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The growing diversity of urban agriculture calls for research that accounts for its increasing complexity

The primary goal of this paper is to understand whether there is a connection between the growing practices organizations and businesses use and the themes present on websites, especially those associated with justice. This paper quantitatively grounds further discussion of the discursive realities of urban agriculture in the second paper, “Thinking and doing justice: urban agriculture in San Diego County.” Using three case studies chosen based on their online discursive representations , socio-spatial settings, and growing characteristics, I examine how local urban agriculture organizations, including soilless and soil-based, define and practice justice. This paper takes a reflexive approach to justice that moves away from “politics of perfection” and is embedded in spatial justice and a progressive sense of place that is “open and receptive to diversity and plurality” . Specifically, I assess the role of distribution, participation, and recognition in justice narratives and practices, paying special attention to the socio-spatial settings they are embedded in locally. Analysis centers around the role of land, labor, and capital—all of which are used in urban agriculture in various degrees and forms. Using a spatial perspective that acknowledges the importance of place and context, I explore the role of these three factors in producing opportunities and barriers for the three organizations to achieve justice, highlighting disparities in access, ownership, and management among them. Building on these case studies, the final paper, “Connecting the dots: local urban agriculture commodity circuits,” in collaboration with Dr. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, use multi-locale ethnographic analysis to explore the complexities and nuances of justice across the three case sites’ entire commodity circuits. Here, we examine the complex symbolic and material lives of the urban agriculture commodities at these sites and the unique,square plant pots locally articulated networks of human and non-human actors that support them. These networks embody different, but often overlapping, urban political economies and political ecologies that materially and discursively shape food production, distribution, and consumption.

We juxtapose vignettes from various nodes along each case’s commodity circuit to understand the place-based socio-natural relationships, including those related to class and race, that scaffold urban agriculture commodities and invite readers to “connect the dots.” Together, the three papers present a thorough account of the idiosyncrasies of justice in the growing, and increasingly diverse, urban food movement in San Diego County. They acknowledge, but ultimately abandon divisive narratives that make a priori assumptions regarding the connection between growing method and justice and instead unravel the question of how different forms of urban agriculture contribute to justice. As will become clear in the coming chapters, justice is more complicated than an abstract concept or measurable outcome – it is a process that is constantly unfolding within and across space.Urban agriculture has a rich history in the United States, evolving from a 20th century strategy for self-sufficiency to a radical and alternative approach to food production in the 1960s and 70s . Today, urban agriculture is a highly-commoditized feature of the urban landscape and represents a growing sector of the green economy . It is also more diverse than ever – traditional, soil-based practices like community gardening and farming on vacant, urban lots are now accompanied by small-scale, technologically-advanced, soilless forms of food production like hydroponics and aquaponics that enable food to be grown on rooftops, in greenhouses and abandoned buildings, and in mobile shipping containers. These physical distinctions are also accompanied by interrelated variances in “scope, scale, type of access and for whom, participants, and goals” . For instance, the participants undoubtedly influence the narratives and goals of an urban agriculture project, whether it be environmental sustainability ; human health and well-being ; distributive justice and economic autonomy ; challenging historical legacies of privilege and marginalization ; and/or participation in the new food economy . Recently, researchers of urban agriculture have begun paying attention to actors’ motivations and the narratives underlying them . However, this literature focuses almost solely on actors operating in the traditional networks of urban agriculture practice , paying little attention to recent and innovative approaches to urban agriculture that incorporate technology.

