Our knowledge about the past is fragmentary for a number of reasons, and there are many challenges facing our approach.Many of these are by no means unique to the study of agricultural systems, and relate to the nature of the historical and archaeological records.Firstly, we must deal only with the limited material remains of past societies , or the marks they left on the world around them.Features of behavior and practice are not preserved directly but instead have to be inferred from what does remain.Secondly, some regions and time periods are better-studied than others, and this reflects a number of factors, including ecological conditions, that make some regions easier to excavate than others, the personal interests or theoretical persuasions of researchers, and broader social and historical factors that shape which countries and institutions have the money to conduct such research.In other words, there are certain biases in our records of the past of which we need to be aware when attempting to draw broader inferences.One potential source of error comes from the fact that although our units of analysis are the NGAs and the societies that have inhabited them in the past, we often only have information from a small number of archaeological sites or a limited set of historical records.For example, our inferences about the early stages of agriculture in the Kachi Plain, discussed above, are extrapolated from the single site of Mehrgarh.A potential risk here is that this site may not be representative of what was going on in the wider NGA.On a practical point, there is not much that can be done here except to recognize that we must work with whatever information we have, be aware of the potential limitations and sources of error, and be ready and willing to update our understanding as and when new information is discovered.Our general strategy is to make as clear as possible the assumptions involved in defining and coding these variables,ebb and flow trays and in how they will get incorporated into further inferences about the productivity of past agricultural systems.

One way to make sure we are using the best available data and are aware of its limitations is by engaging fully with academic historians and archaeologists who are experts on our focal regions and time periods.Such experts enter into the process in a number of ways.Firstly, they help us navigate what is known already, identifying the most relevant literature, aiding in the design of the codebooks, and advising on what information is or is not feasible to obtain.Secondly, they verify that the information being collected is based on the most up-to-date knowledge and scholarship.Finally, as we move forward and begin analyzing these data statistically, experts will also be able to provide important background information and context that can help in the interpretation of the results.It should be noted that researchers can sometimes come to different conclusions about how historical and archaeological records should be interpreted.In other words, there is often conflicting evidence, or a lack of consensus about what the data are telling us.We try to avoid imposing any kind of typological scheme or monolithic theoretical perspective on the data, and the coding framework allows us to indicate where there are disagreements.Another practical step we have taken in dealing with how to interpret the information that is present in the archaeological and historical records is to try and make the coding process as objective as possible.This is done by focusing on presence/absence-type features, which are often much easier to code with certainty, and almost by definition are more consistent across different situations than quantitative estimates or judgments.We have found it often helps to break things down into component parts that can be more readily coded in a presence/absence manner, particularly for societies known only archaeologically.For example, rather than simply asking whether irrigation was practiced or not, we can ask if certain features related to irrigation systems were present or not.In our experience, certain features, such as the presence or absence of metal tools or food storage facilities have proven relatively straightforward to code.

Other variables have proven more challenging because, due to their annual or cyclical nature, many agricultural practices can be quite hard to discern archaeologically.A solution to this is to have very specific criteria about justifying the presence of such techniques.For example, for crop rotation, a sensible justification could be that within a particular site, a spectrum of crops were grown that is compatible with the rotation of crops.The point here is not that these justifications are without error, or cannot be challenged, but rather, that the reason given should be made clear.Attempting to code data systematically across different regions highlights that, for many variables of interest, there will be many cases in which not much, if anything, is known.Because this project is primarily interested in the broad patterns and processes of human history, the issue of missing data or scholarly disagreement perhaps matters less than if we are trying to find the particular details of a given time or place.In other words, as long as we have information on enough variables and enough regions then major trends should still be discernible.On a practical level, we are able to incorporate such sources of uncertainty into any statistical analyses that we perform, and we can explore whether making different assumptions about the data affects our overall results and conclusions.Although sometimes frustrating from an analytical perspective, highlighting where there are gaps in our understanding also serves a useful purpose in the wider sense in that it highlights those areas where future research efforts can be productively targeted.Having outlined out the general factors that will be important in assessing potential productivity in past societies, in this section, we sketch out how we are combining earth system science approaches with historical and geographical information to create a model of carrying capacity in past societies.Our general approach is to take estimates of productivity based on the output of simulations of modern crop growth and then modify these estimates based on the kind of historical information discussed above.

A variety of process-based models have been developed to simulate crop growth and productivity using detailed physical and biological processes.The details of the inputs required by these models can vary greatly depending on the question being addressed and the scale at which a simulation is being applied.For this project, we are making use of the LPJmL global crop model of , which simulates the productivity of a limited number of broad crop functional types through an explicit model of crop growth and development based on the features of such plants, their ecophysiology, and the management techniques applied to them.The model uses inputs relating to climate and weather in order to assess productivity under a variety of scenarios.One of the advantages of LPJmL for our purposes is that it is constructed at a suitable level of abstraction, with a limited number of inputs, which is suitable for projecting back into the past.A downside of simulations is that they are often time consuming to run and require specialist expertise to develop.To overcome this constraint, emulators have been developed that are computationally fast, statistical representations of process-based models.6 In previous work, developed an emulator of the LPJmL model.It generates a spatial map of maize, rice, cereal, or oil crop yields at approximately 50 km resolution.The crop emulator allows for variable management levels, allowing us to capture the effects of developing agricultural technologies.The emulation framework takes a matter of minutes to derive a global map of crop yield for a specified climate input and crop management level.This speed compares to several days of computing that would be required if we were using its underlying simulators.We are, therefore, using this emulator approach for reasons of tractability, flexibility, and to facilitate the analysis of modelling uncertainties.To date, LPJmL has been used primarily to simulate current and future conditions.However, the emulation approach allows us to take the modelled associations between climate and crop productivity and project these back into the past using information about past climate.For this project, we have developed a crop-modelling framework that uses emulation of a crop simulator and a paleo climate simulator.This paleo climate emulator generates spatially and seasonally resolved fields of temperature, precipitation,4×8 flood tray and cloud cover as functions of the Earth’s orbital configuration.

The climate data is then passed to an emulator of the LPJmL crop model.As with the original emulator, the outputs of this crop emulator are spatial maps of crop yields, but this time, those maps are derived from the estimated climate at defined periods in the past.To make the outputs more relevant to past societies, the suite of crops being considered will be extended beyond the maize, rice, cereal, or oil crops of the original emulator to take into account additional important classes of crops, such as tropical cereals and tropical roots.The simulator and the emulator also estimate productivity under rain-fed and irrigated conditions, which can help inform our historical estimates of productivity based on knowledge about the presence of irrigation techniques in the past.With these estimates of productivity in hand, we can set about adjusting them based on the historical data on past agricultural systems described above.The basic idea is that within a Geographical Information System framework, we can take the initial coverage maps supplied as output from the emulator and apply a formula that shifts the estimated yields up or down depending on the particular crops, agricultural techniques and practices, and other relevant factors at different points in time and in different regions.As a first step in adjusting the emulator output, our data can tell us when agriculture began being practiced in different regions and which crops are most important to assess for different regions.Adjustments will have to be made based on the human-induced biological improvements that crop varieties have undergone.For example, was able to estimate the improvement in maize yields that occurred over time in Oaxaca, Mexico, based on the increase in the length of ears of corn evident in the archaeological record.Furthermore, information about variables, such as the size of fields and whether land is farmed permanently or more sporadically , will affect the amount of land that could be devoted to food production and, therefore, the carrying capacity under that system.The effects of other variables can also be assessed with reference to the literature about the degree to which techniques such as fertilizing, mulching, or crop rotation affect crop productivities.This process can be conducted at several scales.Firstly, because the historical data relate directly to particular NGAs, we can make adjustments at this level to estimate productivity and carrying capacity at the NGA level.

