Category Archives: Agriculture

Binding changes to programs rarely amount to more than a minor tweak or surface adjustment

Many of the proposals are defeated outright. Those that are not rejected are often made voluntary or watered down so significantly that the resulting policy has little impact on CAP operations. The second potential condition involves what I refer to as “disruptive politics”. Under this condition, reformers are not only concerned with the CAP itself , but must also consider the problems and consequences of the application of the CAP and its policies beyond the agricultural sector. Specifically, when negotiating the CAP in the context of disruptive politics, reforms are shaped by non-agricultural considerations, such as trade negotiations and enlargement. CAP reformers have considerably more success when they are able to expand the proposal’s scope, tying it to these broader issues. The reform success under “disruptive politics” tracks with what Baumgartner and Jones describe as “Schattschneiderian moments”. In Schattschneiderian moments, issues or policy proposals are reframed or repackaged so as to change the scope of conflict. Much like these moments, disruptive politics allows CAP reformers to reframe the policy under discussion by tying agricultural reform to a broader issue or challenge. By managing the scope of conflict and shifting the agenda CAP reformers have a greater chance of successfully pursuing far-reaching agricultural change. While both types of negotiation scenarios may be motivated by a similar set of core common pressures, including the budget, environment, and rural community, at times of disruptive politics,plants pots plastic additional pressures including trade negotiations and enlargement come to bear. These additional pressures bring about a difference in the actors involved. When the CAP is considered in an environment of politics as usual, the actors involved are agricultural stakeholders only.

By contrast, discussions of the CAP at a time of disruptive politics often entail intervention from non-agricultural actors. For example, when trade negotiations are concurrent with CAP reform, member state governments often feel pressure from business leaders who do not want agriculture to jeopardize an important trade deal. At the EU level, other commissioners who may have a stake in negotiation outcomes, such as the commissioners for trade or the environment, may lobby or pressure the agricultural commissioner to reach an agreement in line with their preferences. Although reformers under both politics as usual and disruptive politics push for bold, broad reforms, the ultimate outcomes vary across the two contexts. When negotiations involve politics as usual, reforms are muted. New programs and initiatives are voluntary, often including a lot of member state discretion for if, when, and how to implement them. When EU officials and the member states operate under disruptive politics, including the extension of the CAP to new member states or its application in global trade agreements, the outcome is different. Proposals to make fundamental changes to the operation of the CAP are adopted and reforms are binding, rather than optional. These changes are made in order to ensure that the CAP can survive and continue to meet its operating objectives given the broader issues confronting negotiators, like enlargement and trade negotiations. Of the four CAP reform initiatives since 1992 analyzed in this dissertation, one has involved politics as usual , two have been marked by disruptive politics , and the most recent took place under mixed conditions. The MacSharry and Fischler Reforms occurred in times of disruptive politics, with trade negotiations and enlargement looming large, and resulted in systemic change to the operation of the CAP. Not only were new rules and conditions adopted for determining eligibility for CAP income payments, but the entire system of calculation and delivery of CAP payments was revised.

By contrast, the Agenda 2000 and the 2013 reforms, which occurred under politics as usual conditions , resulted in little meaningful change. New initiatives were optional and non-binding, and no systemic changes occurred to the structure or operation of the CAP. In the case of the CAP for 2020, the only change of note that occurred could be clearly linked to disruptive politics5 , demonstrating the importance of such conditions in facilitating reform. CAP reforms have often defied expectations. The outcome of the Fischler Reforms, for example, was supposed to be a mere “review” of existing policies. While the member states expected little change, the Fischler Reforms resulted in major alterations to the operation of the CAP. Conversely, Agenda 2000 was supposed to bring about a new CAP for the new millennium, but instead yielded no major changes. Ultimately, a pattern can be identified whereby, regardless of member state expectations, major change is possible when negotiations grapple with disruptive politics while only narrow, limited change is possible during politics as usual. Table 1.2 summarizes the key similarities and differences of these two types of CAP negotiations.The third part of my argument concerns the forms that CAP reform takes when it does occur. Many of the ways in which reformers endeavor to change the CAP echo the politics of welfare state retrenchment described by Pierson. Reformers of the social and agricultural welfare state must navigate a host of obstacles, in particular, resistance by the beneficiaries of the policies they seek to retrench. The set of possible reform outcomes is contingent upon navigating the influence of farmers. This dissertation explains CAP reform outcomes by highlighting five different strategies for dealing with farmers that reformers employ. Four of the five strategies are loosely modeled on the strategies used by welfare reformers as described by Pierson , while the other applies Levy’s “vice into virtue” to agricultural policy reform. The first strategy is obfuscation. Using this tactic, reformers attempt to hide or disguise cuts and manipulate information about policy changes. One way technocrats can engage in manipulation is to “lower the salience of consequences”, for example, by freezing a program, such as unemployment benefits, in a growing economy, thus not adjusting for inflation .

The ramifications of non-adjustment build slowly and are unlikely to attract attention. At first glance, it appears as though there is no change, but in the long run, spending is reduced greatly. In the realm of agricultural policy, an example of obfuscation is to freeze the subsidy payment levels and not adjust for inflation. Another example is to increase the complexity of the reform. Simple cuts are easy to detect, but complex rules and standards can make potential losses much harder to detect and trace. The CAP is already among the EU’s most complex policies, offering ample opportunity to veil cuts in obtuse Eurospeak. If the procedures and rules are sufficiently complex, reformers can restrict the population of beneficiaries and/or the total amount of benefits delivered. Obfuscation strategies have the potential for meaningful change because reforms can be imposed without causing immediate pain to the farmers themselves,blackberry pot the member state representatives answerable to the farmers, or the EU policymakers. A second option for reformers is to “divide and conquer” the target population. In the welfare state, cuts can be designed, typically through changes to eligibility rules, so that only some benefit recipients are affected . For example, many pension reforms exempt existing retirees and those nearing retirement from the new, less generous calculation of benefits. Such divide-and-conquer strategies find success because they are able to limit the size of opposition, in this case objection from senior citizens. In the domain of agricultural policy, a divide-and-conquer strategy involves proposing changes that will affect only some farmers, such as big farmers or commodity producers. Policy examples include price cuts for only some crops, or changing eligibility rules of certain types of income-aid payments. This strategy has the potential for meaningful change because either the farmers are no longer united and thus less able to resist change, or the reforms have targeted those sectors that are most amenable to change, while avoiding producers who would resist reform. Certain types of producers are more willing to accept retrenchment or reform than others. In particular, reforms that target large-scale and/or commodity producers tend to be more successful because many of these farmers believe that they can compete internationally without assistance and could take markets from weaker competitors.A third approach for reformers is to enact reform in exchange for “compensation”. Under this strategy, the potential for fierce opposition is quelled by offering a positive gain to victims of cuts . For example, while cutting general pension levels, reformers offer better or more attractive pension plans to women who have taken time off from work to raise children or lower the retirement age for people who have been working since their teens. A compensation strategy is the mostly likely to succeed and provides the most protection to loss-imposing politicians, but is also the most expensive avenue. Under the CAP, this strategy involves advancing policies that buy off or incentivize farmers for adopting certain behaviors, for example offering farmers direct payments in exchange for price cuts and or paying farmers for meeting specific environmental benchmarks. The fourth route is for reformers to engage in what Pierson calls “systemic retrenchment”.

Following this strategy, reformers implement changes that may increase the prospects for future cutbacks or reform. This strategy is indirect, and potential consequences will only be realized in the long term. Examples include institutional reforms that limit the government’s revenue base, strengthen the hand of budget cutters, or undermine the position of pro-welfare state interest groups. Ronald Reagan engaged in systemic retrenchment by introducing tax cuts that significantly weakened the government’s ability to finance social programs . In the realm of the agricultural welfare state, systemic retrenchment takes a slightly different form. Rather than using fiscal tools to strengthen the hand of reformers, systemic retrenchment within the agricultural welfare state plants the seeds of future reform by introducing controversial proposals on an optional basis at first. Once a policy is established, even on an optional basis, reformers have an easier time converting the voluntary provision into a mandatory policy. Typically, they rely on the argument that the member states had already agreed to the idea in principle, so the conversion to a permanent rule is simply a matter of implementing what has been agreed to. Indeed, this exact logic was used in the 2003 Fischler reform to convert an optional set of environmental standards into a compulsory greening program. As in the social welfare state, the inclusion of optional rules in 1999, did not change anything initially, but opened the door to deeper reforms down the line. The fifth strategy entails turning “vice into virtue” by reforming existing policies that are operating unequally and are also a source of “economic inefficiency or substantial public spending” . Reformers can work on correcting these programs rather than taking the much harder road of eliminating the program and attempting to adopt an entirely new program that functions better. In addition, by correcting the program, reformers are often able to extract new revenue streams that can then be redirected and redeployed toward achieving other policy objectives . Elements of “vice into virtue” overlap with Sheingate’s discussion of how CAP reformers take advantage of opportunities to control and manage issue definition. For Sheingate , CAP reform is possible when these changes are tied to broader objectives, like increasing animal welfare standards or promoting good environmental practices. CAP reformers have taken advantage of many opportunities to use the both “vice into virtue” approach and the issue definition strategy, particularly when changing to the system of income assistance for farmers. In some cases, this strategy is employed in order to shift money from one program to another, so that farmers still get paid the same amount, but the money comes from a different program. More often than not, the money is shifted out of a program that has been tagged as operating inefficiently or perpetuating harmful practices and into an existing program that corrects for these problems. For example, income assistance payments were channeled out of a system that paid farmers based on output that encouraged environmentally destructive industrial farming and massive surpluses, and into a new system that paid farmers a flat rate based on holding size. This shift did not reduce CAP spending, but by delinking payments and production, it reduced the incentive to produce no matter the consequences for the environment. All five of these strategies have been deployed by CAP reformers.

The livelihoods made possible by the infrastructure contribute to infection risk in this landscape

Parasitic worms of the genus Schistosoma inhabit the urogenital or the intestinal tract of the human host, with parasite eggs excreted in human urine and feces, respectively. Freshwater snails of the genera Bulinus serve as the intermediate host of S. haematobium while Biomphalaria transmit S. mansoni. These snail genera have distinct ecologies: Bulinus snails are able to withstand prolonged periods of drying while Biomphalaria are sensitive to saline conditions. Species from both genera, however, can colonize irrigation canals. Expansion of snail habitat and increased human activity in the aquatic environment both increase transmission in dammed and irrigated areas. However, few studies disentangle the environmental and socio-behavioral mechanisms of schistosomiasis occurrence in areas where water resources are actively managed. Of the approximately 800 million people at risk for schistosomiasis worldwide, 100 million live in close proximity to dams and irrigation schemes. An estimated 200 million are infected, the majority of which live in sub-Saharan Africa. Parasites exiting snail hosts penetrate the skin of people who are in direct contact with water. Acute symptoms of schistosomiasis include hematuria for S. haematobium infection and diarrhea and abdominal pain for S. mansoni infection. Prolonged infection can lead to anemia, organ damage, and cancer. While lethal pathologies are linked to infection with both S. haematobium and S. mansoni, deaths are not often officially attributed to infection, and as a result, are likely underestimated. Because available treatments do not prevent re-infection, regular contact with water can lead to chronic infection and severe disease. In some settings, prevalence and intensity of infection remain high even in the presence of treatment programs. Existing evidence linking irrigated agriculture and schistosome infection relies on village- or landscape-level aggregations of disease occurrence and agricultural activity ,plastic pots plants but finer-scale processes associated with irrigation influence exposure to parasites present in surface water.