This research provides an inclusive account of the narratives, specifically online web page content, of urban agriculture sites and organizations in San Diego County – a county with a rich agricultural tradition that possesses both soil-based and soilless forms of UA. We use a novel, computer-mediated method that reveals hidden trends and avoids unproductive researcher biases. The result is a map of discursive relationships that transcends what we call politics of technology in which the narratives, and ultimately goals and motivations, of urban agriculture sites are taken for granted based on their growing methods. This politics of technology, which classifies certain forms of growing as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based upon their use of technology, is misleading. Instead, we argue that there is nothing inherently good or bad about urban farming methods. To support this claim, in this chapter, I examine the motivations and goals that are highlighted in the narratives presented on the websites of San Diego’s main urban agriculture organizations. The primary focus here is the ways organizations represent themselves and their work to the general public, including volunteers, policy makers, and potential funders. In subsequent chapters, I will turn my attention to the practices of these organizations in an attempt to draw connections between discourses and on-the-ground activities. This means more inclusive research that recognizes the many forms of urban agriculture, including new soilless configurations. For the purpose of this research, we define soilless urban agriculture as urban food production in greenhouses and in/on buildings that use hydroponic, aquaponic, or aeroponic technology. This definition expands the idea of “ZFarming” – referring to farming on zero acres including “rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses, indoor farms, and other building-related forms” – by focusing less on the location of urban agriculture and more on the production process. It excludes vertical and rooftop farms that do not incorporate hydroponics, aquaponics, or aeroponics and avoids vague monikers like ‘innovative’ or ‘high-tech’ . The physical descriptors associated with soil-based and soilless urban agriculture differ in the literature .

Using the term ‘soilless’ allows us to untangle our classification from those already established in the urban agriculture literature and draw attention to actors, technologies, and spaces commonly missing in definitions of urban agriculture. Soilless urban agriculture is an emergent feature of the urban agriculture landscape throughout the Global North; however, it is still in an “early innovation phase” . Little scholarly literature exists on soilless urban agriculture save for a few examples on stakeholder perceptions , descriptions of practices and novelties , and assessments of environmental and economic impacts . What research does exist tends to conflate it with entrepreneurialism . Rooftop agriculture is gaining recognition for its community and social justice benefits ; however, growing food on rooftops represents only a small aspect of technological innovation in urban agriculture. Urban agriculture is also practiced in greenhouses, warehouses, and shipping containers with or without the use of soil. Further, soil-based rooftop gardens may not carry the same stigmatization as those that use soilless technologies. Recently, researchers have examined the contributions that aquaponics can make to urban food sovereignty in Milwaukee and Melbourne ; however, this type of research is largely lacking. Here, we attempt to correct the direction of the current research agenda. Just as the seminal critique by Born and Purcell challenged the politics of scale that privilege local food production as inherently better without critical inquiry into actors’ agendas, we challenge the politics of technology in urban agriculture that privilege certain production methods as ‘inherently better’ without examining actors’ narratives and practices. Researchers have examined politics of technology in the context of the design of information technology, exploring the construction of ontological differences between “technology” and “human work” . Latour has also grappled with ethical arguments around technology,plastic pots for planting arguing that it is how we engage with technology that tips the moral scales. We ultimately build on Born and Purcell , arguing that there is nothing inherently superior about any given urban growing process and confusing the means by which food is grown in the urban setting with the ends that growing food in cities aims to achieve is fallible. The use of advanced technology in urban agriculture requires a reflexive, critical examination regarding the diversity of participants, narratives, and practices in urban agriculture. This research is preceded by a growing body of literature that examines the motivations of actors involved in urban agriculture in cities throughout the Global North . Recent research on urban agriculture organizations and businesses throughout Canada and the United States provides an interesting national context, identifying a series of motivational frames based on survey responses including Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical frames . This research reveals some interesting patterns, but unfortunately does not include technologically-advanced forms of growing. This investigation of motivations links productively to an analysis of the topics underlying urban agriculture narratives. Indeed, narratives around health, sustainability, justices, and more, often are driven by and drive motivations; however, as researchers note, examining advertised narratives and stated motivations is not a substitute for examining practices – see discussion of justice by Cadieux and Slocum . To that effect, this research is but a step in the process of understanding urban agriculture in San Diego County. Our research takes a different approach from its predecessors who have used both qualitative and mixed method research designs. Inspired by the ‘digital turn’ in Geography , we identify the narratives underlying urban agriculture using an innovative, computer-mediated quantitative method that combines natural language processing, dimensionality reduction, and data visualization.

