and abundance . In particular, the observed increase in insectivore birds due to large fragments is in agreement with other studies in vineyards . Insectivore species as Chilean swallow and House Wren, were more abundant in vineyards with fragments. Higher insectivore abundance could be associated to ecosystem services such as insect predation relevant to vineyard pest management . However, further research is required to better assess the impacts of biological control via bird predation of insects in Chilean agroecosystems. Fragments were particularly relevant for endemic species. Although fragments could be expected to favor mainly more mobile species such as Chilean Mockingbird and Dusky-tailed Canastero, this was observed also for the Dusky tapaculo, a rhinocryptid species which is less mobile . Other endemic rhinocryptids were excluded from the analysis due to their low rates of detectability within fragments and vineyards , indicating that these species are less likely to be found in anthropogenic environments. More focused research on these less mobile species would be needed to study their behavior. Forest patches were also relevant for Neotropical migratory species as White-crested Elaenia, showing that agroecosystems with large forest patches were indispensable for birds, and in particular for species that need connectivity at landscape scales . The results are consistent with existing literature demonstrating that vineyards support bird communities across the globe . Vineyards monocultures, without fragments of native vegetation favored a subset of species, all of them associated with open habitat and higher tolerance to anthropogenic environments.

We observed substantially higher odds of low neurobehavioral scores , among children living within 100m of a plantation compared to children living at >500m; the odds ratios were weaker among participants living within 101m to 500m of a plantation. Finally, we inspected GAM plots for the relationship between continuous distance and neurobehavior scores for the three subdomains with the largest effect sizes . These are qualitatively similar to the results of analyses of distance by category , exhibiting a decrease in Attention & Inhibitory Control and Language scores at close proximity but do not provide strong evidence of nonlinear effects. Only 12% of the study population lived within 100m of a plantation , which limited the power of our analyses of associations within very close distances to plantations. All results from linear regression analyses comparing growing area within 100m of participant residences to those living further than 100m from floricultural crops were null . In logistic regression analyses, children with the most growing area within 100m of their residence had higher odds of low scores in the Language domain , compared to children without any plantation land within 100m of their residence .We observed that close residential proximity to floricultural crops was associated with poorer neurobehavioral outcomes in the domains of Attention & Inhibitory Control, Language and Memory & Learning. Associations were strongest among children living within 50m of a flower crop and present to some extent among children living between 51 and 100m. These findings were partially corroborated by sensitivity analyses using areas of floricultural crops near homes as a related construct of pesticide drift from flower crops. Unlike short-lived biomarkers of exposure, proximity of a child’s home to agricultural crops may approximate the child’s ongoing and historical low dose exposure to pesticides through off-target drift or direct access to pesticide-treated areas. In the ESPINA study,black plastic nursery pots we previously described positive associations between AChE activity and the domains of Attention & Inhibitory Control, Memory & Learning, and borderline associations with the Language domain affecting boys more than girls .

Alterations in the same domains were observed in the present study, which is consistent with previous findings. Epidemiologic studies provide increasing evidence that pesticide exposure during key developmental periods may be a risk factor for a range of neurocognitive deficits later in life, including attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, slowed reaction time, and slowed motor control, poor verbal comprehension People living closest to agricultural crops are at increased risk of pesticide exposure. In our analyses, children living within 100m of a flower crop, and especially within 50m, had lower neurobehavioral scores compared to children living farther than 500m. These findings suggest that the amount of pesticide drift from crops onto nearby homes can especially affect the neurobehavioral performance of children living within 100m. However, alterations in neurobehavioral performance may also be present at greater distances but the limited statistical power of our study to detect smaller differences precluded us from assessing this further. In previous analyses of the ESPINA study, we observed positive associations between residential distances to flower crops and AChE activity, with the lowest AChE levels observed among children living within 232m of a greenhouse floricultural crop . This supports the construct of residential distance to flower plantations as a pathway of exposure to pesticides Furthermore, we previously observed that children living closer to flower crops had higher systolic blood pressures, which indicates that additional physiologic processes may be affected among children living near pesticide spray sites . Multiple investigations have studied the association between proximity of homes to agricultural crops and pesticide exposure . While maximal exposure attributable to pesticide drift, among these studies, varied from 60 to 750 meters, this collection of studies rather consistently indicates that homes residing closer to pesticide treated fields tend to have higher pesticide levels and that children residing closer to pesticide treated fields tend to reflect higher pesticide exposure levels using bio-monitoring studies. In this study, exposure was modeled as distance to the nearest plantation in the primary analyses, based on the assumption that increased distance reflects lower exposures. An alternative measure, area of plantations within varying buffer areas, which is likely a better proxy for exposure to pesticide drift, was also explored.