However, because our NGAs are well-sampled geographically, we can use this information in conjunction with other sources to make reasonable extrapolations out from these points to assess potential productivity on regional and global scales.The relative efficiency of private and state-owned enterprises has been a subject of interest throughout recent history, and has gained attention in recent decades following a wave of privatizations that began with the Thatcher government in the UK in the 1980s, and escalated after the collapse of the Soviet Union.While theoretical literature in the last 3 decades has been nearly unequivocal in favoring the productive efficiency of private firms, results in the empirical literature have been less conclusive.Boardman and Vining survey 54 studies that examine the effects of ownership on performance, and find that 32 of them conclude that private firms outperform state-owned firms, and 22 of them are either inconclusive, or find that public firms outperform private firms.More recently, Megginson and Netter find greater evidence that the empirical literature favors the efficiency of private firms, but cite important exceptions.In addition, measures of efficiency vary greatly between studies, and may have important implications to findings.In this paper, I explore whether the variation in findings on the effect of firm ownership on productive efficiency can be partially explained by differences in the level of industry competition faced in each setting.In addition, I identify the elements of “competitiveness”that theoretically matter in determining efficiency differences between state-owned and private firms, to shed light on what elements seem to matter most, and how strongly these elements are tied to standard measures of competitiveness.

For a landowner, the decision to sell or donate an agricultural conservation easement is a momentous one that is not made lightly or quickly. Negotiated voluntarily with a nonprofit or public land-trust agency, conservation easements restrict the use of a particular parcel; the landowner can continue farming after the easement is purchased, but the land can never be subdivided or developed. Land in easements can be bought or sold, but the restrictions remain in perpetuity. The decision to sell, then, depends on the landowner’s willingness to forego the profitable option of selling the land for urban development in return for more modest economic gains and other benefits. While cash or tax advantages provide immediate benefits to the present landowner, future generations and owners carry the costs in terms of restrictions and limited opportunities.Based on extensive interviews with 46 owners of easement-restricted farms in three counties , we have examined landowner motivations for selling easements and their experiences with local programs that acquired the easements . The landowners in most cases were enthusiastic sellers of the easements. Their main motivations were cash, family ownership and conservation, and they reported generally satisfactory experiences with the easement programs. To a lesser degree they expressed concerns about certain aspects of the process, especially negotiations and monitoring, and suggested ways that easement programs can improve their relationships with landowners. Most of the landowners interviewed are located in two North Bay counties, the region that contains most of California’s farmland easement acres and easement programs. Given the unique conservation, landscape and agricultural characteristics of this region, it’s not yet clear what the prospects are for easement programs statewide and in the agriculturally rich Central Valley,flood table where they are much less well-established .The landowners who participated in this study are involved in three of the most active agricultural easement programs in California.

The programs are countywide in scope. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Yolo Land Trust are private, nonprofit organizations, chartered under state law to engage in conservation activities. The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District is a public district formed by a county ballot initiative in 1990 and operated by a county government agency. Their easements total more than 53,000 acres, nearly half of all agricultural easement acres in California. Both the Marin and Sonoma county programs are among the six largest local agricultural easement programs in the nation . We surveyed 46 landowners in the Sonoma, Marin and Yolo county programs by phone and in person from February to August 1999, using a standardized interview guide. The interviews ranged from 15 minutes to 1 hour and were taped and later transcribed for analysis. Interview topics included questions about motivations, negotiations with land trusts, perceptions about program success and other experiences related to their conservation easement. The 46 landowners represented 44% of the total of 105 landowners participating in the three programs. Thirty-seven had sold such easements in recent years; the other nine owners had recently purchased parcels with easements already in place . Their parcels represented a majority of the total 53,000 easement acres held by the three programs at that time. The average parcel size was 530 acres.The survey revealed some common threads about why landowners made the decision to sell development rights . While the 37 original sellers of easements gave seven discrete reasons, there were obvious similarities and overlaps. Combined, three major motivations surfaced: to preserve land for farming and/ or open space ; to provide cash for savings and retirement, for farm improvements or to reduce debt ; and to serve family needs such as estate settlements and generational transfers.Most respondents cited a combination of at least two of these motivations. Certainly cash was a powerful incentive, since giving up development rights typically meant that the landowners received at least several hundred thousand dollars per transaction and more than a million dollars in a few cases.

But in many cases the cash was valued mainly as a vehicle for accomplishing one or another of the other objectives. Personal attachment to a parcel was another widely held sentiment, with many respondents noting a long history of family ownership and the importance of their farms as home sites. Several landowners spoke about the need to facilitate an intergenerational transfer. The immediate goal for some was to overcome a fragmented family ownership that made continued farming uncertain. The cash from the easementsale could help the younger family members purchase the parcel from the older generation or prepare for the transition by paying down existing farm debt or improving the farm operation. In one situation, the farm operator used the proceeds from the easement sale to secure full control of the land by buying out the ownership shares of his siblings. Surprisingly, the permanence of a deed restriction — the issue of keeping the land in agriculture in perpetuity, essentially forever — did not discourage landowners from selling easements. However, this sample includes only participating landowners and not those who might have chosen not to sell because of this restriction. Only five respondents expressed some discomfort with the permanent nature of their easement. In fact, for the majority of landowners, perpetuity was considered an advantage because their goal was to pass the land on, undeveloped, to future generations. One respondent did argue for less-than-permanent easements because he felt they were more compatible with the economic fluctuations in agriculture. For most of the nine landowners in the three counties who purchased their properties after the development rights had been removed, having an easement in place was considered an advantage. The principal reason, they said, is that it made the purchase more affordable. By eliminating the possibility of development, an easement in effect reduces the market value from a speculative to a farm production level.Discussions between the landowner and the conservation organization usually focus on two areas: the price, and changes in the use and character of the covered parcel that the easement will allow. One area of landowner concern was the time it took in some cases to negotiate and complete a transaction. Various factors can complicate and lengthen the process: disagreements over price that require more than one appraisal, landowner consultations with attorneys or consultants, or delays until the land trust receives the funds to close the deal. One landowner in Yolo County, who purchased a parcel after the easement was in place, had no idea that he wouldn’t be able to build a home because of specific restrictions named in the deed. Landowners suggested that programs should seek ways to clarify and expedite easement negotiations and terms.