The household is a particularly relevant unit for both agricultural activity and water contact behavior. However, few studies investigate whether household-level circumstances compound infection risk present in the environment. In this study, we investigated whether participation in agriculture at the household level was associated with individual-level schistosome infection. We assumed that in rural areas, the majority of schistosome exposure would occur at water access sites within a village and hypothesized that household-level cultivation of irrigated crops may represent additional exposure beyond the village-based exposure that occurs for most people. As a result, we suspected that children living households that cultivated irrigated land would be more likely to be infected with both species of schistosome. We further reasoned that, because larger areas of irrigated land are served by greater lengths of irrigation infrastructure, the occurrence of schistosomiasis would further increase in households that were cultivating larger areas of land. Larger fields served by more irrigation infrastructure would require more person-time to manage, harbor more snails, produce more parasites and, ultimately, increase schistosome exposure. With this rationale, we examined the relationship between area of irrigated land reported at the household level and individual-level infection outcomes, focusing on school-aged children who are often the target of mass drug administration campaigns. While studies of both schistosomiasis ecology and water contact behavior often focus on the water access sites within a village, human contact with agricultural water sources could play an important role in sustaining schistosome transmission in a way that threatens the success of ongoing schistosomiasis control efforts. While the spatial distribution of agricultural water sources makes them difficult to monitor, processes of exposure and contamination in agricultural water sources may contribute to the contamination of village water sources and lead to re-infection after treatment. Such processes may contribute to the development of persistent hot spots of schistosomiasis transmission. For schistosome transmission to be successfully suppressed, the implementation of interventions needs to account for the spatial scale of all the transmission sites in and around a village and the human movement between them. Te lower basin of the Senegal River became hyperendemic for schistosome transmission following the construction of the Diama dam in 1986, which was designed as a saltwater barrier to support agricultural development.

Prior to dam construction, S. haematobium infections occurred seasonally at low levels, while S. mansoni was absent from the region. By preventing saltwater intrusion, stabilizing water levels, promoting vegetation growth and disrupting the life histories of snail predators, the dam triggered environmental changes that favored the snail-borne transmission cycles of both S. haematobium and S. mansoni. Salt-sensitive Biomphalaria have since become established in the perennially freshwater environment, while the irrigation infrastructure provides new habitat for both Bulinus and Biomphalaria. The prevalence and intensity of both infections remain high today in human populations, and agricultural practices have increasingly shifted to the cultivation of irrigated crops. Given the environmental changes affecting both parasite transmission and livelihoods in this setting, we aimed to understand whether household engagement in irrigated agriculture compounds the infection risk created by the dam, and whether agricultural sites of water contact may be involved in schistosome transmission in this setting. Specifically, we investigated whether schistosome infection increased in school-aged children living.This is study used cross-sectional data collected as part of a longitudinal study of schistosome infection in school aged children and the socio-economic conditions of the households where those children resided. Sixteen villages along the Senegal River, its tributaries and the Lac de Guiers in northwest Senegal were chosen to represent rural, high-transmission sites common in the region . Village selection criteria are described in detail elsewhere, but included proximity to freshwater and presence of water access sites, presence of a school with sufficient enrollment in target grades and a non-zero prevalence of self-reported infection as well as accessibility in the rainy season. School-aged children were recruited from grades 1–3 in village schools. Agriculture was common in all villages with cultivation of irrigated rice using constructed irrigation infrastructure undertaken primarily in river villages and gardening and monocropping supported by hand-dug infrastructure in lake villages.Parasitological data were derived from a single year of a longitudinal, school-based parasitological study in all 16 villages.

A total of 1480 school-aged children were enrolled at baseline in February–April 2016. Of those, 1479 remained enrolled in January–April 2017 and 1414 successfully produced urine or stool samples on the two testing days that year . On each testing day, one urine and one stool sample were collected from each child enrolled in the study. Urine and stool sample collection was organized at the school by trained personnel from the Biomedical Research Center Espoir Pour La Sante. Sampling pots were provided to each participant 24 h in advance, and samples were kept in isothermal boxes during transport back to the laboratory. Samples were analyzed by urine fltration for S. haematobium infection and duplicate Kato-Katz examination of stool samples for S. mansoni infection by standard methods. In each year of the longitudinal study, all children were treated with 40 mg/kg of praziquantel following sample collection. The cross-sectional parasitological data from 2017 data used in this study, thus, refect post-treatment re-infection over the preceding year.Household survey were data collected in August 2016, during the rainy season preceding the 2017 parasitology data collection. We aimed to reach all the households where school-aged children enrolled in the parasitology study resided. The household survey instrument included six modules . The modules used in this analysis included demographic and occupational information for every member of the household,plastic nursery pots agricultural land use for all parcels owned and/or cultivated by household members, and data on building materials and durable assets, which were used to approximate socio-economic status. Surveys were completed in 655 households . The questionnaire was developed in English and translated to French by native speaking members of the field team. A team of eight Senegalese enumerators were trained to obtain verbal informed consent, pose survey questions in Wolof and record data in French. Prior to data collection, all survey questions were reviewed in French and the proper Wolof translations of key terms and ideas were discussed at length and agreed upon by all members of the enumerator team.We find evidence that the occurrence of S. haematobium but not S. mansoni infections in a dammed landscape is compounded by engagement in agricultural livelihoods. In the lower basin of the Senegal River, the presence of S. haematobium infections in school-aged children increase with irrigated area cultivated by members of their households. This may result from greater contact with Bulinusand S. haematobium-laden water among children whose families use and manage infrastructure for irrigating crops, compared to those whose contact occurs primarily at village water access sites. The observed association between irrigated area on S. mansoni infection presence was smaller and more uncertain, as were the associations of irrigated area with both measures of infection intensity, preventing frm conclusions about these outcomes. The contrast between S. haematobium and S. mansoni outcomes may reflect different sources of contamination in agricultural surface waters, such that the circulation of S. haematobium is more easily sustained by the input of urine than S. mansoni by the input of feces.

Our use of individual- and household-level data suggest that irrigated agriculture contributes to increased infection risk beyond the environmental consequences of infrastructure development. Previous meta-analysis on the topic revealed a greater increase in the occurrence of S. mansoni compared to S. haematobium in irrigated areas at the landscape scale. This and other studies that have examined landscape-scale measures of disease occurrence and land use support the notion that human-mediated environmental change is associated with elevated infection prevalence, but do not shed light on the finer-scale mechanisms that influence individual infection risk. The relationship between disease risk and environmental exposures depends on the scales at which the relevant biotic, abiotic and human factors operate, such that individual- and landscape level processes of disease and land use are not interchangeable and may represent distinct constructs. In the lower basin of the Senegal River, dam construction in support of agricultural development has altered the landscape by stabilizing water levels, preventing saltwater intrusion and expanding the aquatic habitat available to the snails that transmit schistosomes. Our use of finer-scale data establishes that processes related to household land use also play a role in determining risk for acquiring infection from the environment.These findings also suggest that—beyond the in-village water access sites that are the typical focus of studies of schistosome ecology and water contact behavior—agricultural water sources play a role in sustaining schistosome transmission and connecting transmission sites to each other. Te frequent use of irrigation canals for a wide variety of activities is likely to result in both snail-to human and human-to-snail transmission in water sources outside a village. This may be particular true for S. haematobium, whose eggs can be introduced more easily into the environment through urination compared to S. mansoni, whose eggs get introduced into the environment through defecation. If exposure and contamination occurs in both village and agricultural water sources, the human movement and water contact behaviors that connect these water sources will inevitably expand the spatial scope of transmission and the interventions needed to interrupt it. Networks of water sources may ensure continuous introduction of parasites into a village, perpetuating transmission, threatening the success of both MDA and environmental interventions and potentially leading to the formation of persistent hot spots. In this way, the design of interventions must account for the influence of human behavior on the ecological processes that affect infection risk at the proper scales. As calls continue for environmental interventions to complement mass drug administration, the development of implementation guidelines should consider for the full spectrum of water contact activity and the disperse water sources that might contribute to transmission in a particular setting. The ability of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions to reduce both exposure- and contamination-related behaviors, for example, may not be effective if agricultural water sources are disregarded. Environmental complements to MDA interventions may include cleaning aquatic vegetation to reduce snail habitat and chemical and biological control of snail populations in both water access points and irrigation canals. This research has some limitations. Odds only approximate risk when outcomes are rare. Because the outcomes in this study are not rare, our estimates are biased away from the null compared to prevalence ratios. We attempted to directly estimate prevalence ratios by fitting log-binomial models, but these models did not converge.

A main contributor of heterogeneity in gains future geographic distribution of acreage growth

Therefore, by specifying the means and covariance matrix of predicted chill in our five counties for 2025- 2050, we simulate the natural chill realization from a 5D multivariate normal distribution.To determine the potential growth in pistachio output by the year 2030, we consider bearing acreage growth in the past. Since the year 2000, harvested acreage grew by an average 10% yearly. Since 2010, the average rate was 13.5% . To assess the gains from MCE in the year 2030, we need to stipulate the total acreage at that year, and its distribution among our counties. We create acreage growth scenarios to get the edges of a potential acreage range in 2030. Two factors influence scenarios: growth rate and geographic distribution. For a high growth rate scenario, we let the total acreage grow by 13.5% yearly for six years , and then by then 10% yearly until 2030 . For a low growth scenario, we let acreage grow by 10% yearly for six years, then by 5% yearly until 2030 . Some counties are more prone to low chill years than others, and future growth in acreage might take this into account. If the counties’ acreage shares stay the same, i.e. all grow at the same rate, each county’s acreage in 2015 is thus multiplied by the growth factor to calculate county acreages in 2030. This represents a world where growers might not be aware of the perils of climate change, or trust MCE in solving future problems even in the risky counties. However, growers could also divert growth to the less affected counties, Madera and Tulare. To model this, we increase each county’s 2015 acreage by the appropriate growth factor for the first 6 years ,garden plastic pots to account for acres already planted. The difference between the sum of predicted acreage in 2021 and the total predicted acreage in 2030 is then allocated evenly between Tulare and Madera. First, we want to get a sense of the magnitude of loss, brought by insufficient chill without MCE.

Figure 4 shows the empirical cumulative distribution of total potential loss rate by scenario. For each simulation, the chill realization is used to construct a vector of county specific loss rate. This is multiplied by the share of that county in total acreage in 2030, which varies by scenario. Summing these, we get the weighted average loss rate for all our counties. The figure shows, as expected, that scenarios in which acreage growth is shifted north have lower probabilities of large loss events. About 30% of chill portion vector draws result in virtually no loss. The CDFs seem step-like, indicating the sharp decline in yield at the chill threshold for each affected county. The average expected loss by scenario is specified in Table 1. In our simulations, MCE seems to revert the market outcomes of insufficient chill almost completely. When simulated without MCE, the outcome market price ranges between $5,625 / ton and $36,019. However, simulation with MCE result in a price range between $5,625 and $5,704 – a minimal increase. This is probably the result of a relatively low price of MCE, compared to the output price. To get a better sense of the effect, Figure 5 shows the distributions of MCE effects in percent change for price and quantity. That is, the percent increase in quantity and decrease in price when using MCE, compared with the non MCE simulation. The mean price decrease is 13-31%, and the mean quantity increase is 32-88% . These averages include years, where the climate damages are nearly zero for all counties, about a third of simulations. Thus, the actual effects in insufficient chill years are actually higher. We now turn to look at the gains from MCE on aggregate profits, consumer surplus, and total welfare. Figure 6 presents the distribution of these gains, and they are almost exclusively positive. That is not very surprising for consumer surplus, as MCE lowers the price on a good with modeled elastic demand. Average consumer surplus gains from MCE range between $0.68 – 2.60 billion , scenario depending. Grower profits gains are almost always positive as well, with an average ranging between $0.49 – 1.22 billion .

This result was less obvious a priori, as there is some measure of oligopolistic power in each simulation. These gains in grower profits are not distributed evenly between counties. As the baseline climate is not homogeneous among counties, and climate change might be different as well, not all counties would be affected the same. Sharing the market with Kern and Kings counties, which are more susceptible to insufficient chill, the cooler counties of Madera and Tulare are predicted to be less affected by climate change. Yet, MCE lowers the price and their share of the market on years with insufficient chill, compared to the non-MCE baseline. That is, while the industry gains in total are positive, these counties’ profits are mostly negative. Figure 7 shows the profit gains distribution by county. Kern and Kings counties have mostly positive profit gains. Madera and Tulare counties have mostly negative gains, and positive ones only in the worst chill years, when they lack chill portions as well. Fresno county is somewhere in the middle. This result reflects a broader aspect of climate change and adaptation. Areas who are affected very little by climate change can still feel its effects. As there are winners and losers from climate change, there will be winners and losers from MCE.Note how the gain distributions vary between scenarios. The two “Same” scenarios, keeping the distribution of future acreage the same as 2014’s, but varying in total acreage by roughly a twofold, generate gain distributions that are closer to each other than to the “North” scenarios with respective growth rates. To see the effect of other parameters on welfare outcomes, we plot them separately. In Figure 8, the gains are plotted against each parameter, using the “High Same” acreage growth scenario. Recall that, since we did not include parameter realizations resulting in P C > 6, there are slight correlation between the parameters. This is therefore an approximation of an “all else equal” plot, which we still consider useful to see the effects of each parameter on gains. To start, we note that the gains from MCE increase with the potential loss rate, as expected. The profit gains seem to increase linearly with the potential loss rate, but consumer surplus seems to grow exponentially. This is probably due to the choice of our demand function: with elastic demand, the inverse demand function is an exponential function with negative exponent that is greater than .