As expected, results showed consistent associations between these two related but different constructs of pesticide exposure, which strengthens our findings. Several studies have utilized residential proximity to agriculture as a metric of exposure to pesticides when studying its associations with neurodevelopment . A number of these studies used data from California State’s Pesticide Use Reporting System, finding positive correlations between proximity of prenatal residence to areas of agricultural pesticide applications and neurodevelopmental outcomes in early childhood, specifically ASD . In our analyses the observed effect size in the logistics models were small, but the magnitude may have been attenuated by the non-linear dose-response relationship shown in Figure 3. Furthermore, the linear regression models indicated that a difference of 100m in residential proximity to floricultural crops is associated with a greater likelihood of the child scoring in the sub-clinical ranges for the Language and the Memory and Learning domains by 9% and 24% respectively. In the context of measurable outcomes, this is clinically significant in that identifying children with delayed development warrants early intervention by clinicians as well as educators. The expected distance of pesticide drift from flower crops to nearby homes was smaller in our study population compared to those of other studies likely because rose production is enclosed within greenhouses. Greenhouses in Pedro Moncayo County have air circulation vents or windows, which could allow the escape of fumigated pesticides during and after spraying. However, these analyses suggest that pesticide drift, even in this setting, could still be problematic in the context of pesticide exposure affecting the neurodevelopment of children living nearby. This body of evidence coupled with the growing number of studies describing neurobehavioral alterations associated with pesticide exposures suggests that extending buffer zones or protective areas that separate the industry from the neighboring communities, could be an effective way to protect developing children from the adverse effects of pesticide exposure. The present study was subject to several limitations. Though a crude exposure assessment, the use of this exposure metric is supported by the existing literature and validated within our study population . Prevailing winds were not accounted for in the present analyses. This provides potential for non-differential misclassification of the amount of pesticide drift from plantations to homes and may have biased our findings towards the null . Also, while the vast majority of the floricultural production in Pedro Moncayo County includes roses, which are grown inside greenhouses, a small amount of production of other flowers also occurs in nonenclosed fields typically located near the greenhouses. For this reason, it is plausible that some of the pesticide drift from crops, and hence the associations observed in this study, may be a result of both greenhouse and open field floricultural production. Nonetheless, residential proximity to crops is a useful construct of exposure as it is an indicator of chronic pesticide exposure, and provides practical information about the distances in which populations may have an increased risk of pesticide exposure and/or adverse health. While it does not allow us to determine which specific chemicals are influencing this association,greenhouse pot it indirectly accounts for a mixture of the various agrochemicals used in floriculture. The floricultural industry in Pedro Moncayo frequently uses various pesticides including insecticides , many classes of fungicides and to lesser extent, herbicides .

Many of the studies assessing neurodevelopment and pesticide exposure, including the ESPINA Study, are limited in that they study bio-monitoring of few pesticides, even though it is unusual for one pesticide to be used without multiple others. It is plausible that pesticides or other neurotoxicant agrochemical exposures explain the neurobehavioral deficits seen among participants living near the flower crops. Determining the quantity and types of agrochemicals used over time and by location would improve precision but would be very difficult to ascertain in this agricultural setting. Another limitation related to exposure assessment is that we were not able to account for all potential routes of exposure to pesticides, including dietary intake. We did not have information on time-activity patterns, which would have provided better insight into participants’ outdoor exposures . There is also some uncertainty associated with using home location only to estimate exposure to environmental pesticides. Some children in the cohort went to school during the day, while younger children attended daycare or stayed home with a relative. Modeling exposure experienced across all daily activities and locations is beyond the scope of this current study; we choose to focus on exposures at the children’s home locations. Another limitation of this study is that neurobehavioral outcomes were assessed at only one point in time, and thus we are unable to assess if the neurodevelopmental effects are permanent. Additionally, the NEPSY-2 is based on a US normative sample. Although this does not affect the internal validity of our findings, it is unclear how accurately the cut-off values for “low performance” apply to this study population. This study has several strengths and thus contributes to our understanding of the effects of pesticide use in floricultural communities. This study is unique in that there was a wide distribution of participants’ residential distance to crops, and we had a considerable number of children living in close proximity to flower crops, which allowed us to estimate effect sizes at short distances. Additionally, all participants were examined during a period of relatively homogeneous flower production and pesticide use. Children in this study were examined during a period of lower flower production and pesticide use compared to other times of the year. In theory, this would reduce the off-target pesticide drift potential from crops, with resulting lower exposures to children living nearby. Considering that pesticide spray seasons may also have short-term neurobehavioral alterations in children , it is plausible that these observed associations would be stronger during peak exposure periods. Lastly the existing studies have focused on residential distance to agricultural open fields. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to characterize the associations of neurobehavior in relation to greenhouse agricultural production, which is generally though to result in reduced pesticide drift from crops. Many types of crops involve the use of greenhouses such as flowers, tomatoes, cucumber, a variety of herbs, lettuce, bell peppers, and eggplants. The present study findings may be applicable to such agricultural production. High rates of ecosystem modification and subsequent consequences for biota, climate and geochemical natural cycles characterize the Anthropocene . To date, agriculture has modified nearly 40% of terrestrial ecosystems and drives biodiversity depletion via multiple direct and indirect effects associated with wildlife decline . These mechanisms include intensive use of agrochemicals, conversion of natural areas to simplified monocultures, fragmentation associated with land use change, soil erosion and sediment runoff, and greenhouse gas emissions, among others . These negative effects of agriculture consequently impact on species, habitat loss, and lack of connectivity, generating synergic detrimental effects on biodiversity, ecosystem functionality and provision of ecosystem services . Reconciling agricultural production and biodiversity conservation goals is a global priority in light of future scenarios pertaining to food consumption and land use change . However, agricultural management is not homogenous and may differentially influence wildlife. Agricultural intensification which entails a shift from diversified small farming practice to large monoculture production relies on the use of agrochemicals and has taken a toll on biodiversity . Adoption of agroecological principles and wildlife friendly farming can favor habitat suitability for wildlife and maintain sustainable crop yields . Strategies to balance agricultural food production and wildlife conservation include land sharing and land sparing strategies . Land sparing proponents have focused efforts on increasing food productivity per land area often requiring high levels of agrochemical input, and argue that with high production in target crop areas, natural areas can be spared from conversion to crop production . One impact that this approach does not address is the agrochemical spill over and its negative impacts on non-target wildlife species leading – another detrimental externality resulting from agrochemicals .