They felt that if programs provided complete information upfront, and made sure purchasers understood the easement terms including the conditions of monitoring and use restrictions, misunderstandings and negative feelings would be reduced. The most frequent sticking point seemed to be the construction of additional residences or farm outbuildings. Landowners wanted the flexibility to house family members or farm workers. Several landowners expressed the opinion, when asked if they would participate again, that they would revise their easement deeds to provide more flexibility for family housing. This included the location, size and number of buildings allowed. While the conservation organization generally tries to tailor these terms as closely as possible to the expressed needs of individual landowners, we found that some organizations were more lenient than others in defining the parameters of an easement.Contact between the landowner and the conservation organization does not end at completion of the easement transaction. The easement terms require that the relationship continue indefinitely to ensure that landowners adhere to the restrictions that have been placed on the property. Program staff or volunteers periodically monitor the uses and conditions of the property, typically through annual site checks and other forms of data collection. Monitoring of easements was controversial among some of those we interviewed. Of the 33 respondents who commented on the subject, 14 reported negative experiences or perceptions of the process. Landowners do not like intrusions on their property regardless of whether they agreed to them on paper. Landowners suggested that programs monitor easement-restricted parcels as a cooperative rather than adversarial process. They suggested that the personnel responsible should be sensitive to local circumstances,rolling benches be knowledgeable about local agricultural practices and provide more practical assistance with improving land management practices.Easements are unquestionably a flexible tool for advancing the individual, family and business goals of farmland owners, as suggested by the owners who sold easements in three California counties. They liked the economic and conservation benefits of the transactions, and were largely positive about the negotiations and other experiences with conservation agencies. Nonetheless, while the easement programs seemed to work for farmers in the northern Bay Area counties and Yolo County, it’s not clear that they will appeal to landowners in other parts of the state and, in particular, the agriculturally rich Central Valley. This region differs from the three counties we surveyed in having a greater diversity of agricultural crops, no coastal zones to justify the protection of farmland as open space, less apparent community support for land preservation programs and perhaps a more conservative agricultural community.We captured a snapshot of vineyard worker satisfaction in 2018; some employers had already adopted strategies to improve job satisfaction and some had not, which may account for some of the variability in the levels of satisfaction among workers.

Future studies may seek to evaluate which strategies are most effective by assessing changes in worker perceptions before and after the introduction of new practices, using tools such as the AJSS.In addition to reducing turnover, improving job satisfaction can also increase work performance and worker health outcomes.Therefore, the satisfaction categories that did not predict turnover should not be dismissed, as dissatisfaction in these areas can contribute to other negative consequences.The AJSS tool overall proved reliable, but it contains four categories with low reliability that require further adjustment and retesting in future studies.In the long term, we are confident that adoption of this tool by the industry could support improvements in productivity, worker health and happiness, and promote the sustainability of the agricultural workforce.Prior to European contact, the Hawaiian Archipelago supported a diversity of highly intensive agricultural systems—in keeping with the high degree of social and cultural complexity of Hawaiian society , and the exceptional environmental heterogeneity of the islands.The most widespread of these agricultural systems have been separated into two major classes—irrigated pond fields in which taro was the major crop, and rainfed uplands based on sweet potato , dryland taro, and yams.Pond Fields were established earlier in Hawaiian history; there is clear evidence for their existence by AD 1200 , and organized systems of pond fields were developed by AD 1400.In contrast, rainfed systems largely developed after AD 1400, and show evidence for increased intensification after AD 1650.These two classes of agro-ecosystems have profoundly different environmental requirements, and they were distributed unevenly across the archipelago at the time of European contact.Pond Fields depend upon reliable sources of irrigation water and gentle slopes; they were developed extensively in well-watered alluvial and colluvial soils.Streams develop and the cumulative effects of erosion and sediment deposition increase with increasing rainfall and substrate age across the Hawaiian archipelago—and consequently pond fields largely were restricted to older northwestern islands, and to the oldest and wettest portions of the younger southeastern islands.In contrast, intensive rainfed systems require at least moderate rainfall and relatively fertile soils.Soil fertility on stable geomorphic surfaces decreases with increasing rainfall and substrate age ; hence, rainfed systems developed primarily in leeward portions of the younger Hawaiian Islands, in environments very different from irrigated pond fields.The spatial and environmental separation between these two modes of intensive agricultural production could have played a substantial role in the dynamics and interactions of Hawaiian societies occupying the younger versus older islands in the archipelago.Despite the opposing nature of the conditions favoring irrigated and intensive rainfed systems, examples of what appear to be integrated systems including both the modes have been reported in valleys on older islands in the archipelago, with irrigated pond fields in valley bottoms and dryland agricultural features on lower slopes just above them.

They documented Old World cultigens, including wheat , barley , and peach , in a hearth associated with an usnu, or ceremonial platform, and suggest that those items were incorporated into changing ritual practices of the Hispanic-Indigenous period, although those foods were not recovered in other domestic contexts. Throughout the period of Spanish conquest, a common cultural exchange that occurred between Europeans and Indigenous peoples involved food, especially cultigens. Jamieson and Sayre’s recovery of barley and quinoa from eighteenth century artisan households from a marginal neighborhood in Riobamba in highland Ecuador suggests that lower-class households consumed both Old World and New World domesticates. They argue that indigenous highlanders may have readily adopted barley, an Old World cultigen, as the grain would have fit well into existing food-processing systems and grain-based cuisine that included quinoa . While the impact of European contact on native subsistence systems has been a prominent theme in historic archaeology in North America , historic archaeology in the Andes has been more limited . Aside from ritual offerings themselves, paleoethnobotanists have examined the settings in which ritual events took place—namely, feasting, including memorial feasting as well as feasting that was more explicitly tied to the political economy . Many scholars have emphasized the political and economic roles of prominent types of ritual negotiation—feasts—in creating and reinforcing power and status differences. However, scholars are now questioning the simple association between the emergence of social hierarchies and food production linked to status competition occurring in the context of feasting. Rather than having a causal role in the emergence of social hierarchies,led grow lights changes in plant food cultivation likely were embedded in the changing social relations that eventually led to the development of those hierarchies.

Across the world and through time, while many groups certainly engaged in hierarchical negotiations involving food ways to emphasize power or status differences, others likely participated in commensal events that reinforced shared group identities and traditions . Neither scenario is mutually exclusive; attempts at increasing solidarity within communities and emphasizing differences among its members through commensal activities likely happened simultaneously in the formation of early complex societies, including early Andean polities. Some recent scholarship in the Andes has moved away from ideas of food production as an economic foundation for accumulation on the part of leaders,and instead favors views of community events and the ritual significance of food in the formation of sociopolitical inequalities. At the site of Buena Vista in the Chillón Valley of central Peru, Duncan et al. discuss macro and micro-botanical remains from the Fox Temple, a special purpose ritual feature that dates to ca. 2200 B.C. In addition to a diverse suite of macrobotanical remains, gourd and squash artifacts yielded starch grains of manioc , potato , chili pepper , arrowroot , and mesquite, or algarrobo . The authors argue that these remains likely represent refuse from small feasting events. In the Preceramic period , multiple small-scale construction events appear to have been preceded by feasting rituals hosted by informal leaders who lacked the social power to organize large amounts of labor for more massive building events. Drawing on work by Vega-Centeno,they argue that the limited and weakly formalized leadership of this time needed to be constantly reinforced through ritual practices or events. For the Tiwanaku polity of western Bolivia and southern Peru, Goldstein argues that there were no specialized chicha brewing facilities , and that the distribution of keros, the emblematic Tiwanaku serving vessel, indicates that feasting was organized at an ayllu-like level and not at the grandiose large scale of Inka state feasting. In this view, chicha consumption, including amongst Tiwanaku colonies, contributed to the development of community cohesion and a panregional identity across areas that had previous lacked unifying features, including the Atacama region, the Azapa Valley, Cochabamba, and Moquegua.