Therefore, the integral below the inverse demand function, from zero to any quantity, is infinite. As the potential loss rate increases, this integral should grow in a non-linear fashion. When demand is more elastic, gains from MCE increase for growers and decrease for consumers, as expected. When supply is more elastic,raspberry plant pot gains from MCE decrease for everyone, as expected. Looking at the effects of market power, we notice that monopolistic power seems rather uncorrelated with consumer surplus. This is somewhat surprising, as we expected monopolistic power to decrease consumer’s benefits from MCE. However, note that we assumed monopolistic power does not change with loss rate. Had we modeled them with a correlation, the trend line would probably slope up. Monopsony power increases consumer surplus, prob-ably through the monopsony rents: as demand is elastic, restricting quantities lowers surplus. An increase must be the result of the rents. In a more realistic situation, where these rents are not necessarily included in consumer’s surplus, the result might be different. However, this does not change the total welfare outcomes. With respect to the entire market power measure, P C, it seems to increase both consumer surplus and profits from MCE. This also means that the potential losses from insufficient chill increase with market power, a point worthy of consideration in other settings as well. Crop breeding centers in agricultural research institutes around the world played a major role in feeding the world’s population during the 20th century . In the immediate aftermath of World War II and through the 1960s, scientists and politicians forecast serious food shortages and starvation across large parts of the world. Between 1960 and 2000, the world’s population doubled, but over the same period, grain production more than doubled, an increase almost entirely attributable to unprecedented increases in yields. The Malthusian nightmare never materialized, mainly because scientific innovations produced new technological packages that raised productivity and expanded output beyond anyone’s expectations . New crop varieties made up the heart of these packages, although they were supplemented by improved water control, greater use of chemical fertilizers, and increased know-how. Despite the enormous successes in the second half of the 20th century, science has not eliminated the possibility of serious global food shortages, and agricultural research establishments must meet even greater challenges in the 21st century . Growth rates of yields slowed during the 1980s and 1990s and the yield gap—the difference between yields on experimental plots and farmers’ fields—has shrunk .

When the slower growth rate of yield is coupled with rising demographic pressures and water and environmental concerns, new varieties that produce more food under increasingly challenging environments will be essential to meeting world demand, which is predicted to rise by 40 percent between now and 2025 . The task of those responsible for breeding new varieties, however, will have to be executed at a time when support for agricultural research in both developed and developing countries is waning. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, agricultural scientists enjoyed rapidly expanding budgets, but during the past two decades the growth has slowed. Pardey and Beintema reported a real growth rate of global agricultural research spending during 1976-1981 of 4.5 percent per annum , but by 1991-96 this growth rate had fallen to 2.0 percent per annum . It has continued to decline since then. China is no exception. China’s real annual growth rate of agricultural research expenditure fell from 7.8 percent in 1976-81 and 8.9 percent in 1971-86 to 5.5 percent in 1991-96 . Similar patterns but in more exaggerated terms can be seen in the expenditures of research institutes in developed or developing countries, and in the international agricultural research system that are dedicated to crop varietal improvement . Hence, in an era of slower growth in agricultural research expenditures and increased demands for output, there will be rising pressure on the research system to come up with ways to produce more for less. In the parlance of production economics, this means that it will be necessary to become increasingly efficient at producing new varieties. Although several authors have recognized the importance of economies of scale and economies of scope in agricultural research , few studies have attempted to measure the nature of the processes used by the agricultural research “industry” to create new varieties—the technology used to produce varietal technology, sometimes called the research production function. Since the seminal work of Baumol et al. , economies of scale andeconomies of scope have been studied in a wide range of industries . However, only two studies—Branson and Foster and Byerlee and Traxler —have produced empirical evidence on economies of size in agricultural research, and there have not been any empirical studies on economies of scope. Moreover, the limited evidence on economies of size in agricultural research is mixed. Based on a unique set of data, collected specifically to examine the production economics of crop breeding centers, we use a cost function approach to estimate economies of scale, economies of scope and other aspects of the technology of crop varietal production in China.1 Although we are interested in the production economics of crop breeding, in general, our focus on China is appropriate for several reasons. First, China has a long and successful history of crop breeding and, although it is a developing country, its breeders have made breakthroughs that rival those of most developed countries . Hence, in some sense, our findings are relevant for the breeding programs of all nations. In addition, China is important in its own right as the largest country in the world, and as an example of a large developing country.

These choices are provided new meanings and significance in the experience economy

Adding to this argument is the fact that organic food has provided an alternative to “conventional” food products. Its importance is thus two-fold, as it simultaneously presents itself as an alternative, while – by its mainstream presence and appropriation by consumers – questioning the legitimacy of “conventional” food, on the basis of different essential and previously unquestioned parameters: “Concern about animal welfare is more important for particular organic products and countries where intensive animal farming systems are commonly used. This includes chicken meat and eggs, pork products and, to a lesser extent, beef and dairy products” . This point is also reflected in a 2007 EC report: “The combined benefits of agriculture through the production of safe food, respect of environmental and animal welfare standards is more likely to be selected as important by respondents in most Member States, but particularly northern European countries” . Perceptions of individual health and safety are, still, considered the most important explanatory factors to the consumption of organic foods, which is even the more interesting as organic food products have no documented “extra” positive health effects on the individual’s health when compared to conventionally grown food products . Indeed, individual economic-choice-rationalities , have been shown to be after-rationalisations themselves. Some research suggests instead that the consumption of organic food for most consumers in Western Europe is actually, primarily, motivated by their belief in organic foods’ universal “goodness” . And then, secondly, these beliefs are dressed in the cloak of the “rational” economic optimizing consumer, as post-rationalizations, in order to present oneself as a critical and/or authentic consumer,macetas cultivo or true to ones own tastes . Instead, perceptions relating directly to the environment and overall societal sustainability might play an even larger role than previously assumed when determining what foods to eat or not.

This is perhaps especially true for organic foods, as the procurement of these is never done entirely on price. If this were the case, very few, if any, organic food products would probably be available outside of home gardening; instead organic food is highly dependent on the perceptions of the consumers choosing these: “Perceptions of organic food are affected by their beliefs about the safety and quality of conventional food production and subsequent attitudes to conventional versus organic products. Purchasing behaviour is affected by their perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and the ability to pay premiums for organic products” . The perceptions – not necessarily knowledge – consumers have of agricultural production and its effects on the environment, in general, exercise considerable influence over their final food choices. These issues of place and related values will be explored next. If we are to believe contemporary theory, we live in a “post-modern” “post-industrial” world with all the ontological insecurities this can cause, as already briefly mentioned . The values and meanings inherent in societies are, apparently, shaped not by the present as much as what came before, which probably, also, speaks to the ambiguity of using post-modernism as a “unique” historical category. Indeed, the initial experiences of early twentieth-century industrialization share thematic similarities with the early experience of the, arguably, post-modernist “knowledge” society in the twenty-first century. The alienating effects of urbanity witnessed by Engels and Marx comes into play in the post-modern societies, where the fear of loosing both industry and nature are prevalent. We live in a time where development/progress, be it technical or social, is moving faster than ever before, but also, it seems, is fuelled with more anxieties than before. It is perhaps not surprising if people participating in such societies are looking for authenticity, and associated/related events. Farmers markets, for instance, at once represent something old and something new. It is a re-imagination of the past, legitimized by the beliefs in its intrinsic and real capabilities to effect change in our contemporary food consumption and production. Interestingly, new food experiences and/or consumptive initiatives are, often, legitimized by narratives/perceptions imagined or replicated from the past – they are, in other words, deemed authentic. Authenticity does not have to adhere specifically to linear time, rather place and frequency are significant parameters.

Starbucks is older than New York’s Union Square Farmers Market for instance. But visitors might attach greater authenticity value to the latter than the former due to its “pre-modern” spatiality and perceived sociability. Though it could, reasonably, be argued that Starbucks is a more authentic representation of consumption than the farmers market. Perhaps therefore, or thereof, much attention for the last 10-15 years has been afforded to document the discursive and performative meanings of farmers markets , alternative food systems and outlets often coupled with notions of an emerging “creative countryside,” and not infrequently postulated as part of the perceived development of agriculture in most advanced countries, moving from a productivist to a post-productivist regime , though this concept is, rightly, not without its critics . The recognition and use of authenticity as a concept of meaning and therefore potential agent of change is widespread in contemporary literature, on food experiences , food services , in a tourist perspective , on hospitality , on governance and mediatisation , consumer culture , consumption and consumers , event studies , and within many more areas of research. Its critics are often quick to dismiss authenticity as a backward concept, or a form of left-wing conservatism or defensive localism, reducing ‘the search for authenticity’ to mere marketing strategies, or even a hoax as described by popular author Andrew Potter or in classical Marxist terms an advanced form of “commodity fetishism” or a commodifica-tion of culture – and sometimes rightly so, as authenticity can be utilized for monetary means . But, again, authenticity and its uses is not such a new thing. Outka , in her “Consuming Traditions,” shows how the concept of authenticity was used and misused by different manufacturers and retailers as early as the nineteenth century in order to increase sales and as a promotional tool. Importantly, in the case of Cadbury Outka also shows that the ideal of the authentic was at times, actually, translated into concrete better social conditions for its workers: ‘Wages were better, benefits were greater, the housing was better built’ . The point being, that though food is not something we can very easily ever establish as something completely authentic, its associated values and/or perceptions of authenticity still influence how we understand them and how we choose to consume, for instance. The attempts to bridge the two separate environments of food consumption and production also seem particular to recent times. The huge mainstream success of food writer Michael Pollan and his books is surely an indicator of such holistic interest, along with the mediatisation of “celebrity” alternative farmers like Joel Salatin in a US context. The sentiment guiding these attempts to re-connect food production with its end-consumers, if only on a perceptual level, is eloquently summed up by Vileisis: “Typically, the history of America’s remarkable food system has been recounted as a singularly progressive tale. Yet for many of us, the marvel of fresh leafy lettuce in the winter nests right aside the uneasiness that our children don’t know milk comes from cows” .

In a globalized world with increasing trade of food products, foods might appear to have become more homogenous and standardized as part of the McDonaldization of Society , which, in sentiment, mirrors the “mythic roots” of “massification” , which is often invoked to illustrate the perpetual decline of society. These are perceived developments that have instigated food movements – now themselves globally present – whose primary role is to support local alternatives to what they perceive as a threat to not just nutritional standards and traditional cuisine but also to local culture and communities, to which local food, both its production and consumption, is perceived to have a stabilizing and positive effect, which can counter the influences of the global markets. Again we find a dichotomous and oppositional interpretation of market and community, and the close alignments between global structures as market driven and local structures based and orientated in community. These perceptions of global homogenization and standardization might be influenced by the fact that the global food systems have not brought us less choice but much more, which in itself might trigger responses of insecurity and even anxiety – or the paradox of choice .We apparently live in an “Experience Economy” ,maceta de plastico cuadrada where services and experiences are replacing production as primary economic pursuits, or perhaps more correctly, because of increased productive capabilities and gained efficiencies, more time and money can be spent in the service and leisure industries. Significantly, only eight years should pass until an addition to Pine and Gilmore’s hugely successful book was apparently needed; it was titled “Authenticity: What consumers really want” . “The only thing constant is change” an old saying goes, and in contemporary society in the developed world where knowledge, communication, values and meaning are mediated and often interwoven, the planned event and or experience becomes simultaneously, and paradoxically, the symbol of authenticity and/or something “real” because it is requires a spatial reality and an accelerator/medium for further mediation, change and increased consumption of services and experiences . This call for spatiality could, also, partly, work as an explanatory factor contributing to the rise of food as a symbol and medium. “Food is not only a metaphor or vehicle of communication; a meal is a physical event” reads Mary Douglas’ cautionary warning when food is overtly loaded with cultural symbolism and discourses. Ironically it seems to be exactly the physicality of food that makes it such a potent symbol and/or medium in present society. It both transgresses boundaries and establishes them, and by its tropic nature is always in flux, changeable but stable, intimate to the extreme but part of the mundane features of everyday life. In other words food as medium and mediator is perfect in the experience economy exactly because of these qualities – imagined or otherwise. Food and related experiences can thus be perceived as the perfect “Levinisian” bridge to the “other,” or the closest one gets to an intimate, yet still impersonal, experience in public. Farmers markets, as already mentioned, could thus be perceived as, and actually work as, promoters of community in urban areas, promoting “gemeinschaft”/community but using the cloaks of “gesellschaft”/business for implementation – trying to bridge the dichotomous divide between “gemeinschaft” and “gesellschaft” according to the now classic divide described by Tönnies and Simmel .