This approach recognizes that “socio-techno-cultural” artefacts like website content create digital geographies linked to, but independent from, physical location. Here, Tobler’s first law of geography – “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” – is transposed to the digital world where all content produced by urban agriculture growers and organizations is related, but near things are more related discursively than distant things. We chose this approach for its ability to unveil hidden patterns in advertised content that may go unnoticed in other approaches such as surveys and interviews and avoid the politics of technology.The analytical methodology we pursue in this study relies on the delineation of ‘canonical knowledge structures’ representing common and generally accepted ideas about urban agriculture within the academic literature. To that end, we employed topic modelling, specifically latent Dirichlet allocation . This method is a popular choice for distilling themes from a collection of documents referred to as a corpus . A corpus may consist of any group of texts including peer-reviewed literature , grey literature, blog post , and social media posts like tweets . LDA identifies common word associations among the documents and performs statistical extraction of latent topics . In addition, a set of topic loadings is computed for each document . In effect, a “hidden structure” is thus inferred from the corpus by the algorithm. The granularity of the model, i.e. the number of topics, is a crucial consideration and input parameter, balancing model fit and interpretability . The topic model provides the top words and top phrases associated with each topic, which can be used to develop a descriptive label for each topic. To build our reference model, we first determined a source of “canonical” knowledge on urban agriculture. Suitable, recognized content on urban agriculture exists in many forms including scholarly literature, federal and state program information, planning documents, and nonprofit sector descriptions, among others. We chose to focus specifically on scholarly literature which gains canonical status through the peer-review and editorial process and represents the diversity of discourse around urban agriculture. Articles span diverse fields including ecology, geography, sociology, urban planning, chemistry, and engineering. Using the Web of Science database, we topic-searched journal articles containing noun phrases of ‘city’ and ‘urban’ in combination with the nouns ‘agriculture’ and ‘farm*1’ which returned 1,414 records including the article title, abstract, and keywords. We did not use a geographic criterion for our search. This search was performed on September 11, 2017. Still a relatively new subject in academic inquiry – the oldest item in the corpus dating back to 1959 – literature on urban agriculture has proliferated in recent years.

Self-compatibility is controlled by a single self-compatibility Sf dominant allele

Wide cultivation of almond, often under the more severe environments of Central Asia and the Mediterranean region, was possible because of the availability of a highly diverse gene pool, genetic recombination promoted by its self-incompatibility, and possibly, by interspecific hybridization and gene introgression involving other members of the Amygdalus subgenus. As a result, almond is an extremely variable species, with a high morphological and physiological diversity. This variability, measured with biochemical and molecular markers , has revealed that almond is the most genetically variable of the diploid Prunus cultivated species. In the Mediterranean Region, 2000 years of almond culture concentrated production to specific areas, where well-defined seedling ecotypes and local cultivars evolved. By the turn of the 20th century, most of these almond-producing countries had identified locally desirable cultivars that were often seedling selections of unknown origin. Thus, growers selected cultivars and landraces, which represented a rich genetic diversity. Most of these Mediterranean local cultivars have largely disappeared from cultivation in the last 50 years. Modern almond cultivation is based on a reduced number of cultivars grafted onto soiladapted clonal root stocks and cultivated under irrigated conditions when possible. Modern almond breeding started in the 1920s with the making of controlled crosses and seedling selections to meet changing agronomic and market demands. Currently,growing blueberries there are six active public breeding programs worldwide: the USA , Spain , Australia , and Israel .

Some private breeding programs exist also in the USA. In addition, there were various breeding initiatives in Russia, France, Greece, Italy, and Argentina. Different breeding objectives were developed according to regional agronomic, commercial, and market requirements. One of the main differences in the objectives is nut shell hardness. Two types of almonds are bred: soft-shelled and hard shelled . Common aims of Mediterranean breeding programs are self-compatibility and late-blooming, as most traditional almond cultivars are self-incompatible and early blooming.During the last 50 years, almond breeding for self-compatibility has mainly used two sources of Sf, local landraces originated in Italy and related species such as P. persica and P. webbii. Almond breeders have relied mainly on out crossing and, occasionally, on introgression from other Prunus species, for the development of new cultivars. Initially, in the USA and later in Russia and Mediterranean region , rapid genetic advances were achieved. In California, “Carmel” , as “Nonpareil” pollinizer, was the first cultivar release with extensive commercial impact. In Russia and the former Soviet Union, several late-flowering and frost-hardy cultivars were obtained in the 1950s with Primorskyi later used extensively for breeding in Europe. In the Mediterranean region, late flowering, productive, well-adapted, and resilient cultivars like Ferragnès or Masbovera were released with great success. The French self-compatible cultivar Lauranne showed a broad environmental adaptation, high production, and regular cropping. Although improved cultivars continued to be released, the amount of progress per generation diminishes since parents were continually drawn from the same gene pool. This situation has resulted in a potential loss of genetic variability in new breeding stocks and cultivars. Inbreeding depression in almond, expressed as low vigor, reduced flower number and fruit set, increased fruit abortion, lowered seed germination and seedling survival, increased leaf and wood abnormalities, and loss of disease resistance have been reported.