In all of these areas, ceramic assemblages for making and consuming chicha are associated with Tiwanaku expansion and came to predominate over open-mouth pots more suited for the preparation of stews. The adoption of chicha at the household level, using Tiwanaku drinking vessels and designs, signals the depth of Tiwanaku influence as it affected commoners’ daily practices instead of being restricted to feasting or elite contexts . Recent research also questions assumptions about the role of maize as an important element of ritual practice within emerging political institutions. Microbotanical analyses by Zarillo et al. suggest that maize was initially used as ritual beverage, rather than a quickly-intensified staple, at the Early Formative/Valdivia period Real Alto site on the Santa Elena Peninsula of coastal Ecuador as early as 3350 B.C. They argue that subsistence change was slow and gradual, rejecting the idea that political competition framed early food production. Recent macro and microbotanical analyses of early maize remains from Paredones and Huaca Prieta, Peru by Grobman and colleagues also lend support to the argument that maize was not a staple food in the Preceramic period . These new findings are significant in that they cast doubt on previous scenarios that consider food production to always be orchestrated by politically savvy elites—rather, political consolidations and social inequalities may have emerged from rituals practiced within traditionally accepted parameters that eventually reached exaggerated scales. Moving beyond the emergence of social hierarchies, other studies continue to draw more explicitly on political economy approaches for understanding changes in plant foodways and social differentiation. Archaeologists typically have examined political economies in terms of class relations, surplus production, and the financing of political institutions. Some Andean models of political economy posit that inequalities resulted as differential control of canals and irrigated land was exploited by elites as a means to co-opt the labor of others, generating agricultural surpluses to achieve power and participate in exchange networks with other communities and ethnic groups ; however, these assumptions largely remain untested with direct subsistence data.

One of the most important contributions of paleoethnobotanical data to understanding shifts in political economy in the Andes is Hastorf’s classic case of how the Inka interfered with the local political economy of the Sausa people of the Upper Mantaro River Valley of central Peru. Hastorf’s analysis of plant data from Sausa house floors dating both prior and subsequent to Inka control revealed a shift in plant diet for local elites and non-elites. Prior to Inka domination, elite and non-elite status was clearly marked in plant foodways; the shift to imperial control, however, led to a leveling of local status differences. Hastorf and colleagues extend their analysis to wood use as well, noting a change in wood use that indicates restriction in access, tending, or trade of fuel resources by the local indigenous inhabitants under Inka rule. Goldstein et al. discuss labor extraction in relation to molle chicha production at the Wari site of Cerro Baul in Moquegua . They argue that outside of Wari elite contexts, the local population was not engaged in producing chicha for their own consumption, but that chicha primarily played a role in organizing and legitimizing elite activities, perhaps including the extraction of labor from nonelite households. Their examination of molle remains departs from the traditional emphasis on maize chicha that has dominated the Andean literature for decades note, “paleoethnobotanists excel at diachronic analyses of plant data, synchronic comparisons of different sites/regions, and the use of diverse quantitative techniques, from basic standardizing measures to complex multivariate statistics.” It is still the rare study, however, that examines variability in plant remains from different contexts within a single site , although such an approach has the potential to inform about the organization of food preparation, processing, storage, and disposal, as well as issues of site formation and feature function. Hastorf’s study of Inka conquest, food ways, and gender represents a seminal case of the spatial distribution of plant remains and gender, and is also a key paper that pushed paleoethnobotany toward social archaeology in the first place—drawing on such approaches has good potential for evaluating the organization of Moche Valley society. Understandings of domestic labor,vertical grow system including food preparation and consumption, can shed light on elements of social reproduction and inequalities in daily life that are often downplayed in large-scale, structural histories . By studying the material remains of food ways, this dissertation contributes to further understandings of the diverse social strategies enacted by both highland and coastal groups that profoundly influenced ancient sociopolitical development along the Peruvian north coast. A drought-resistant plant,Trujillo coca probably originated from the adaptation of Huánuco coca to drier habitats.The best growing conditions include hill-slope planting in friable soil, good drainage, and ample shade; coca plants can be harvested 18 months from the time of planting.

A mild stimulant and analgesic, coca is used to combat altitude sickness; assuage fatigue; stave off hunger and thirst; and relieve headaches, stomach aches, and joint pain. Dried coca leaves are chewed , or are steeped in water to make a tea. Coca tea is consumed commonly in the Andean highlands today as a means to prevent altitude sickness, but coca leaves are chewed broadly in coastal and middle valley communities, particularly by day laborers. While prehistoric remains of coca are rarely uncovered by archaeologists or positively identified by paleoethnobotanists because of their fragile nature , Dillehay et al. provide evidence for coca chewing as early as 6050 B.C. in the Nanchoc Valley, Peru, and tie its use to emerging specialists who extracted and supplied calcite and lime to communities for coca chewing during the transition from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary farming.Indeed, fully domesticated common beans were recovered from deposits in Guitarrero Cave in the Callejón de Huaylas, Ancash, Peru, dated to 6050 B.C. .Common beans were domesticated independently in Mexico as well as the Andes;Andean beans have larger seeds, but Mexican cultivars are better suited to hotter climates.According to Hastorf , beans were the most common crop in coastal Preceramic sites from 6000 to 4200 B.C., eventually becoming widespread throughout the coastal region by the Initial Period . On the Peruvian north coast, beans have been recovered from the earliest levels at the Preceramic component of Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley and from the Initial Period site of Gramalote in the Moche Valley . Because beans are highly susceptible to taphonomic processes and consumed in their entirety, the archaeological presence of beans is actually quite remarkable. Common beans are also prominent in the Moche artistic canon . High in protein, common beans are well known comestibles, frequently added to soups and stews, but also have documented medicinal uses, as a diuretic, as an analgesic, to dissolve tumors, and to stabilize menstruation. After beans are harvested, stalks can be used as fodder. Beans tolerate most environmental conditions in tropical and temperate zones, and germinate rapidly at soil temperatures above 18°C. Seed rates are 20–115 kg/ha depending on seed size and row width . Beans are frequently cultivated with maize for their nitrogen-fixing properties; indeed, in Latin America today, ca. 70 percent of beans are inter planted with maize in commercial fields . With maize, beans are usually planted 5–8 cm deep, deep enough to give good coverage and sufficient moisture to promote fast germination and growth. Intercropping Phaseolus beans with maize provides benefits to both plants . VanDerwarker notes that in addition to enriching the growth and yield of maize plants, Phaseolus beans complement maize in terms of nutritional value; maize is deficient in essential amino acids lysine and isoleucine, which beans have in abundance. As a result, eating beans with maize together would have provided benefits as well as cropping beans and maize together. Lima bean/pallaris another Phaseolus species broadly cultivated in the coast and highlands, with a great antiquity of domestication . Like the common bean, there were two independent centers of domestication of lima bean, with smaller varieties domesticated in Mesoamerica and larger varieties domesticated in coastal Peru. Although lima beans are primarily grown for consumption , some medicinal uses include the treatment of styes and smallpox . Like the common bean, lima beans do not require much water for cultivation, and often are intercropped with maize for their nitrogen-fixing properties.