This division can, also, reenforce withdrawal. Indeed, the making, of two separate spheres of public and private interaction is noted by Elias, as a “basic condition” of modern civilization: “[W]ith the advance of civilization the lives of human beings are increasingly split between an intimate and a public sphere”. This sentiment, again, carries with it some notions of the supposed decline of community values, or the urban realm as an anti-environment for community, due to its fragmented nature and general anonymity of its participants/inhabitants. It should be noted that Simmel did, also, see the anonymity of urban life as liberating for its participants, exactly due to its impersonal nature. This is a sentiment also found in more recent “urban” sociologist Richard Sennet’s work for whom the complexity and the many different roles afforded to those willing to accept the impersonal nature of urban public life is very rewarding, as it furnishes the self with the complexity of the surrounding objects and people: “[T]he experience of urban life can teach people to live with multiplicity within themselves. The experience of complexity is not just an external event, it reflects back on individuals’ sense of themselves” . Farmers markets, and other related food experiences like food festivals etc., could thus be seen as a contributing factor to the diversity and community of life as they, supposedly, differ from mainstream food outlets in both aesthetics and possible social interaction, as these are often viewed derisively as “non-places” and “Like going to the movies, shopping engaged them in a public culture – but in a private space of their own” . But farmers markets can also work as tools for urban gentrification and symbols of inequality, as participation in these markets often come with a costly prize tag compared to mainstream food outlets like supermarkets: “Their desire for alternative foods, both gourmet and organic, and for ‘middle class’ shopping areas encourages a dynamic of urban redevelopment that displaces working-class and ethnic minority consumers” . Again, the medium of food is shown not to be either inherently good or bad for community, but rather dependent on the context, implementation and aims of its instigators.

A record of agricultural burn events was provided by the Air Pollution Control District

Our study found that the incidence of drift-related pesticide poisoning was higher among female and younger agricultural workers and in western states. These groups were previously found to have a higher incidence of pesticide poisoning . It is not known why the incidence is higher among female and younger agricultural workers, but hypotheses include that these groups are at greater risk of exposure, that they are more susceptible to pesticide toxicity, or that they are more likely to report exposure and illness or seek medical attention. However, we did not observe consistent patterns among workers in other occupations. This finding requires further research to identify the explanation. The higher incidence in the western states may suggest that workers in this region are at higher risk of drift exposure; however, it may also have resulted from better case identification in California and Washington states through their higher staffed surveillance programs, extensive use of workers’ compensation reports in these states, and use of active surveillance for some large drift events in California. Nonoccupational exposure. This study found that more than half of drift-related pesticide poisoning cases resulted from nonoccupational exposures and that 61% of these nonoccupational cases were exposed to fumigants. California data suggest that residents in agriculture-intensive regions have a 69 times higher risk of pesticide poisoning from drift exposure compared with other regions. This may reflect California’s use of active surveillance for some large drift events. Children had the greatest risk among nonoccupational cases. The reasons for this are not known but may be because children have higher pesticide exposures,macetas por mayor greater susceptibility to pesticide toxicity, or because concerned parents are more likely to seek medical attention. Recently several organizations submitted a petition to the U.S. EPA asking the agency to evaluate children’s exposure to pesticide drift and adopt interim prohibitions on the use of drift-prone pesticides near homes, schools, and parks . Contributing factors. Soil fumigation was a major cause of large drift events, accounting for the largest proportion of cases.

Because of the high volatility of fumigants, specific measures are required to prevent emissions after completion of the application. Given the unique drift risks posed by fumigants, U.S. EPA regulates the drift of fumigants separately from non-fumigant pesticides. The U.S. EPA recently adopted new safety requirements for soil fumigants, which took effect in early 2011 and include comprehensive measures designed to reduce the potential for direct fumigant exposures; reduce fumigant emissions; improve planning, training, and communications; and promote early detection and appropriate responses to possible future incidents . Requirements for buffer zones are also strengthened. For example, fumigants that generally require a > 300 foot buffer zone are prohibited within 0.25 miles of “difficult to-evacuate” sites . We found that, of the 738 fumigant-related cases with information on distance, 606 occurred > 0.25 miles from the application site, which suggests that the new buffer zone requirements, independent of other measures to increase safety, may not be sufficient to prevent drift exposure. This study also shows the need to reinforce compliance with weather-related requirements and drift monitoring activities. Moreover, applicators should be alert and careful, especially when close to non-target areas such as adjacent fields, houses, and roads. Applicator carelessness contributed to 79 events , of which 56 events involved aerial applicators. Aerial application was the most frequent application method found in drift events, accounting for 249 events . Drift hazards from aerial applications have been well documented . Applicators should use all available drift management measures and equipment to reduce drift exposure, including new validated drift reduction technologies as they become available. Limitations. This study requires cautious interpretation especially for variables with missing data on many cases . This study also has several limitations. First, our findings likely underestimate the actual magnitude of drift events and cases because case identification principally relies on passive surveillance systems. Such under reporting might have allowed the totals to be appreciably influenced by a handful of California episodes in which active case finding located relatively large numbers of affected people. Pesticide-related illnesses are under reported because of individuals not seeking medical attention , misdiagnosis, and health care provider failure to report cases to public health authorities . Data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey suggests that the pesticide poisoning rates for agricultural workers may be an order of magnitude higher than those identified by the SENSOR-Pesticides and PISP programs . Second, the incidence of drift cases from agricultural applications may have been underestimated by using crude denominators of total population and employment estimates, which may also include those who are not at risk. On the other hand, the incidence for agricultural workers may have been overestimated if the denominator data under counted undocumented workers. Third, the data may include false-positive cases because clinical findings of pesticide poisoning are nonspecific and diagnostic tests are not available or rarely performed. Fourth, when we combined data from SENSOR-Pesticides and PISP, some duplication of cases and mis-classification of variables may have occurred, although we took steps to identify and resolve discrepancies.

Also, SENSOR-Pesticides and PISP may differ in case detection sensitivity because the two programs use slightly different case definitions. Lastly, contributing factor information was not available for 48% of cases, either because an in-depth investigation did not occur or insufficient details were entered into the database. We often based the retrospective coding of contributing factors on limited data, which may have produced some misclassification.Burning fields to remove crop stubble, weeds and pests occurs worldwide, and California’s estimated emissions from the burning of crop residue ranks fifth nationally . These emissions potentially contribute to particulate matter levels in the San Joaquin Valley, which often exceed standards for ambient air each season of the year . Studies have documented thousands of chemicals in smoke; they can exist in gas, liquid and solid form. During burning, plant matter breaks apart and gases condense on particles or form particles. Most particulate matter in smoke is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can be transported over long distances . The California Air Resources Board estimates annual tons of particulate matter and gases emitted from field, orchard and weed burning for California counties ; their estimates are derived from burns of crop residue in a laboratory . Studies have documented emissions of 14 semivolatile polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons , the most abundant of which is naphthalene . A respiratory carcinogen , naphthalene is predominantly found in the gas phase of air sampling, with the remainder measured in the particulate phase . Few ambient air monitoring studies have been conducted in the United States during agricultural burns, either adjacent to burns or in towns and communities . Educational efforts for the general public have mostly focused on smoke from wildfires and have included public health recommendations for those exposed to elevated particulate matter and visibility guidelines for those air levels . CARB has also distributed a lengthy educational pamphlet for farmers . However, it was unknown whether health educational outreach efforts specifically targeting agricultural burning were needed. Particulate matter emissions from field burning in Imperial County — a rural desert county in California’s southeast corner — rank among the highest for any county in the state . The agricultural area of Imperial County is anirrigated desert valley, where a variety of crops including vegetables, hay and grain are grown . Fields of bermudagrass, which is grown both for hay and seed, are burned primarily in the winter, while wheat stubble is burned during the summer. Less than 3% of homes in Imperial County use wood as a house heating fuel . During the winter when night temperatures drop, inversions commonly occur; cooler ground level air, including pollutants, are trapped near the Earth’s surface by an upper layer of warmer air. For fields to be burned,macetas por mayor plastico the Air Pollution Control District requires that the estimated inversion layer must be at 3,000 feet or higher, and the burn must be initiated between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Farmers who have applied for burn permits are usually notified by the district the day before the targeted burn date that their fields may be burned. Thus, our air monitoring studies required methods that could be rapidly deployed. Our methods and results are described in greater detail in a report to the funding agency .We selected three schools and one church based on their proximity to burns in previous years and installed portable Environmental Beta Attenuation Monitors . We measured hourly average concentrations of PM2.5 and meteorological variables for 69 days starting on Jan. 14, 2009. E-BAM PM2.5 measurements are not recognized as a Federal Equivalent Method or a Federal Reference Method , one of which is required to determine if levels legally exceed air standards. However, E-BAM measurements have proven comparable to FRM measurements in field tests .

During the E-BAM monitoring period, 15,686 acres were burned on 35 allowable burn days; the acreage burned daily ranged from 0 to 1,400 acres. Average 24-hour PM2.5 concentrations were highest — 12 micrograms per cubic meter — at the northern station and lowest at the western station . The lower levels in Seeley may have been because the predominant wind direction was from the west, and sources of pollution, including burned fields, were predominantly to the east of the Seeley station. All daily PM2.5 levels were below the federal standard for unhealthy air, 35 µg per cubic meter. However, at the Calipatria station the 95th percentile of 24-hour concentrations was above 16 µg per cubic meter, which corresponds to moderate air quality where “aggravation of heart or lung disease in people with cardiopulmonary disease and older adults” is possible . We also compared 8-hour average PM2.5 concentrations at the four locations. There was little difference during the day , with levels slightly lower on field-burn days compared to no field-burn days . In contrast, from the early evening to the morning of the next day , average PM2.5 concentrations on field-burn days were 23% higher than on no-field-burn days. Additionally, on days when there was an agricultural burn within 2 miles of the Calipatria station , during the evening-to-morning period the average 8-hour concentrations were 19.5 to 20.7 µg per cubic meter, 170% higher than on days when there were no burns within 2 miles . Following the burns near the Calipatria station, on the subsequent 2 days when there were no additional burns , the evening-to-morning levels remained slightly above levels on days with no burns . Higher particulate matter levels from evening-to-morning hours associated with agricultural burning in Imperial County are consistent with air pollution dynamics. Air pollutants may rise during the day as the Earth’s surfaces are heated and then be brought down to ground level by the descent of an evening inversion layer. The night and next-day accumulation of smoke is described in a CARB pamphlet for farmers .We monitored five specific burns of 65 to 150 acres of bermudagrass stubble during the E-BAM monitoring period. For four burns, ground-level winds were low at 2 to 3 miles per hour , and the plume from the burn rose up to the apparent height of the inversion layer where it was observed to spread out, sometimes in the opposite direction of the ground wind direction. The ground-level plumes dispersed within about an hour, but the upper plumes remained visible, apparently limited by the inversion layer, until sunset. At one of the five burns, the Dunham burn, the wind speed was higher , and the ground-level smoke plume engulfed a house on the same property as the burned field and drifted onto an adjacent field. We deployed portable particulate matter monitors — active-flow and passive personal DataRAM nephelometers — which continuously measured PM2.5 and PM10 , respectively. This monitoring was done at three locations surrounding each of the five burns for 24 to 72 hours. Two locations were near the burns and were places of public access, homes or telephone poles; the other was at the nearest E-BAM, which was farther away . At the 15 locations, field difficulties including power outages, supply delivery problems and apparent equipment or software malfunctions limited monitoring to 11 and 13 locations for the PM2.5 and PM10 nephelometers, respectively.

