While this choice can be painted as paying the class in question not to work and thus may face push back from the public or even within government, it avoids the myriad complications that stem from subsidizing production, including surplus crises, fights over price adjustments, and conflicts with international trade agreements. In short, leaving production to the most efficient, while supporting the less competitive via income payments allows policymakers to open up more market share for the most efficient while protecting the uncompetitive from impoverishment. A second critical juncture concerns rules structuring benefits, specifically the imposition of benefit limits. A decision to forego benefit limits is arguably more inclusive as it does not discriminate based on some measure of success or size of operation but is also more expensive. Alternatively, the decision to restrict benefits can be seen as discriminatory, splintering the target group into the privileged and unprivileged while saving costs in the long run. This decision has important consequences for the scope and type of future reform. Despite repeated attempts, a reform that the CAP has never been able to impose due to ardent opposition from a few member states is a benefit limit. As a result, some farmers receive hundreds of thousands of Euros in CAP income payments every year. Policymakers wishing to minimize the costs of support to extent possible will want to impose benefit limits, whether they be yearly or lifetime, at the time the policy is created. Benefit levels can always be extended and expanded, but it is much harder to retrench these policies. By imposing limits early, policymakers can better contain overall costs. In addition, these choices position politicians to make popular reforms rather than unpopular,nft hydroponic and likely unsuccessful reforms . However, it may be quite difficult to get the target’s representative groups and unions to agree to a policy that essentially imposes a two-tier system.

The third critical decision concerns qualification and/or behavior standards and requirements. On the one hand, avoiding or limiting standards and rules increases the odds of compliance and support from the target population. On the other hand, imposing standards and rules early controls costs and makes future reform easier. The CAP has struggled to evolve over time, largely failing to impose even the most basic of standards on payment recipients. Policymakers who decide to manage class decline through a CAP-style income support system must think carefully about what types of standards and requirements make sense and impose them early. For example, two reforms CAP officials have struggled to impose are environmental standards and eligibility rules . Neither of these ideas, that farmers should have to meet basic environmental standards or that one’s primary profession must be agricultural in order to receive aid for those employed in agriculture, is particularly radical, but since no real rules or standards for good environmental practices or eligibility existed when the CAP was created, it has been nearly impossible to impose them in a meaningful way in subsequent reforms. Taken together, these three junctures identify moments when policymakers must think carefully about their decisions for how to manage a declining class because these decisions are sticky, proving hard to reverse, and carry important long-term implications. My dissertation and its core findings speak to a broader question of what happens to declining social classes. By investigating the current status of farmer power, I cast light on how and when the political power of a social class is affected by a decline in numbers. Farmers are not the only class to have experienced a dramatic reduction in its share of the population; the blue-collar industrial working class has shrunk dramatically with the shift to a service sector oriented economy. European governments have buffered workers against the effects of deindustrialization with generous disability and early retirement benefits. In addition, in many countries, unemployment programs for workers were structured to ensure that benefits would not run out. As this brief example illustrates, the framework I have used to examine the decline of Europe’s farmers can also be deployed to examine and explain the decline of other social classes. For both blue-collar workers and farmers, policy took the same path. It started with an effort to preserve the class by subsidizing employment and ultimately ended up with a policy that paid individuals not to work.

The path to this final policy outcome in both cases was long and expensive. The lesson, then, for reformers is move to an income support policy as quickly as possible. While these policies are expensive and often unpopular, costs can be contained and crises avoided if these types of programs are adopted first, and reasonable benefit restrictions are imposed early. In sum, my project is not only about the intricacies of CAP reform, but also about the conditions that permit or forestall EU and welfare state policy reform, the techniques for overcoming resistance to policy change, and ultimately the politics of and strategies for managing social class decline. This body of research beginning with my study of farmers and expanding to other threatened social classes will further clarify the important puzzle of why some groups are able, against all odds, to exercise strength without numbers.The rising prevalence of drought conditions in California and elsewhere has dramatically increased demands on groundwater for irrigation and human consumption.Organic and inorganic contaminants in the water supply are prevalent in many human impacted sites such as agricultural, industrial, and municipal. However, simply measuring known sources of contamination has the potential to miss the complex effects of microbial communities in the soil and groundwater. Diverse microbial communities in subsurface environments including groundwater systems exhibit extraordinary phylogenetic diversity and metabolic complexity that has only recently become apparent using culture-independent sequencing-based analytics. The impact of changes in water chemistry on these aquifer microbial communities, and ultimately on groundwater quality, is unknown. Nitrogen as ammonia and nitrate are among the most ubiquitous groundwater contaminants due to widespread use in agriculture as fertilizers, as unintentional discharge in septage and effluent. While crops absorb much of the applied fertilizers, significant amounts leach to groundwater. In certain regions of California’s Central Valley, over 40% of drinking water aquifers have elevated levels of nitrates. The impact of these nitrogen compounds on environmental and groundwater microbial communities is not well understood, including the secondary effects on human, livestock, and wildlife health, and the potential for naturally occurring microbial populations to mineralize ammonia and nitrate to non-toxic forms. There thus exists an urgent need to understand these processes and how they may interact with remediation strategies to protect the quality of groundwater supplies.