Such a mechanistic understanding could help point to strategies for managing multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously , a key goal for agroecosystem management. The effects of biodiversity on multi-functionality are often context dependent, because different mechanisms govern different ecosystem processes. Therefore, managing for multiple agroecosystem services requires understanding the responses of individual services to changes in environment and management as well as trade-offs that exist among services. Given its mechanistic foundation, a traitbased approach could be used to develop agricultural and land-use management strategies to provide multiple ecosystem services that take into account such trade-offs . To develop generalizable principles of how agrobiodiversity impacts ecosystem processes and services, we propose a trait-based approach to agriculture that adopts recent advances in trait research for multi-trophic and spatially heterogeneous ecosystems . Given that traits can vary with environmental conditions, making the relation between trait diversity and ecosystem functioning context dependent, we argue that trait values should be measured across environmental conditions and agricultural management regimes. This knowledge will help predict how ecosystem services vary with agricultural practices and environment, and could be used to develop particular trait-based management strategies that can be implemented in farming systems to increase multiple ecosystem services as well as to manage trade-offs among ecosystem services in agriculture . A trait-based approach to the study of agroecosystems could transform understanding of the importance of agrobiodiversity from largely context specific and based on species identities to generalizable and predictive. For instance, although it is currently well established that intercropping can increase crop yields through niche complementarity, understanding of intercropping comes from examples of particular species interactions in particular contexts, rather than from principles that can be generally applied across different species compositions and environmental conditions.

The statement that intercropping maize with cow peas increases yield is less generalizable than the finding that,vertical hydroponics under conditions where plant-available NO3 concentrations are lower than a certain threshold, intercropping facultative N2-fifixing species increases staple grain seed set and protein content. The latter statement refers to well-defined, measurable traits , while the former refers to taxonomic affiliations that group multiple traits, thereby masking the mechanisms of how intercropping increases yield. Both approaches predict that intercropping increases yield, but the approach referring to functional traits can guide management strategies over a broad gradient of environmental conditions by pinpointing the general controls, such as abiotic and biotic , on rates of soil nutrient cycling and human nutrition .Important initial steps have been taken to apply a trait based framework to agroecosystems. The bulk of this initial research focused on using traits to understand how biodiversity in agricultural systems responds to environmental conditions and land management, rather than on understanding how biodiversity impacts agroecosystem services. Examples of trait-based response to environmentinclude weeds, pollinators , pasture vegetation, soil macrofauna, and soil microbes. Most work connecting species-based measures of biodiversity to agroecosystem services focuses on pollination and pest control ; however, most research using traits has focused on the plant trophic level, such as intercropping . Research on the contribution of intercropping to productivity has largely focused on functional group classifications. In a recent example, crops of broadly different functional types were planted in different combinations and shown to increase overall production. For weed control, the functional traits of weed seeds and cover crop grasses at the plot level are key predictors of weed seed interception by grasses that prevent weed establishment. Weed traits also have an important role in weed persistence and interaction with crop production, a reminder that functional traits can simultaneously contribute to agroecosystem services and disservices. Some initial work has also applied functional group classifications to pollination and pest control services, yet applying traits to mobile organisms remains a key research priority . The diversity of functional groups of bees explained more of the variance in pumpkin seed set than did species richness.

For pest control, functional group diversity of birds was a significant predictor of arthropod removal. However, in contrast with findings from a pollinator system, bird functional group diversity was not as strong a predictor of ecosystem services compared with species richness. Less work has considered how continuously varying measures of functional traits influence agroecosystem services. Gagic et al.provided an initial step by calculating functional trait diversity based on a mix of continuous and categorical traits to show that functional trait metrics are superior to taxonomic measures in linking diversity to several ecosystem functions. Although this study included some important agroecosystem services , it was not specifically focused on agriculture. In a forage production system, Laliberte´ and Tylianakis showed that resource addition and grazing strongly determine grassland functional trait diversity,which cascades to induce changes in grassland productivity, decomposition, and soil carbon sequestration. Abiotic and biotic factors directly impacted functional diversity, directly impacted ecosystem functioning, and indirectly impacted ecosystem functioning through changes in functional diversity. Wood et al. applied a similar approach to soil microbes on African farms and showed that, although microbial functional diversity can be strongly structured by farm management, functional diversity was a weaker predictor of ecosystem processes than were abiotic factors. This approach that simultaneously assesses the influence of biotic and abiotic controls enables ecologists to determine when functional diversity is a key control on agroecosystem services and when it is not. Many applications of trait-based research to agroecosystems have been conducted at the plot scale, while fewer studies have looked at larger or multiple spatial scales. Remans et al. showed that nutritional functional traits of crops are an important predictor of nutrition related health outcomes at a national scale. For animal nutrition, dry leaf matter content can be an important predictor of forage digestibility across broad climate conditions and management regimes. In pollinator systems, sociality is a strong predictor of pollinator response to fragmentation at the landscape scale. Such landscape fragmentation, and resulting distance between pollinator habitat and crops, can have significant negative impacts on yields.

Given that traits determine the movement of species through a landscape, as well as their effect on that landscape, more research is needed to understand how the influence of a community on ecosystem services scales up to the landscape . A trophic approach can also be crucial to understanding agroecosystem services because many services provided by agriculture are determined by activity within, and interactions across, multiple trophic levels. Some studies apply a trait-based framework to understudied trophic levels, such as birds.Storkey et al. showed overlap in the traits affecting the response of plants to tillage and the effects of plants on abundance of phytophagous invertebrates. Plant communities characterized by ruderal traits were associated with greater invertebrate abundances, suggesting that growth strategy can be linked to plant response to disturbance effects and other trophic levels .Agroecosystems range in complexity of the spatial arrangement of crop varieties, species, fields, and landscape types. This heterogeneity can have important effects on agroecosystem processes by determining the persistence, distribution, dispersal, and interactions of farmland biodiversity. These population- and community-level processes can in turn affect ecosystem services through effect traits. It is well established that the spatial partitioning of agroecosystems has an important consequence for ecosystem services. For example, pollination and pest control services depend on the spatial arrangement of vegetation in the farm scape, where farm scapes with spatial heterogeneity in vegetation types can have higher yields because pollinators and pest predators can access more of the cultivated area of the farm scape. However, pests can also rely on non-crop vegetation types to complete their life cycles; therefore,hydroponic vertical farming systems understanding pest traits could additionally provide valuable insights into ecosystem disservices that can compromise farm yields. Many of these studies on spatial structure implicitly evoke interactions between spatial structure and functional traits, but do not measure those traits explicitly. The research showing the importance of forest habitat for coffee yields assumes, and treats as static, the dispersal traits of pollinators. Given the important inter- and intraspecific variation in response and effect traits, the impact of spatial arrangement on agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services can be highly dependent on trait values and distributions. Thus, explicitly including trait measurements into existing spatial approaches to agricultural research is key. Lonsdorf et al. used a trait-based model to predict pollinator abundances in a spatially complex environment, but did not connect these predicted abundances to ecosystem services.