The coconut palm also gave back to the communities who tended to the trees

GS1 transcripts and glutamine synthetase enzyme activity also increased with increasing NH4 + and NO3 – availability in sorghum roots, suggesting this response may be widespread among plant species. Interestingly, inclusion of soil GWC in multiple linear regression models increased the proportion of GS1 expression variability explained to nearly 30% ; soil water content increases microbial activity as well as the mass flow and diffusion of inorganic N to roots. Further research will undoubtedly show how other factors like crop physiological N demand relative to C fixation and P availability increase the interpretability of N uptake and assimilation gene expression in roots.The N cycling scenarios identified on this set of organic fields corresponded at least in part with landscape clusters based on landscape and soil characteristics . Fields that balanced high yields with low potential for N loss and high internal N cycling capacity were part of PAM cluster 1, which had the highest productive capacity rating . Landscape clusters encompassing more marginal soils included both low-yielding fields exhibiting N deficiency or high-yielding fields that used inputs of highly available N like seabird guano to alleviate N deficiency . But these inputs led to the highest soil NO3 – levels and thus came at the cost of higher potential for N loss. Long-term efforts to increase internal soil N cycling capacity would help alleviate both N deficiency and the need for such large inputs of labile N. Whether farmers are willing to invest in management to increase soil N cycling capacity depends in part on how likely they perceive the benefits to be, especially on marginal soils. The discussions that we had with each farmer in this study indicated genuine interest in adaptive management to further tighten plant-soil N cycling, but this may not always be the case. Indeed,macetas redondas grandes the proportion of management vs. inherent soil characteristics responsible for driving differences in N cycling is challenging to untangle. Farmers may allocate more resources to more productive land and likewise fewer resources to more marginal land, or may selectively transition more marginal land to organic management.

Documenting the multiple services provided by increases in soil quality and facilitating information exchange among organic growers such as through the landscape approach used here may help build momentum for efforts to improve soil quality and plant-soil-microbe N cycling.The health food movement’s latest trend in its ongoing rejection of carbohydrates in favor of fats alarmed cardiologists and public health experts. Studies in the journal of the American Heart Association noted a possible link between coconut oil’s high levels of LDL cholesterol, colloquially known as the “bad cholesterol” which carries a higher risk for coronary disease.In a now infamous 2018 talk at the University of Freiburg, Harvard epidemiologist Karin Michels called coconut oil “pure poison.”Delivered in German, the talk captured headlines in countries that are net importers of coconut products and also commanded the attention of exporting nations and industry trade groups. India’s horticultural minister demanded that Michels retract her statement while the International Coconut Community , a twenty-nation member organization headquartered in Jakarta, issued multiple defenses of coconut oil’s superfood status.Setting aside the merits of competing health claims, the ICC’s response to Michels was a rare albeit brief instance in which the global political economy of coconut oil became visible to North American consumers. The North American demand for coconut products tethers small- and large-scale coconut planters and wage pickers in the South and Southeast to a multitude of producer associations, cooperatives, national governments, and multinational marketing companies who deliver the product to health-conscious consumers. Coconuts—an enduring symbol of tropical ease—are big business. The Philippines, which the Calboms held as evidence of the oil’s benefits, produces an estimated 1.9 million tons of coconut products each year and account for forty-nine percent of the world’s exports. Coconut farms are found in most of the country’s eighty-one provinces, covering 3.3 million hectares or thirty percent of farmlands.

This high output persists despite high poverty rates among coconut farmers, maturing trees with waning production, recurring infestations of coconut scale insects requiring tree felling, and an intensification of destructive typhoons precipitated by the climate crisis.Production depends on forest clearing for new planting, in turn exacerbating the climate crisis behind the industry’s woes. How does a commodity produced by an ailing industry attain and sustain the allure of a natural superfood? Adrienne Bitar’s Diet and the Disease of Civilizationoffers an answer from the perspective of consumption. Coconuts, she writes, play a leading role in a larger North American “food story” in which eating against the grain can recapture “an original, innocent world and mourn the descent of the human race into modern disease.”Diet jeremiads decrying the “fall of man” include the Paleo diet, in which men and women are urged to eat like evolutionary ancestors and the Detox diet, which calls for abstention from refined and processed foods. Coconuts also feature in Pacific Islander efforts to decolonize the everyday dietary. Citing alarmingly high rates of diabetes and obesity, Dr. Terry Shintani’s The HawaiiDiet positions the replacement of fried and refined foods with “foods eaten in Hawai’i before the onset of Western influence” as part of a larger personal, cultural, and ecological healing from the ravages of colonialism.But in making this case, fall of man diets “eternalize a timeless past,” homogenize diversity among Pacific Islanders, and sharpen alleged innate and biological differences between Pacific Islanders. The diets, Bitar writes, exemplify what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia”—a romanticization of that which has been lost to colonial violence in the name of progress of development.This nostalgia for the coconut echoes outside of diet culture as well. Recall, for example, LinManuel Miranda’s invitation to “consider the coconut” as the Motunui villagers of Disney’s Moanapraise the tree, its husk, fibers, water, and meat as “all we need”. Hsu and Vázquez’s “molecular intimacies of empire” can move us toward an account of the coconut’s superfood status that incorporates production. Indeed, the seemingly paradoxical relationship between “superfood” and “ailing agriculture” illuminates the processes by which US empire and capital accumulation extend across geographic space and render biological materials into component parts such as oil and synthetic materials while relegating the risks of those processes to producers and laborers at the supply end of the commodity chain. This essay’s focus is therefore on the American agricultural entrepreneurs, tropical research stations, and penal farms that built a coconut plantation economy in the southern Philippines after 1898.

These Southern Philippine plantations were just one site in what others identify as a transimperial “coconut zone” extending west from the equatorial Pacific Islands to southern India and were also akin to Dole’s pineapple empire in Hawai’i and United Fruit’s banana empire in Central America.Coconuts, pineapples, and bananas constituted an American equatorial fruit empire that fed upon and nurtured discourses of tropicality—the late nineteenth century division of the globe into tropical and temperate worlds. Tropicality held that planning for temperate winters instilled EuroAmericans with traits conducive to industry while the heat and humidity of tropical climes produced a fecund nature and indolent natives who lived off, rather than mastered,maceta 25l the land.The exaggerated fecundity of the tropics was simultaneously a threat to white bodies and a justification for Indigenous dispossession that imagined precontact idylls in which fruits sprang forth from nature rather than human cultivation. The agricultural entrepreneurs of the fruit empire cast coercive labor regimes as necessary improvements on primitive agricultural methods. They neutralized fears of tropical landscapes by stressing their singular ability to “tame” jungles and domesticated foreign foods by emphasizing health. The promotional materials of United Fruit anointed the banana a “superfood” as early as the 1920s.A robust scholarship on tropical commodities has since reconnected the American appetite for bananas and pineapples to colonial plantation.The colonial plantations of the southern Philippines, however, were severed from the this larger history of fruit empires largely because the sites produced copra, the dried kernels from which the oil is expelled, and coconut oil was initially valued for its industrial applications. Coconut plantations preceded the embrace of coconut as a food by decades. The following essay offers an episodic accounting of the American coconut empire in the southern Philippines. It begins with the union of Euro-American industrialization and economic botany and colonial state power in the making of coconut plantations and a Philippine copra export industry in the early twentieth century. Coconut oil oozed unseen into soap, candles, and dynamite before making a more visible debut during the first world war as an ingredient in the butter substitute oleomargarine. Because Euro-American consumers already saw oleomargarine as unnatural, advertisers emphasized coconut oil’s whiteness as a sign of purity, healthfulness, and closeness to nature. But in the interwar period, North American dairy and cottonseed farmers cast Filipinos and their copra as impure in their effort to restrict its import. Their campaign blurred what were already fuzzy boundaries between the natural and the primitive, and between individual bodily risk and risk to the body politic. Yet the nearly four million Filipinos linked to the coconut commodity chain ultimately bore a collective risk that scholars call the “body burdens” of toxic exposure.Imprisoned laborers risked malaria by clearing forests for plantations while planters and pickers later faced exposure to the pesticides and herbicides used to manage the ecological risks of monocropping.

The US racialization of Philippine copra as impure placed what one Philippine official called a “black mark” on the country’s copra in global markets.Independence and the looming loss of US markets in 1946 led Philippine planters to encourage Filipinos to bear the risks of monocropping by eating more of the coconuts they grew and to forge new alliances with other Southeast Asian producers. Such alliances paved the way for the International Coconut Committee. The marketing machinery of the ICC coupled with the interwar association of coconut oil as “unrefined,” and a second world war literature on the coconut as a survival food primed the coconut for its reinvention as a superfood. Far from a traditional food of the tropical Pacific, the coconut’s place in the Philippine economy and dietary is an exemplar of the edible and unequal intimacies of empire.Botanists have long debated the origins and migration of the coconut palm tree across the equatorial Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Because the husks containing the kernel, water, and meat can root after exposure to seawater, nineteenth-century plant geographers speculated that maritime currents, rather than mariners, carried the husks from a singular origin point in either the Americas or East Asia. The thesis, much like tropicality, minimized the human role in plant propagation and has since yielded to a new consensus that allows for a multisited provenance and a guiding human hand.Asian–mainland travellers likely introduced the tree to the Philippine archipelago between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where it coevolved with the coastal ecology. Coconut palms thrive in sandy soils with circulating ground water. It gives back to the coast by blunting the impact of typhoons and absorbing “wash-over” into its dense root systems.Coconut fronds became shingles that roofed nipa homes; its husked fibers caulked ships; shells and husks could be used as household tools and burnt for fuel. Food vendors sweetened rice cakes with coconut sugar and fermented the tree’s sap into vinegar and tuba, a potent alcohol. Baked in open air under the hot sun, the kernels of the coconut formed copra, from which oil for cooking, washing, lubricating, and medicine was pressed. These myriad uses may have protected small cultivators from debt tenancy as financial capital encouraged the planting of sugar and hemp. The coconut was so ubiquitous that landlords in southeastern Luzon’s hemp exporting Kabikolregion allowed fallen nuts to compost in the soil.This would change within two decades of US rule at which point copra constituted thirty percent of Philippine exports—third behind the far more established trade in sugar and hemp.The rapid rise in copra exports points to the centrality of economic botany and scientific agriculture in making the American colonial state in the Philippines. The US declared war on Spain in 1898, the same year that the United States Department of Agriculture opened an Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction .

Soil pH usually affects the activity of nitrifier and denitrifier microorganisms

Increased C and N substrates can supply more essential substrates for N cycling microorganisms. For instance, Song et al. demonstrated the importance of substrate availability to fast growth of temperature-sensitive N2O producing microorganisms. The microbiome shift was closely associated with fast N mineralization at warm temperatures, resulting in increased N2O emissions. The increased microbial mineralization can produce more CO2, leading to O2 depletion , and eventually accelerated denitrification . The tropical zone with the highest annual temperature/rainfall and microbial activities had lower N2O emission compared to the warm temperate zone . We attribute this to accelerated completion of denitrification , C substrate loss and less accumulation of inorganic N. High rainfall may create wet and O2 limited conditions , which can accelerate completion of the denitrification process by converting N2O to N2 . Heavy rains may also transport C/N substrates and N2O formation deeper into the soil profile, where relatively more N2O can be consumed before it escapes to the atmosphere. Further, N cycling in tropical systems is generally very efficient between the soil and vegetation, which limits the accumulation of NH4 + and NO3 − in the soil thereby attenuating nitrification and denitrification processes. Hence, lower N2O emission was observed in tropical compared to warm temperate climates . With respect to crop type, our analysis showed that manure application increased N2O emission in soils of all upland crops, except for beans . A lack of enhanced N2O emissions from paddy rice cultivation following manure application was also noted and attributed to: the dominantly anaerobic conditions associated with paddy rice cultivation that limits nitrification and promotes conversion of N2O to N2 ; and low sample size in rice systems may affect the statistical robustness. In general,macetas cuadradas grandes cultivation of leguminous beans uptakes large amounts of base cations from soils and release H+ , leading to lower soil pH and based-cation fertility.