To explore these important issues, we sampled groundwater from three adjacent wells completed at different depths that are part of a long term study on agricultural groundwater. The wells are affected to different degrees by manure, a common source of aqueous agricultural contamination. We subjected these samples to chemical analytics as well as next-generation sequencing, assembly,nft system and genomic analysis. Our genomic analysis revealed a highly diverse microbial community dominated by many new lineages of the Candidate Phyla Radiation and the Diapherotrites, Parvarchaeota, Aenigmarchaeota, Nanoarchaeota,Nanohaloarchaea superphyla and new lineages of the Planctomycete phylum with metabolic potential for both bio-remediation of the contamination as well as production of potentially hazardous secondary metabolites.We collected individual samples from each of four sites , the contamination source water as well as three wells. The domestic well water sample was clear and colorless in appearance with no odor. This water is pumped from ~100 m depth and used for human and cow consumption. Cow waste is pumped into the effluent lagoon , which was cloudy and brown in appearance with an apparent odor of ammonia and feces. After settlement of particulates, the lagoon water is used as a fertilizer source for the surrounding corn fields. Monitoring well 5 and monitoring well 6 are located immediately down gradient and upgradient respectively from a corn field receiving lagoon water . These wells are screened from 3 m to 10 m below ground surface . Monitoring well samples were clear and yellowish-green in appearance with a slight organic odor. Depth to the water table for the monitoring wells was 3.4 m bgs, and the wells were sampled at a depth of 4.3 m bgs. A previous hydrologic analysis indicated that MW5 is primarily recharged from the manured corn field, MW6 receives partial recharge from the manured corn field and partial recharge from an adjacent unmanured orchard, and DOM is primarily recharged from the adjacent orchard with slight impact from the manured field.Each water sample was tested for the presence of USDA pathogenic bacteria by inoculating liquid enrichment media and plating on selective nutrient media. The specific pathogens tested for were Salmonella, Enterococcus, Escherichia coli, and E. coli O157. Of these, Enterococcus, Escherichia coli, and E. coli O157 were detected in the LAG sample, but no pathogens were detected in any of the groundwater samples. Previous samplings from these and other similar monitoring wells on dairies did reveal the presence of USDA pathogens. However, it is not known how long these pathogens remain viable in the groundwater, and lagoon water had not recently been applied to the field where the monitoring wells are located. Our failure to detect these pathogens in groundwater suggests that they have a limited residence time.We asked whether the microbial composition of the water samples matched the chemical and culture-based observations. We analyzed the water microbial communities for DOM, LAG, MW5, and MW6 by constructing a whole metagenome library for each water sample and shotgun sequencing to a depth of ~50 million paired end 101 bp reads. We analyzed taxonomic makeup of the samples both by 16S rRNA gene profiling and whole metagenome assembly. First, we used EMIRGE to do reference-guided assembly of 16S ribosomal subunit genes and abundance estimation for each of our shotgun sequencing libraries.

We then assigned taxonomy to the 16S assemblies using the RDP web interface. Second, we assembled all of our reads and binned genomes from the assembled contigs and then assigned taxonomy to the genomic bins using RAPSEARCH to the UniProt UniRef100 database. The two metagenomic approaches we took are in good agreement with each other and with the water chemistry, however, we did not detect any of the cultured pathogens from the surface water by sequencing, suggesting they are rare. The shallow groundwater communities of MW5 and MW6 have similar species composition and are similar to the activated sludge bioreactor communities recently reported by Speth et al , a community sampled from the nitrogen removal stage of sewage wastewater treatment. However, in addition to observing 10 of the 12 phylogenetic groups reported by Speth, we additionally see 13 more in the groundwater. Specifically enriched are prokaryotes from the recently described nano-bacterial Parcubacteria and Microgenomates , nano-archaeal DPANN and ThaumarchaeotaAigarchaeota-Crenarchaeota-Korarchaeota superphyla as well as two distinct clades of Planctomycetes: the OM190 group, and the anammox Brocadiaceae group. Examining the EMIRGE data at abundances over 5%, the Archaea dominate, with the Crenarchaeote, Thermocladium , Woesearchaeota , and Methanomassiliicoccus . The Bacteria include anammox Planctomycetes from the Brocadia group , Acanthopleuribacter , Microgenomates genera , Dehalogenimonas , Parcubacteria genera , and Opitutus . The other major lineages in these samples include many known as nitrifiers, denitrifiers and methylotrophs as well as the heterotrophic eukaryote, Chlorella , at 7.4% and 5.4% respectively. In contrast to the similarities seen between the two shallow groundwater samples, the DOM and LAG samples each have their own distinct communities. The DOM sample is dominated by Domibacillusfollowed by Sphingomonasand Nitrospira . Anammox genomes are more rare in the deep groundwater, matching the trend seen in nitrate concentrations. The surface water is dominated by Rikenella ,which is known from animal feces. Several other likely animal-associated genera are abundant, including Anaerorhabdusand Acholeplasma , as well as a photosynthetic bacterium, Halochromatium . Overall, the taxonomic representation in the water samples matches well with expectations based on the chemical data. We note that several taxa appear unexpectedly in both the DOM and LAG samples, and we suspect these are contaminants in DOM from airborne dust. Specifically, Rikenella, the most dominant member of LAG, is present at 2.9% abundance in DOM. Likewise Anaerorhabdus, Coprobacillus, Halochromatium, and Acholeplasma are abundant at >5% in LAG and ~1% in DOM.