To integrate traits and spatial scale, trait-based data could be integrated into existing spatially explicit models of ecosystem services. These modeling approaches would first identify the landscape patches important to the provisioning of certain ecosystem services. Services, key functional traits, and abiotic properties would then be measured in each of the components of the spatially structured landscape. Spatial configuration metrics could then be calculated to determine how space influences functional trait control of ecosystem services. For instance, Biswas et al. demonstrated that fine-scale responses of plant functional trait diversity to environmental disturbance exhibit greater unexplained variance and evidence of local-scale competition than did coarse-scale patterns. Combining such spatial metrics with data on traits and abiotic characteristics would enable the development of spatially explicit models of ecosystem services that use point data to predict the landscape distribution of ecosystem services. Models with and without trait data could then be compared to determine the importance of traits vis-a`-vis environmental properties to particular ecosystem services. Such a spatially explicit representation of traits and ecosystem services would also be important because functional traits, and associated services, can vary through the farm scape over time. For instance, plant matter of N2- fixing plants is often relocated from one field to another to improve soil fertility. Sampling vegetation and soil nutrient status in single plots would fail to identify the effect of N2 fixation on soil nutrient availability in the broader farm scape by ignoring this transfer of plant matter between farm fields.In addition to being focused on small spatial scales, most research on biodiversity–ecosystem functioning has been conducted on single trophic scales. Yet, the ecosystem services provided by agriculture often depend on activity within multiple trophic levels and interactions across trophic levels. For example, rates of symbiotic N2 fixation are determined by the activity of several trophic levels. Leguminous plants regulate carbon and oxygen flow to roots that symbiotic N2-fifixing microorganisms use to fix atmospheric N2. Root-feeding nematodes can suppress N2 fixation by feeding on roots and decreasing the number of root nodules for N2 fixation. Similarly, for pest control, consumptive predator activity traits affects pest populations , which in turn affect crop yields. Thus, it is crucial not only to apply traits to understudied trophic levels, but also to understand the interactions among multiple trophic levels. A trophic, trait-based framework of ecosystem functioning requires quantifying the traits involved in the responses of species to the abiotic environment, effects of species on the environment, and the effects of species on, and their responses to, the presence and activity of species at other trophic levels. Within a given trophic level, traits determine the effect of that trophic level on an ecosystem process and/or service; the response of that trophic level to higher trophic levels; and the effect of that trophic level on lower trophic levels. These latter two types of trait can inform how trait interactions across trophic scales might improve inference about the relation between agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services. Applying trait-based research simultaneously across multiple trophic and spatial scales is essential for predicting ecosystem services because of interactions between trophic and spatial scales. For instance, large monocultures may be worse for pest control when the pest is a better disperser than the predator because the pest can out disperse the predator into the middle of the crop field and then increase in abundance. In this case, response traits interact with mobility traits, landscape context, and trophic traits to determine an ecosystem service. Although previous work in ecology has proposed the adoption of either trophic or spatial approaches to trait research, we argue that predicting agroecosystem services requires both because of interactions between these two frameworks.Previous efforts to integrate functional trait research into ecosystem service assessments have been proposed, but these have stopped short of creating tangible management targets that can be practically implemented by managers.

While not all of these funds were being used on distorting policies or non-productive administration, much of it was. If a good part of the funds is able to be redirected into more productive areas, there is a chance that the agricultural sector can be energized by this new windfall. The policy implications of China’s WTO accession on land use and farm organization also are hotly debated. Many of the concerns have arisen over the ability of China’s small farms to be able to compete after trade liberalization. Although every farm household in China is endowed with land, the average farm size is small, and declining . Leaders are pleased with the equity effects of the nation’s distribution of land as it allays concerns about food security and poverty. Land fragmentation and the extremely small scale of farms, however, almost certainly will in some way constrain the growth of labor productivity on the farm and hold back farm income. The debate has centered on these issues: Some argue that farm size could be expanded and agricultural productivity could rise if policy makers were to advocate more secure land tenure arrangements. Others call for a continuation of policies that allow localities to periodically re-allocated land to the farmers in order to keep land in the hands of all rural residents. Although most policy makers currently seem to favor more secure rights, they still are searching for complementary measures that will not forego all of the pro-equity benefits of the current land management regime. Land ownership in rural areas, by law, is collectively owned by the village or small group and contracted to households . One of the most important changes in recent years has been that the duration of the use contract was extended from 15 to 30 years. By 2000, about 98% of villages had amended their contract with farmers to reflect the longer set of use rights .

Although some were concerned that household and village demographics and other policy pressures often induce local authorities to reallocate land prior to contract expiration,vertical farming technology it has been shown that the area of this reallocated land has been minimal and the effect on investment behavior insignificant . With the issue of use rights, resolved, the government is now searching for a mechanism that permits the remaining full-time farmers to gain access additional cultivated land and increase their income and competitiveness. One of the main efforts revolves around the development of a new Rural Land Contract Law. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress has drafted a law and the main body is expected to approve it in the near future. According to this law, although the property rights over the ownership of the land remains with the collective, the Law conveys almost all other rights to the contract holder that they would have under a private property system. In particular, the Law clarifies the rights for transfer and exchange of the contracted land, an element that may already be taking effect as researchers are finding increasing more land in China is rented in and out .Part of the law also allows family members to inherit the land during the contracted period. The goal of this new set of policies is to encourage farmers to use their land to increase their farms and household short and long-run productivity. Although quite controversial, the effort to increase China’s agricultural productivity under trade liberalization also is made through the promotion of large farm enterprises. Many officials in the MOA consider this effort as one of important forces that may help to restructuring China’s agriculture, expand agricultural markets, and increase farmer income. Recently fiscal authorities have supported this effort by making grants and allowing tax reductions for the infrastructure investments of the farms. They also have provided large farms with credit subsidies for input procurement and the financing of their efforts to update their technology at all levels of the food change .

As a result of China’s WTO accession, the support in this area is expected to increase. However, more effort in the future is likely to shift to supplying services that are supposed to be provided by government in areas such as farm infrastructure development, technology adoption, and extension, rather than direct intervention and subsidy. As subsidies through agricultural investment and inputs in China are subject to WTO restrictions on Aggregate Market Support , it is not expected that the extent of these subsidies will restrict such support. China will be limited to its support of large farms to levels that do not exceed its de minimis level of AMS of 8.5%. However, it is much more likely that its ability to finance agricultural subsidies will be more binding than the WTO-imposed rules. The other major attempt to increase farm productivity and agricultural competitiveness under trade liberalization is to promote the development of farmer organizations. The government has now officially cast its support for self-organized farmer groups that focus agricultural technology and marketing . At one time, the creation of farmer organization was a political sensitive issue. Leaders were concerned with the rise of any organization outside the government’s authority. Such restrictions, however, caused a dilemma in reforming the nation’s agricultural and rural economies. Policy makers also are aware that with the small scale of China’s farms there are many increases in economic efficiency that might be gained by the creation of effective rural organizations and that if they were successful in raising incomes, there might be a rise in political stability.It is on this basis, then, that leaders have now decided to allow the organization of China’s 240 million farms. Letting these millions of small farmers competing in a market with globalization requires substantial institutional reforms on farm organization and provisions of government service such as technology extension and marketing information and quality controls. It will be in these areas that farmer organizations will be encouraged. In addition, these types of farm organizations that are supported by the government fall under WTO’s “Green Box” categorization and investments to create such groups will not be counted as part of the nation’s AMS measures. Perhaps more than anything, the government is going to need these farmer organizations to lead the fight against the imposition of trade barriers on China’s agricultural exports.