This may inhibit N2O production, as nitrifiers and denitrifiers prefer relatively neutral or mildly alkaline environments . Additionally, leguminous beans are N2-fixers and tend to receive lower manure applications resulting in lower production of N2O compared to other crops. The WFPS had a significant effect on N2O emission, with soils having a moderate WFPS experiencing the highest N2O emission . Soils with WFPS at 50–90% appear to provide the optimum conditions for denitrifier activity and N2O production. At these intermediate WFPS conditions, there is likely some O2 available to allow nitrification to proceed and the generation of NO3 − provides substrate for denitrification to occur in adjacent anaerobic microsites. In contrast, the major processin soils with WFPS b50% is nitrification with denitrification inhibited by the presence of O2 . When the WFPS is N90%, soil porosity is water-saturated, leading to greater conversion of N2O to N2 under strongly anaerobic conditions . It was notable that short-term application of manure produced higher N2O emission than long-term application . While the exact mechanisms remain unknown, one possible reason is that manure application enhances microbial growth and proliferation and stimulates soil N cycling by providing more available substrates and generating more anaerobic microsites . Once the N cycling microorganisms adapt to regular manure application, they may become less responsive to further manure applications over time. In addition, regular application of manure may lead to higher microbial biomass and therefore a higher capacity of soil microbial community to retain N, resulting in more uptake of N by the microbial community and less N2O emission. Another possibility is improved soil abiotic properties resulting from long-term manure application. As manures are applied annually, several soil properties would be progressively altered to a new steady-state compared to initial soil conditions.Zhou et al. showed no differences in N2O emissions from different manure sources , consistent with the findings of our meta-analysis. Raw manure resulted in higher N2O emission than pre-treated manure, consistent with the results of Nkoa . In general, raw manure has higher inorganic N and a lower C: N ratio than pre-treated manure . Higher inorganic N contents induce higher N2O emission, as NO3 − and NH4 + are essential substrates for denitrification and nitrification, respectively. Manures with a high C:N ratio would enhance microbial N assimilation , resulting in uptake of inorganic N from indigenous soil sources.

The lack of available N substrates would thereby decrease soil N2O emission. However, Zhu et al. demonstrated that manure pre-treatment did not reduce N2O emissions and Chantigny et al. showed no difference in N2O emissions between pre-treated and raw manures. We attribute these contradictory results to factors such as the high heterogeneity of manure, contrasting manure sources and pretreatment methods. In this meta-analysis, we did not specify manure forms or pretreatments for manure . Instead, we focused on the in-situ response of N2O emission to manure application from the perspective of agricultural soil rather than manure source management. As showed in Fig. 4, pre-treated manure showed lower effect size compared to raw manure. Manure treatment, for example, compost and digest, will change the physical, chemical and biological properties of the manure radically, resulting in the difference for N and C content in raw/pre-treated manure and soil N2O emission after manure application. Thus, a detailed quantitative index of manure characteristics may be more suitable for explaining the mechanisms mediating N2O emission from soil than qualitative categorical descriptions such as manure preparation and manure type. The overall increase in soil N2O emission resulting from manure application was consistently greater than zero , and the responses of N2O emission differed with manure characteristics. Different microbial activity and growth induced by different manure characteristics likely account for differences in N2O emission. In this analysis, manures with the highest N content had the highest soil N2O emissions compared with manures with medium and low N contents . This is in accordance with the consensus that higher inorganic N availability directly enhances nitrification-denitrification processes, resulting in higher N2O emission. Our analysis also found that manures with medium C content or C:N ratio had significantly lower N2O emission compared to those with lower or higher C contents and C:N ratios. Normally, when manures have a C:N ratio b 5 or low C content, they provide ample N for microbial growth and proliferation, resulting in net N mineralization .

Excessive inorganic N produced from mineralization can stimulate soil nitrification and denitrification processes, contributing to increased soil N2O emission. When the C:N ratio increases, the N content in manure cannot meet the N requirement for microbial growth and proliferation, and the microorganisms will utilize indigenous N from the soil resulting in microbial N immobilization . This process competes with heterotrophic denitrification and autotrophic nitrification to utilize the NO3 − and NH4 + substrates, respectively. Further, high manure C:N ratios or C content may initially enhance microbial activity, leading to consumption of O2 and development of anaerobic conditions . As a result, denitrification may persist for longer time periods, leading to increasing N2O emission .Soil texture did not significantly affect N2O emission following manure application . This is contradictory with several previous laboratory studies that found higher N2O emissions from fine-texture soils than coarse-texture soils . In general, soil texture strongly affects soil pore distribution, and thereby regulates water and O2 availability . Soils with coarse textures would favor nitrification as the dominant process . In contrast, denitrification preferentially occur in soils with fine textures ,frambuesas cultivo where O2 availability is often low . However, our analysis showed no difference in N2O emission between soils with coarse and fine textures from field trials . This was probably due to the long-term effects of manure application to fields, as continuous and intensive application can greatly change initial soil properties .In general, nitrifiers prefer neutral to moderately alkaline conditions , and heterotrophic denitrifiers are more active in neutral rather than acidic environments . Thus, N2O emission may be expected to be higher in neutral or alkaline soils compared to acidic soils. In contrast, our analysis revealed that the initial soil pH had no significant effect on N2O emission, contradictory with some previous laboratory studies . A potential reason for this discrepancy may result from manure being an effective acidic soil amelioration amendment that can increase soil pH . After manure application, the final soil pH may be increased to a neutral or alkaline value attenuating possible effects from the initially acidic soil conditions. Given this potential pH buffering and/or soil acidity amelioration effect, the activity of nitrifier and denitrifier communities between initially different pH soils may not be as pronounced as expected based on the initial soil pH values. Our analysis further found that initial soil organic C content significantly affected N2O emission and soils with moderate SOC content had the largest N2O emission. We attributed this to differential C-use efficiency among microorganisms. Soils with low SOC often have low microbial activity , which may lead to low N2O emission. Soils with high SOC may have their C persevered by chemical/physical protection mechanisms or SOC may have a high C/N ratio resulting in N-limitation for microbes. Additional research is warranted to better understand the role of soil carbon dynamics in N2O emission.

Overall, initial soil properties were not highly predictive of N2O emission response to manure application in field trials. As our analysis utilized a global dataset, several interacting factors that regulate N2O emission within a given site are obscured by combing with data from other regions. Additionally, intensive manure application may substantially alter the initial soil properties, making them non-representative of post-manure application conditions. In addition, the lack of significant effects of soil properties may be related to many confounding factors in the field trials, which may obscured the individual effect that can be observed in laboratory experiments on N2O emission with manure application. Compared to field trials, laboratory experiments are typically short-term incubations and receive less cumulative manure application . Therefore, WFPS, which can be controlled and measured during field experiments, is often a better predictor of N2O emission than initial soil properties, such as soil texture, pH and organic matter. Using real world data generated from field trials for our meta-analysis was an important distinction of our analysis since laboratory experiments are not able to capture all the complexities and interaction associated with field trials.California’s electricity system is undergoing unprecedented change. California’s current goals call for meeting 50% of the state’s retail electricity sales with renewable energy by 2030 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 . A 50% renewable electricity system in California will have a high penetration of variable solar and wind generation. Fluctuations and uncertainty of variable generation will make the operation of an already complex electricity system even more complicated. One way to offset the unpredictability of renewable resources is through DR programs, by which end users are induced to change their electric demand to match the supply. Historically, DR resources have been used to reduce the system level peaks . As California moves closer to its target of 50% renewables, traditional DR can provide local reliability, but more importantly faster time scale DR services will be more important for facilitating the intermittency of renewable generation. With higher penetration of intermittent renewable sources, the grid needs to deal with generation variability. Intra-hour variability and short-duration ramps are one of the immediate challenges faced by a 50% renewable grid. However, other challenges arise as the California grid decarbonizes over time. Historically peak hours were defined as the hours between 12pm-6pm . Proliferation of solar generation in California is forcing those peak hours to shift to later hours in the day 1 . This is most commonly referred to as the “Duck Curve” , where the increased solar generation is significantly dropping the net electricity demand during the day, which in turn results in significant ramps in the later hours . Agricultural irrigation pumping is a significant component of California’s electric demand and a resource that can provide DR services to the grid and contribute to its stability. In addition, distribution feeders that serve agricultural customers often have low diversity in their types of customer loads, and exercise of a large number of irrigation pumps on a single feeder can cause over-voltage issues .

The issue of limited information also has to do with the size of reporting units in the available data

California pistachios, on the other hand, are concentrated in the southern part of San Joaquin Valley. Moreover, they are planted in areas where the climatic conditions are mostly beneficial for them. Few events of adverse weather exist on record, which can be used for analysis. Therefore, the variance in CP in our range of interest is even more limited.The California Department of Food and Agriculture, as well as the US Department of Agriculture, usually report average yields on the county level. If the counties are large, compared to the growing area, few observations will be generated, and the averaging process will get rid of useful extreme observations on the sub-county level. The aggregated reporting problem, together with crop concentration, limits the possibilities of traditional econometric analysis on crop yields. I address this problem here for California pistachios, but the challenge might prove a barrier for research on other crops as well. Consider not only high value commercial crops concentrated in a few California counties, but also “orphan crops”: local crops which have received less attention from researchers and the private sector, yet generate substantial nutritional value for low income communities in developing countries. The African Orphan Crops Consortium, an initiative to promote research and use of these crops in Africa, list 101 crop of interest on its website, many of them perennial.2 Cullis and Kunert note that orphan crops “…are poorly documented as to their cultivation and use, and are adapted to specific agro-ecological niches and marginal land with weak or no formal seed supply systems”. Research on specific orphan varieties might therefore suffer from the same challenges of California pistachios: biological complexity, concentration of growing acreage,blueberry plants in pots and few data reporting units. In this chapter, I combine two approaches to estimate the yield response of California pistachios to winter CP count. The first approach is a “big data” one: I enhance a California yield panel of five counties with local temperatures at the pistachio growing areas. I use satellite data and temperature readings from local weather stations to create a large data set that can be connected with the yearly yields.

Substantially increasing the number of explanatory variables, this allows for more nuances observations. The second approach is an aggregate estimation methodology, previously used in agricultural productivity literature but –to my knowledge– not yet explored in climate literature. This approach notes that the observed outcome variable is a mix of unobserved sub-unit heterogeneity in the data generating process. Information about this heterogeneity is used to recover the relationship between temperatures and yields. The result of this exercise is the first successful recovery of the nonlinear yield response to winter chill in commercial pistachio production. I apply my findings to climate predictions in the current growing areas to show the potential impact of climate change on California pistachios in the next 20 years, and predict that a significant decline can be expected. California pistachios are a high value crop, with grower revenues of $1.8 billion in 2016. The most common variety is “Kerman” , and almost all the California acreage is planted in five adjacent counties in the southern part of the San Joaquin valley. In recent years, rising winter daytime temperatures and decreasing fog incidence have lowered winter CP counts. Climatologists have concluded that winter chill counts will continue to dwindle , putting pistachios in danger at their current locations. To better predict the trajectory for this crop and make informed investment and policy decisions, the yield response function to chill must first be assessed. This task has proven quite challenging. The effects of chill thresholds on bloom can be explored in controlled environments, but for various reasons these relationships are not necessarily reflected in commercial yield data. For example, Pope et al. report that the threshold level of CP for successful bud breaking in California pistachios was experimentally assessed at 69, but could not identify a negative response of commercial yields to chill portions of the same level or even lower. They use a similar yield panel of California counties, but only have one “representative” CP measure per county-year. Using Bayesian methodologies, they fail to find a threshold CP level for pistachios, and reach the conclusion that “Without more data points at the low amounts of chill, it is difficult to estimate the minimum-chill accumulation necessary for average yield.” The statistical problem of low variation in treatment at the growing area, encountered by Pope et al., is very common in published articles on pistachios.