Because China’s producers have not been organized, when foreign countries, such as Japan, Korea, and the US have levied trade barriers, typically citing dumping. Even when such cases were based on questionable bases, China had no one who had an incentive or ability to contest the cases. Since China Provisions of anti-dumping and safeguards measures against China’s products, such cases will not abate and the nation needs to have a way to protect the interest of those seeking to export.The financial sector has reformed more slowly than some other sector, and government maintains strong control . Among the commitments regarding the banking sector, the Protocol requires China to open the country’s financial markets in a step by step way. The liberalization must allow foreign competition across wider and wider regions and customer base. After a four years transition period, all regional restrictions will be removed and foreign banks will receive national non-discriminative treatment in the area of banking services. Specifically, restrictions on branch banking can not be imposed.International experience shows that in the long run, increased foreign participation in the financial sector will have a positive effect on country’s development as a whole. However, in the period immediately following its WTO accession and the removal of protective measures in the financial sector, China may face one of its biggest challenges. There is a good possibility that the nation’s banks will suffer financially. Hence, it might be expected, the leader’s policy response to reform the current banking system will be a strong one. For example, financial sector officials are already mandating the government interventions fall, state banks recapitalize themselves, and nonperforming loans be transferred to asset management companies . The implications of the above shifts of policies for agricultural development are not clear. While one might think the agricultural sector and poor regions in the rural economy could suffer from liberalization, it is not clear if things will be worse than before the reforms. In the past, agriculture in China was squeezed. Huang and Ma have shown how the financial sector has systematically shifted funds away from faming. Throughout the entire reform period, there was a net capital outflow by means of the financial system. Hence, it is hard to see how a reformed banking sector will treat agriculture any worse. Though, the experience of other countries most likely mean that in the short run small, poor farmers will be rationed out of financial markets. Tax reform also is underway. In 2001, there were three major types of taxes levied on products and services: a VAT levied on goods and services for processing,how to make vertical garden maintenance and assembling; a Consumption Tax levied on some selected consumer products; and a Business Tax on services and the sales transaction involving assets.Both the VAT and Consumption Tax are applied to imported goods.Tax laws, however, have offered producers several exemptions. In many cases, part or all of the VAT is reimbursed when the goods is exported.

All goods to be exported are not subject to the Consumption Tax. Although subject to a number of technicalities, there is some concerns are some of these tax rebates may not be consistent with the requirements of the 1994 GATT rules. Since, China has agreed that it would ensure that its laws, regulations and other measures relating to internal taxes would be in full conformity with its WTO obligations, some adjustments may have to be made. Perhaps the best example of this may be in the area of the assessment of the VAT on agricultural imports and the possibility that such an act may violate the national treatment clauses of the WTO accession agreement. Specifically, while the VAT is charged in full at the border for all imports . Although some observers in China have tried to argue that since farmers in rural areas already pay high land- and head-taxes, they can fairly be exempt, such a tax is not commodity specific and such unequal taxation of imports and domestically procured crops almost certainly violates WTO. If such a tax policy is challenged, China will have two options: assess the VAT on all domestic procurement or eliminate the VAT at the border on agricultural goods. More generally, as China attempts to make it economy more competitive in a post accession world, it has announced that in some areas it will lower taxes. The primary objective would be to lower the burden of domestic enterprises and attract new foreign investment. Tax cuts would also increase the competitiveness of its domestic products in the international markets. Moreover, tax officials also have plans to continue to push on tax reform that shift China from a system that primarily uses a production-based tax system to a more consumer oriented tax regime. While desirable, it should be noted that the timing of implementing this tax reduction necessarily will depend on the impacts that the reform would have on the government’s revenue-earning capacity. An official from the State Council recently claimed that a major move to realign China’s tax system towards a more consumer-oriented one may begin as soon as 2003. To make the rural economy more competitive and to remove a set of institutions that have historically caused a lot of frustration among rural residents, officials have also begun to experiment with rural tax reform. The most bold experiment to date is based on a movement that seeks to “convert fees into taxes.” The earlier experiments began in Anhui province in 2000. The reform was implemented to reduce the burden of various fees imposed on farmers to a maximum level of 5 percent of the income of farmers. By reducing the tax burden of the farmer, officials hope to reduce the cost of agricultural production, since many fees are collected from farmers by local government and village committee on the basis of their sown area or level of livestock production.

The NPF framework is used to identify and demonstrate the implications of narratives for the design of SB 700 . The framework identifies a basic structure of narratives and provides basic belief system linkages and preliminary hypotheses. The basic structures of a narrative include “a setting or context; a plot that introduces a temporal element .Providing both the relationships between the setting and characters, and structuring causal mechanisms; characters who are fixers of the problem , causers of the problem , or victims ; and the moral of the story, where a policy solution is normally offered”.This structure is grounded in a belief system that anchors the narrative “in generalizable content to limit variability” . From this premise, one can test hypotheses at both micro and meso levels . This framework fits with elements of Schneider and Ingram’s theory of policy design, which allows the NPF to be used to explore how narratives shape policy design. The key linkage is the concept of socially constructed target populations. This refers to the recognition of shared characteristics that distinguish a target population as socially meaningful, and the attribution of specific valence-oriented symbols and images to the characteristics” . Positive constructions label target populations as “deserving,” “honest,” and driven by “public interest.” Negative constructions label target populations as “undeserving,” “dishonest,” and “self-interested.” These portrayals are captured in the NPF by the discussion of characters as part of the narrative structure. Narratives utilizing the social constructions of target populations influence the other aspects of policy design including policy tools, agents,indoor vertical farming and implementation structures. This allows for meso-level hypotheses between narratives and different aspects of policy design.

Narratives serve to amplify our notions of who is “deserving” and “undeserving” of the benefits of government policy. The credibility of narratives depends on tapping into the preconceived ideas of groups in the larger social context . Policy tools “are elements in policy design that cause agents or targets to do something they would not otherwise do with the intention of modifying behavior to solve public problems or attain policy goals” . The choice of tools reflects the assumptions and biases about how different people and targets behave . Policy tools applied to deserving target populations emphasize the positive aspects of the group. Capacity-building and learning tools reward with benefits and penalize with burdens. These tools tend to see the group as being able to act independently of the policymaker. However, undeserving groups will be on the receiving end of a combination of sanctions and authority-laden tools. Undeserving target populations are treated in a coercive manner with respect to burdens. Thus, as a narrative portrays a target population in a more positive way, the more likely policy tools are to emphasize the positive aspects of this group. According to Schneider and Ingram , agents are “the means for delivering policy to target populations.” The implementation structure refers to the relationships among various agents and their connections to target groups. Policymakers reward deserving groups in a highly visible way. Strong statutes that clearly provide the reward directly in the legislation are used frequently. Placing burdens on the deserving groups usually entails an approach to implementation that seeks to build consensus and support for the policy.Agents and implementation structures tend to operate differently for undeserving groups. The assessment of burdens is done very visibly in a strongly worded statute.