Simply put, pistachios are not planted in areas with adverse climate. Too few “bad” years are therefore available for researchers to work with when trying to estimate commercial yield responses. An ideal experiment would randomize a chill treatment over entire orchards, but that is not possible. Researchers resort either to small scale experimental settings, with limitations as mentioned above, or to yield panels, which usually are small in size , length , or both. Zhang and Taylor investigate the effect of chill portions on bloom and yields in two pistachio growing areas in Australia, growing the “Sirora” variety. Using data from “selected orchards” over five years, they note that on two years where where chill was below 59 portions in one of the locations, bloom was uneven. Yields were observed, and while no statistical inference was made on them, the authors noted that “factors other than biennial bearing influence yield”. Elloumi et al. Investigate responses to chill in Tunisia, where the “Mateur” variety is grown. They find highly non-linear effects of chill on yields, but this stems from one observation with a very low chill count. Standard errors are not provided, and the threshold and behavior around it are not really identified. Kallsen uses a panel of California orchards, with various temperature measures and other control variables to find a model which best fits the data. Unfortunately, only 3 orchards are included in this study, and the statistical approach mixes a prediction exercise with the estimation goal, potentially sacrificing the latter for the former. Besides the potential over-fitting using this technique, the dependent variables in the model are not chill portions but temperature hour counts with very few degree levels considered, and no confidence interval is presented. Finally, Benmoussa et al. use data collected at an experimental orchard in Tunisia with several pistachio varieties. They reach an estimate for the critical chill for bloom, and find a positive correlation between chill and tree yields, with zero yield following winters with very low chill counts. However, they also have many observation with zero or near-zero yields above their estimated threshold, and the external validity of findings from an experimental plot to commercial orchards is not obvious.Pistachio growing areas are identified using USDA satellite data with pixel size of roughly 30 meters. About 30% of pixels identified as pistachios are singular. As pistachios don’t grow in the wild in California, these are probably missidentified pixels. Aggregating to 1km pixels, I keep those pixels with at least 20 acres of pistachios in them. Looking at the yearly satellite data between 2008-2017, I keep those 1km pixels with at least six positive pistachio identifications. These 2,165 pixels are the grid on which I do temperature interpolations and calculations. Observed temperatures for 1984-2017 come from the California Irrigation Management Information System , a network of weather stations located in many counties in California,draining plant pots operated by the California Department of Water Resources. A total of 27 stations are located within 50km of my pistachio pixels. Missing values at these stations are imputed as the temperature at the closest available station plus the average difference between the stations at the week-hour window. Future chill is calculated at the same interpolation points, with data from a CCSM4 model CEDA . These predictions use an RCP8.5 scenario. This scenario assumes a global mean surface temperature increase of 2o C between 2046-2065 . The data are available with predictions starting in 2006, and include daily maximum and minimum on a 0.94 degree latitude by 1.25 degree longitude grid. Hourly temperature are calculated from the predicted daily extremes, using the latitude and date . I then calibrate these future predictions with quantile calibration procedure , using a week-hour window.

Past observed and future predicted hourly temperatures in the dormancy season are interpolated at each of the 2,165 pixels, and chill portions are calculated from these temperatures. Erez and Fishman produced an Excel spreadsheet for chill calculations, which I obtain from the University of California division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, together with instructions for growers . For speed, I code them in an R function . The data above are used for estimation and later for prediction of future chill effects. For the estimation part, I have a yield panel with 165 county-year observations. For each year in the panel, I calculate the share of county pixels that had each CP level. For example: in 2016, Fresno county had 0.4% of its pistachio pixels experiencing 61 CP, 1.8% experiencing 62 CP, 12% experiencing 63 CP, and so on. The support of CP through the panel is [36, 86]. Past county yields are from crop reports published by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Figure 3.1 presents chill counts and their estimated effects in percent yield change for two time periods: 2000-2018 and 2020-2040. The top left panel shows the chill counts in the 1/4 warmest years between 2000 and 2018 . The top right panel shows the chill counts in the 1/4 warmest years in climate predictions between 2020 and 2040. Chill at the pistachio growing areas is likely to drop substantially within the lifespan of existing trees.Results from the polynomial regression are presented in Table 3.2 . The first coefficient is for an intercept term, and it is a zero with very wide error margins. This makes sense, as centering around the means also gets rid of intercepts. The second coefficient is positive, as we would expect, and statistically significant. The third coefficient is negative, as we would also expect since the returns from chill should decrease at some point, but not statistically significant even at the 10% level. However, as dropping it would eliminate the decreasing returns feature, I keep it at the cost of having a wide confidence area. With the estimated coefficients, I build the polynomial curve that represents the effect of temperatures on yields. It is presented in Figure 3.2 with a bold dashed line. The 90% confidence area boundaries are the dotted lines bounding it above and below. Note that the upper bound of the confidence area does not curve down like the lower one. This is the manifestation of the third coefficient’s P-value being greater than 0.1. In both cases, the confidence area was calculated by bootstrapping. The data was resampled and estimated 500 times, producing 500 curves with the resulting parameters. At each CP level, I take the 5th and 95th percentiles of bootstrapped curve values as the bounds for the confidence area. This approach also deals with the potential spatial correlation in error terms. Another minor issue requiring the bootstrap approach is that the implicit potential yield estimation should change the degrees of freedom in the non-linear regressions when estimating the standard errors. In the lower panel of Figure 3.2, a histogram of positive shares is presented. That is, for each chill portion, the count of panel observations where the share of that chill portion was positive. The actual shares of the very low and very high portions are usually quite low. This shows the relatively small number of observations with low chill counts. The two yield effects curves look very similar in the relevant chill range. By both estimates, the yield loss is very close to 0 at higher chill portions, and starts declining substantially somewhere in the upper 60’s, as the experimental literature would suggest. Interestingly, the polynomial curve does not exceed zero effect, although it is not mechanically bounded from above like the logistic curve. This probably reflects the fact that historically, the average growing conditions has not deviated much from the optimal range. The “within” transformation hence did not deviate the potential yield much from the optimum in this case.

The monetary cost of water saved can be viewed as savings on the intensive margin

Geo-engineering proposals involve global scale interventions in the atmosphere and hydrosphere that would revert some of the changes in the total temperature distribution worldwide . In contrast, MCE is a small scale concept, aiming to tweak the temperature tail distributions where necessary rather than shifting the entire distribution year round. Many MCE technologies already exist and are used by growers, making sense both on the technical and economic dimensions. I believe many more examples are out there to be found, and many more will evolve as growers adapt to climate change.Respondents seem satisfied with CIMIS services. About 72% of respondents reported using CIMIS at least occasionally. The user types reporting “often” using CIMIS the most were Agriculture, followed by Golf Course Management and Water Districts. These user types are indeed likely to use CIMIS on a day to day basis, at least for some part of the year. In research and planning, on the other hand, one might use CIMIS to draw data only at an initial stage of a given task. In general terms, of the respondents who report using CIMIS to some extent, 77% say it is at least “moderately important” for their operations, with 22% reporting CIMIS as “extremely important”. The frequency of use and importance scores are positively correlated: frequent users also report high importance of CIMIS to their operations, which makes sense. The correlations between frequency and satisfaction, and between importance and satisfaction, seem less pronounced. There might be users who use CIMIS infrequently, perhaps because only a smaller part of their tasks involve the weather or climate information provided. Nevertheless, they seem satisfied with CIMIS services, as the satisfaction scores are relatively high. We also asked respondents to rank factors which hinder further use of CIMIS. Various answers were provided, given the results of initial surveys,blueberry packaging container and there was also room to specify other answers. Two main concerns exist, especially for users in agriculture: how reliable is the data and how to integrate it into existing systems and practices.

Many growers and consultants in agriculture complement CIMIS with other data sources, such as soil moisture sensors, irrigation logs, and flow meters. Integrating information from multiple sources into decision making is a challenge faced by virtually all growers.599 respondents, about a quarter of our survey, reported agriculture to be their primary business. Out of these, about half work on one farm, and the rest are consultants of sorts . 89% of respondents in agriculture report using CIMIS to some extent. Growers and consultants were asked to report their total acreage, selecting into pre-determined ranges. Summing these, we have 318,156 acres covered by growers, and almost 3 million acres covered by consultants. Many of the questions for growers and consultants were similar. One notable exception is regarding water use. The team decided not to ask growers how much water they use, fearing that growers would not want to share this information and would not finish the survey. However, consultants were asked how much water their clients use on average. This question was presented in the online survey as a slider bar, with a default at the lower bar , and an option to check a “Not applicable” box. This box was not checked very often. Instead, it seems like many consultants who did not want to answer this questions left the slider bar at the default value of 0.5 AF/acre. This is a very low value for irrigated crops, and we assume that all these responses are basically non-answers. Ignoring them, the average reported water use is 2.96 AF/acre per year . This seems like a very reasonable distribution for water use in irrigated crops. Indeed, the USDA’s most recent Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey reports a total of 7,543,928 irrigated acres in California, with a total of 23,488,939 AF of water applied, and a resulting average water use of 3.11 AF/acre, only a minor deviation of the reported average. Given the responses from agricultural consultants, we seem to have captured a very large portion of the drip irrigated acres in California. As a baseline for valuation, we will use the total 2013 drip irrigated acreage from the USDA survey, 2.8 million acres. While some growers might use CIMIS with gravitational or sprinkler systems as well, our understanding of the qualitative and quantitative responses is that CIMIS is mostly important for drip.

We exclude the potential of CIMIS values on non-drip acreage, noting that our estimates would therefore be conservative in that sense.One can also consider gains on an extensive margin. The water saved by use of CIMIS is likely to be used in agriculture as well. This means more acres can be grown with the same initial amount of water. The “full” economic value of the water saved by CIMIS in agriculture is the value of agricultural output that can be produced with it on acres not irrigated before. This following analysis includes the economic value of growing alone, without the added values of post-harvest and economic multiplier effects, and probably a safe lower bound. We do not, however, include a counter-factual productivity of non-irrigated land. In California, this is probably range land or acreage that is too sloped for traditional irrigation methods, and therefore of very low economic productivity. With 1.92 million AF of water saved by CIMIS, and an average use of 2.5 AF/acre by growers , the savings from CIMIS can water an extra 768,000 acres in California. To put this in context, this is about double the total walnut acreage in 2016. Because of economic and technical constraints of water transport, it is hard to determine which crops would be planted in these extra acres. A conservative approximation assumes that the water saved by CIMIS serves to replicate the existing distribution of crops , taking the average value of productivity of an acre as the benchmark. The weighted average of grower revenue per acre in 2016 was $3,757 per acre1 . Multiplying by 768,000 acres, a conservative approximation for the contribution from CIMIS to California’s GDP via agriculture is about $2.89 billion. CIMIS allows for more precise irrigation, which means not only saving water but also increasing yields: water application can be adjusted to the plant requirements, which might depend on the weather and growing phase. We ask growers and consultants how does CIMIS contribute in increasing yields, ranking from 1 to 5 . How should we quantify these ranked contributions? Taylor, Parker, and Zilberman mention average yield effects of drip irrigation, ranging between 5% and 25% increase in output. This extra yield effect is explained by allowing for more consistent soil humidity and the precision of the irrigation.

This aspect of drip depends on weather and ET information, such as the one provided by CIMIS, to assess the water intake by plants and the appropriate amount of water required. We calculate an average yield effect of CIMIS by reconciling the respondent rankings with a portion of the yield effects from drip irrigation. For a lower estimate, rankings between 1 and 3 are attributed 0% yield effect,blueberry packaging boxes and the rankings of 4 and 5 get 5%. For a higher estimate, ranking of 1 gets 0% yield increase, ranking of 2 and 3 get 5% yield increase, and the rankings of 4 and 5 get a 10% yield increase. These percent yield effects are then averaged among the respondents. We aggregate growers and consultants with equal weights. 41% of respondents rank the importance of CIMIS for yield effects at 4-5. The low estimate for yield contribution of CIMIS results in 2% output increase, and the higher estimate at 5.9% increase. At a conservative estimate of per-acre income of $3,757 for growers, this represents an extra yearly income of $76 – $222 per acre. For the 2.8 million acres using drip irrigation, this would account for $213 – $622 million yearly from the contribution of CIMIS to yields. Assuming again the demand is elastic with a coefficient of -2, these estimates would halve to $107 – $311 million. These are gains from water saving in parks, golf courses, and gardens. They were assessed as a small portion of the total gains from CIMIS in the 1996 report by Parker et al., totaling about $2.3 million . Our current estimate for these gains is much higher. The discrepancy from the 1996 report is due to several factors. First, we believe to have reached out to more respondents in this sector. Second, water prices in California have gone up substantially. Third, there might be more use of CIMIS and smart irrigation planning in the sector compared to 20 years ago. We focus on responses from landscape managers and golf course managers. They report their operating acreage , the average water use, and the estimated saving rate by using CIMIS. We have 28 respondents in golf courses with 6,750 acres in total, and 137 respondents in landscape management with 179,000 acres. The total sum is about 21 times the acreage of the equivalent category in the 1996 report. Based on the initial interviews, we grouped them into a single user category, but still asked them to select into landscape or golf later in the survey. Table 2.2 proved us wrong. Surprisingly, it turned out that the users in landscape management reported much higher water saving rates with CIMIS. This could potentially be explained by technology: big turf areas are still likely to be irrigated with sprinklers, which allow lower savings rates even if CIMIS is used for optimal water calculations. On the other hand, a lot of non-turf landscaping might be irrigated with drip. The total amount of water, saved yearly with CIMIS according to our respondents, is 220,707 AF. Water prices for these types of users are much higher than in agriculture. We can use the municipal water rates to get an estimate of the monetary savings. The EBMUD rates, effective 2018, are $5.29 per 100 cubic feet or $4.12 for non-potable water. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power charges commercial, industrial and governmental users by tiers.