The rewarding of benefits is done using a more decentralized process, although the statute may provide specific eligibility criteria . Thus, as a narrative portrays a target population in a more positive way, the more likely agents and implementation structures directly reward this group. Roe’s narrative policy analysis was applied to the materials making up the SB 700 database. In all, there were 202 discrete problem statements identified in the texts. The aggregation of these individual statements revealed four major patterns of problem-cause relationships. Narratives play an important role in shaping the social construction of populations targeted by SB 700. They capture the context of the struggle to end California agriculture’s exemption to air pollution permits. This struggle takes place in the state legislature and has a very partisan base. Democrats assemble a coalition of environmental and public health groups in support of SB 700. Republicans construct a coalition of various agricultural and municipal organizations to oppose the legislation. The following is a discussion of these four narratives and their varying constructions of target population. Thus, it is a combination of natural and demographic factors, along with a variety of mobile and stationary sources that emit harmful air contaminants in the valley. This narrative establishes two important ideas that carry through the rest of the policy discourse. The first is that air quality in the San Joaquin Valley is bad. Numbers play an important role in establishing air quality as a problem that needs to be solved. In particular, EPA has established national ambient air quality standards for ozone and PM-10. The San Joaquin Valley Air Control District is in serious non-attainment for PM-10 and severe non-attainment for ozone with the possibility of moving to extreme non-attainment . The second foundational element is that this poor air quality leads to adverse health and environmental impacts . These are the victims of the narrative. Ozone and particulate matter are associated with a variety of health effects including reduced lung function, permanent lung damage, increased risk of cardiac death, increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease, and aggravated asthma .

Of all these, the incidence of childhood asthma garners the most attention. According to figures from 2001, 16.4% of children in Fresno County were reported as having asthma . This is higher than the statewide rate of less than 10% and the national rate of 5.5% . Grossi et al. note, “Health officials cite the number of children with asthma in the valley when advocating for stricter pollution standards.” In addition to these figures, the authors of “Last Gasp” utilize personal vignettes to drive home the human toll exacted by exposure to high levels of these pollutants. Institutional sources are also indicted in the narrative. According to Deborah Stone , problems may be “caused by a web of large, long-standing organizations with ingrained patterns of behavior.” Some claim that the interaction of various government officials with one another and industry have led to delays in cleaning up the valley’s air. Grossi et al. note, “The valley’s last 30 years are littered with accounts of the federal government issuing proposals,edicts and threats to clean up the air, only to accept delays and compromises after meeting resistance. Industries, local elected officials, and even state regulators have had a hand in the process.” The EPA has the power to sanction noncompliance with the Clean Air Act; it has a history of backpedaling. In the 1990s, CARB underestimated vehicle pollution emissions and failed to act in a timely manner. The SJVAPCD has been accused of bowing to various industry pressures and not pursuing stronger emission reducing strategies . Natural and institutional forces aside, there is no shortage of “villains” contributing to the polluted valley air. Chief among these are passenger cars and trucks, gross polluters, and diesel trucks . All told, these and other mobile sources account for 56% of NOx and 41% of VOCs emitted in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin.Emissions from sources such as farm diesel engines and dairy operations account for 54% of particulate matter and 25% of VOCs in the valley’s atmosphere.

In addition to these major categories, sprawling development encourages more driving and less environmentally friendly modes of transportation . Complex systems and institutional causes make finding policy solutions difficult. Stone notes “Complex explanations are not very useful in politics,hydroponic vertical farming precisely because they do not offer a single locus of control, a plausible candidate to take responsibility for a problem, or a point of leverage to fix a problem.” However, the complex cause narrative does provide some insights into the discourse surrounding SB 700. It establishes two ideas taken as givens by all participants in the discourse. Air pollution in the valley is bad and it is related to adverse health effects. Other narratives take these as facts not to be disputed. The narratives to follow emphasize selected pieces of the multi-causal chain and deemphasize others. This is done to accomplish the strategic ends of different actors in the policy process. Thus, the complex cause narrative acts as a context or backdrop for the coming discourse. In the complex cause narrative, federalism functioned to delay the process of cleaning up the air. In this narrative, the federal relationship will serve as an incentive for California to end agriculture’s exemption to Clean Air Act permits. This sets off a story of potential decline. On May 14, 2002, the EPA and Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund settled a lawsuit concerning whether or not EPA should regulate major agricultural sources of pollution. Under the settlement, the EPA found California’s exemption for agriculture violated Title V of the Clean Air Act. Thus, “if the state fails to revise its agricultural exemptions, increased pollution offsets will take effect on November 15, 2003, and California will lose its federal highway funding on May 15, 2004” . Pollution offsets would be imposed on new and modified sources. Business and industry would pay increasing bills to expand their activities. Loss of the highway funding would amount to around $2.4 billion for 2004. Thus by not ending the state’s agricultural exemption, state policymakers and citizens became the victims of this narrative. The ending of the exemption became imperative. While there were alternative solutions, the approach taken by SB 700 argues agriculture is a significant contributor to air pollution and should be required to play a larger role in the cleanup effort. Florez believed the exemption needed to be repealed and regulations on agricultural sources extended, “We’re not taking our cue from EPA. . . . If farmers’ argument is going to be that the EPA says we don’t need to go that far, that’s not acceptable. We are not interested in doing the minimum. We want to clean the air” . Florez believed that the additional EPA requirements announced in June 2003 supported his argument. Specifically, the EPA announced that farms must be included under new source review permits . Florez argued, “There is no way to avoid it.You have to remove it now to make sure the state can comply with all of the Clean Air Act” . As the clock ticked closer to the imposition of sanctions, wholesale repeal of the exemption gained momentum. As Fitzenberger states, “agricultural leaders knew some form of SB 700 had to pass. It is the only bill to lift the exemption, and failing to do so could lead to a loss of billions of dollars in highway funds and increased fees for some businesses” . This narrative is structured around intentional cause. This suggests that agriculture interests and their political supporters have willfully supported the exemption, and this allowed their contributions to poor air quality to grow . While numbers are used to detail the level of various pollutants emitted from agricultural sources, comparisons are used to put the numbers in context. According to SJVAPCD and CARB data, agricultural sources are the: “Largest source of nitrogen oxide and second largest source of sulfur oxide —precursors of smog; largest source of the volatile organic compounds and reactive gases —precursor to smog; and second largest source of particulate matter.” . Grossi et al. offer another unflattering comparison, “During summer, the $14 billion agriculture industry creates more lung-searing pollution than the valley’s eight highest-polluting large businesses combined” . And the significance is growing, “For one of the two major, smog-making pollutants, reactive organic gases, livestock waste is projected to pass cars in 2005. Farm equipment in 2005 will run second only to heavy-duty diesel trucks for nitrogen oxides, the other major smog ingredient” . Some supporters of SB 700 state this argument even more directly. They argue agriculture’s longstanding exemption from air permits has allowed the industry to “grow” its contribution to air pollution relative to other groups.