For January 2019, the tier 1 rates are $5.264 per 100CF, and tier 2 rates are $8.667. The specific tier 1 allotment is set for each user. However, some non-profit users might get rates as low as $2.095 for tier 1 and $3.595 for tier 2. For comparison with agriculture, note that the lowest rate cited above for municipal water is more than four times higher than the “high” rate for agriculture in Taylor, Parker, and Zilberman . The spread of prices, even within municipalities, suggests that they might not reflect the marginal cost of providing water to consumers. However, water utilities have regulated rates and usually work on a “cost plus” basis, such that the water rates should reflect their real average cost. These rates can therefore be used to assess the economic gains from water savings. The different municipal rates serve to construct bounds for our estimates. This first order approximation does not take into account the potential elasticity in water demand, or the potential effect of CIMIS in lowering residential water pricing by curbing down demand. However, we think they are good benchmarks and could definitely serve as an estimate for order of magnitude. The lower rate is the LADWP non-profit rate, which might not apply for many CIMIS users. Assuming nobody exceeds their tier 1 allocation, the value of water savings amounts to $201 million per year. For a higher EBMUD rate of $5.29, the savings amount to $509 million per year. For a reasonable upper bound, assuming we are in Los Angeles and 90% of the water consumption is in tier 1 , the sum is $539 million. Unlike the case of agriculture, we do not believe the survey responses in this category have captured all the relevant acreage. Neither do we have a good sense of the total relevant acreage in California, which could indicate by what factor these estimated gains could be extrapolated. However, the sums are substantial as they are. We take them as our total estimates for gains from CIMIS, noting that they are an under-estimate in this sense. This chapter analyzes the gains from CIMIS, focusing on agriculture and some urban uses.

The marshes are separated from the main channel of the slough by a railroad berm

Sampling in the present study occurred during the silking period of maize, when crop N uptake reaches a maximum. The rhizosphere may be N-depleted in comparison to bulk soil, and microbial N limitation may account for the decreased abundance of these N-cycling genes. Differences in soil organic matter or shifts in root exudation during development leading to altered rhizosphere carbon availability may also account for the change in direction of the rhizosphere effect in the present study as compared to the literature. Increased sampling frequency over the course of the growing season paired with metabolomic analysis of root exudates would provide insight into the mechanisms linking root C release and N uptake dynamics to microbial N-cycling gene abundances. We hypothesized that differences in N-cycling gene abundance between conventional and organic systems would reflect adaptive shifts, increasing the abundance of gene pathways linking system-specific N inputs to plant-available species, but this hypothesis was not supported. Only two of six genes were affected by soil management history. The abundance of the nosZ and bacterial amoA genes, the only genes affected by the M × R interaction, was higher in the organic system . The increase in abundance of the nosZ gene could potentially indicate greater conversion of N2O to N2 and decreased greenhouse gas production, while increased abundance of the amoA gene may reflect increased conversion of ammonium to nitrite and subsequent nitrification products. Higher soil carbon as a result of long-term organic matter applications at this site may contribute to higher abundances of the nosZ gene in bulk and rhizosphere soil in this system. Putz et al. found that higher soil organic carbon under a ley rotation increased expression of the nrfA and nosZ genes relative to the nirK gene as compared to a conventional cereal rotation,grow bags for gardening favoring higher rates of dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium and lower rates of denitrification. However, previous work in the treatments examined in the present study found that abundances of the amoA and nosZ genes were not correlated with gross rates of N transformation processes.

Prediction of cropping system impacts on microbial N cycling therefore requires a nuanced integration of gene abundances with parameters such as carbon availability, moisture content, and temperature within soil aggregate microenvironments over time. That few differences were observed late in the growing season between N-cycling genes in systems receiving organic or inorganic N inputs is consistent with the results of a meta-analysis by Geisseler and Scow, which found that N fertilizer impacts on microbial communities tend to fade over time. Sampling occurred at silking in the present study, long after the preplant fertilizer and compost applications that likely maximize differentiation between systems. Potential N limitation in the rhizosphere in both systems may also have outweighed management effects. Co-occurrence networks, which provide insight into ecological interactions among microbial taxa, were influenced by M, R, and M × R effects. Bulk and rhizosphere bacterial networks from the conventional system had the same number of nodes but were more densely connected than networks from the corresponding soil compartment in the organic system . Other bulk soil comparisons of organic and conventional agroecosystems using networks constructed from OTU-level data have found conventional networks to have more nodes or, alternatively, fewer nodes and edges than organic networks. Clearly, predicting cooccurrence patterns of incredibly diverse microbial communities based on a conventional-versus-organic classification is too simplistic. Agricultural management is likely better represented as a continuum than discrete categories, and causal relationships between specific practices and network topological properties have yet to be determined. An M × R interaction was also observed for network properties in which size, density, and centralization were lower in the rhizosphere network from the conventional system than from the organic system . These network properties follow the same pattern as alpha diversity of bacterial communities, suggesting a shared yet perplexing cause: while the mechanism remains unclear, rhizosphere communities appear to be converging from very distinct bulk soils towards similar diversity and structural metrics. Conventional agriculture is hypothesized to disrupt the connections between bulk soil and rhizosphere networks, as tillage and mineral fertilization are proposed to disturb fungi and soil fauna that serve as a bridge between bulk soil and rhizosphere environments.

While tillage does not differ between the systems we measured, fertilization effects are likely partly responsible for the observed interaction. Regardless of the mechanisms involved, the system specific direction of the rhizosphere effect on cooccurrence network properties suggests that management and plant influence interactively determine not only which taxa are present, but how they interact, with potential implications for agriculturally relevant functions and ecological resilience. Hub ASVs were identified in each network based on high values for normalized betweenness centrality, a metric often used to describe keystone taxa. Organic networks had lower normalized betweenness centrality values than conventional networks . Lower betweenness centrality values for hub taxa may indicate that network structure depends less on individual species, potentially increasing resilience to environmental stresses that could destabilize networks overly dependent on hub taxa sensitive to those specific stresses. Different hub ASVs were identified in each rhizosphere environment, but information on the ecology of these taxa is generally absent from the literature. Although it would be misleading to state that these taxa are keystone species in their respective habitats without experimental validation, the fact that many of these taxa were also identified through indicator species analysis suggests that they play important ecological roles. Future work could explore the genomes of these ASVs to discern why they are important in their respective agricultural systems and test the hypothesis that they serve as keystone species using synthetic communities. Concluding whether adaptive plant-microbe feed backs result in an M × R interaction leading to shifts in other rhizosphere processes is complicated by the importance of poorly understood fungal communities and methodological limitations of this study. Numerous fungal taxa respond to the M × R interaction according to our differential abundance analysis , yet knowledge of these taxa remains limited due in part to the constraints of culture-dependent methods prevalent in the past. Nonetheless, fungi influence inter-kingdom interactions and agriculturally relevant processes in the rhizosphere, and novel molecular biology tools could be used to improve our understanding of key fungal regulators identified in these analyses.

Metagenomics and -transcriptomics would facilitate a much more comprehensive analysis of potential functional shifts. A highly useful starting point would be to delve into dynamic variation in microbial genes involved in carbon metabolism and nitrogen cycling in the rhizosphere, in combination with root exudate metabolomics and measurements of root N uptake. Stable isotope labeling and in situ visualization methods could further complement our understanding of how management, plant roots, and their interactive effects shape rhizosphere processes. The scope of this study was intentionally restricted to a single genotype of one crop in two management systems to limit the main sources of variation to the management and rhizosphere effects that were of primary interest, but the limits to inference of this small-scale study must be considered. Other studies in maize have found that strong legacy effects of soil managementhistory are generally acted upon in a similar manner by two maize cultivars and that rhizosphere bacterial community composition varies only slightly among hybrids from different decades of release. Testing whether these limited effects of plant selection hold true for additional contrasting genotypes and genetic groups of maize would further complement this work. Furthermore, variation in root system architecture across crop genotypes might interact with tillage and soil properties responsive to management effects. Management practices such as the inclusion of forage or cover crops planted in stands rather than rows might affect the differentiation of bulk and rhizosphere soil uniquely from systems based on perennial crops, successive plantings of row crops in the same locations,garden grow bags and/or minimal tillage. Study designs incorporating more genotypes, management systems, and cultivation environments would therefore be highly useful to test how results of this study may be extrapolated to other settings. Future studies should also identify functional genes that are upregulated or downregulated in the rhizosphere under specific agricultural management practices. Whether such functional shifts are adaptive will provide insight into the relationship between agroecology and ecology. Positive eco-evolutionary feedbacks resulting in adaptive microbial communities have been described in unmanaged ecosystems, for example, habitat-adapted symbiosis in saline or arid environments. If similar adaptive recruitment can occur with annual crops in the context of agroecosystems, maximizing this process should be added to the list of rhizosphere engineering strategies and targets for G × E breeding screens. Finally, while our results provide evidence that management and plant influence interact to shape microbial communities at one sampling point, we highlight the need to reframe the M × R interaction as a dynamic process. Rhizosphere communities may be more different from one another than bulk soil communities because roots develop right after tillage and fertilization, when management systems are most distinct. Plants are not static entities, but active participants in the ongoing process of rhizosphere recruitment. As an alternative to the “rhizosphere snapshot,” we propose a “rhizosphere symphony” model that acknowledges the active role of root exudates in orchestrating the composition and function of microbial communities.

Altered root exudation during development and in response to water and nutrient limitation can upregulate or downregulate microbial taxa and functions, as a conductor brings together different sections of instruments in turn during a symphony. Although it is unknown whether this plasticity in exudate composition occurs in response to agricultural management, observations of changed exudate quantity and quality in response to soil type and long-term N fertilization suggest that it is possible. Differences in the timing of nutrient availability between management systems, such as delayed N release from cover crop mineralization compared to mineral fertilizer, could thus result in management-system-specific exudate dynamics and rhizosphere microbial communities, i.e., an M × R interaction. If true, this mechanism suggests that we may be able to manipulate the sound of the symphony by talking to the conductor: plant-driven strategies may be instrumental in maximizing beneficial rhizosphere interactions throughout the season.The Elkhorn Slough is located in the Central Monterey Bay area and feeds into the head of the Monterey Submarine Canyon in the newly designated Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The slough is described by the Department of Fish and Game as “one of the most ecologically important estuarine systems in California” . Elkhorn Slough was designated as an environmentally sensitive habitat in the 1976 California Coastal Plan and over 1400 acres of the slough are in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. Water quality in the Elkhorn Slough is heavily influenced by both past and present human activities on the land surrounding the slough. This is especially true of agriculture. Non-point source pollutants from farm use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been identified as a primary cause of water quality degradation in the Elkhorn Slough. Agriculture is one of the main land uses in the slough watershed with about 26% of the local watershed in agricultural production. Of this land, strawberry production accounts for the greatest area under production . Field testing and monitoring of alternative farming practices that decrease dependence on synthetic chemical inputs has been extremely limited. What is needed is the development of farming systems that are economically as well as environmentally sustainable. The Azevedo Ranch site encompasses 137 acres, approximately 120 of which are currently in strawberry cultivation. The land is jointly owned by The Nature Conservancy and the Monterey County Agricultural and Historical Land Conservancy, whose stated goal is to keep this property in open space in perpetuity. The property will be divided into a wetlands buffer zone surrounding three “pocket marshes,” and an upland agricultural zone.They are connected to tidal water by culverts through the berm, making each independent. The buffer zone, which is currently in cultivation, will be restored with native vegetative cover including native bunch grasses, Coast Live Oaks, and maritime chaparral. The upper agricultural zone will encompass 83 acres and will eventually be converted to low-input sustainable agriculture.

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