In addition, low self fruitfulness in self-compatible almond genotypes was suspected to be due to inbreeding. Regarding breeding for self-compatibility, male parents carrying the Sf allele and sharing the other S allele with the female parent are commonly used. In addition, crossing heterozygous self-compatible parents in breeding programs has been suggested to obtain homozygous self compatible genotypes to be used in further breeding. Such breeding strategies can narrow the genetic variability of crops when they lead to a reduced number of genotypes utilized as parents. Summarizing, modern almond breeding and production are dominated by a small number of widely distributed and related cultivars. This situation can lead to a potential increase of inbreeding depression and genetic vulnerability, i.e., susceptibility of most of the grown cultivars to biotic and abiotic stresses due to similarities in their genotypes. Therefore, it is needed to have up-to-date information of the relationships among genotypes used at breeding and production levels. Several almond populations have been analyzed with molecular markers in order to determine genetic variability and relatedness. However, these studies were performed with material from limited geographic areas and do not represent the current worldwide status of almond breeding stocks. Although genomic measures of inbreeding are more accurate than those obtained from pedigree data, pedigree-based analysis is a cost effective technique to estimate these parameters inbreeding populations and an alternative when genomic measures are unviable. Several reports have evaluated inbreeding based on pedigree data in breeding populations of fruit and nut tree crops. In almond, a pedigree analysis of 123 different genotypes from the USA, France, Spain, Israel, and Russia was reported. However, their work was mainly focused on North American genotypes and did not include many cultivars that have subsequently been released worldwide.

This study aimed to determine the genetic structure of current breeding stocks and breeding tendencies over the last 50 years using marker-verified pedigree data.Pedigree data of 220 almond genotypes were compiled from available bibliography and breeding records. From the 220 almond genotypes, 37 genotypes were no longer available as they were eliminated some time ago or were from discontinued breeding programs. To verify parental relationships of the rest of genotypes , we used SSRs, SNPs, and self incompatibility S-allele data from previous studies performed by the breeding programs taking part in this study . Marker data confirmed both parents of 71 genotypes and one parent of four genotypes and found three erroneous parentages. Two wrong parentages were found on the male parent of “Capella” and “Davey”, changing their pedigree to open-pollinated and a third incorrect parentage on “Yosemite” female parent, eliminating this genotype from the analysis. After the corrections made, pedigrees of 169 genotypes of known origin were analyzed . The origin of the genotypes were 59 from Spain, 56 from the USA, 16 from Russia, 11 from Israel, 10 from France, 7 from Australia, 7 from Greece, 2 from Argentina, and 2 from Italy. A pedigree data file was created. Each record in the file contained one cultivar or selection name, the female parent and the male parent, in that order. Once entered,square plant pots these data were available for inbreeding analyses such as determining the number of times a cultivar appeared in a pedigree as a male or female genitor. Genotypes of known origin were classified into two groups according to self compatibility: 104 self-incompatible and 65 self compatible.In summary, the inbreeding coefficient measures the probability that two alleles in a locus are identical by descent and so copies of the same allele from a previous generation. The pairwise relatedness measures the probability that two alleles at any locus are identical by descent between two different individuals. F and r range from 0 to 1, with values close to 0 indicating a low degree of inbreeding or relatedness and values close to 1 indicating a high degree of inbreeding or relatedness. The genetic contribution estimates the proportion of genome that comes from the same individual. Thus, a child will have 0.5 genome of either parent and a grandchild will have 0.25 genomes of his grandparents.To calculate F, r, and GC, parents of unknown origin were assumed to be unrelated and noninbred. The seed parent involved in all open pollinations was also assumed to be unrelated to the pollen parent. These assumptions, based on the fact that most almond cultivars are obligate out crossers because of their self-incompatibility, may lead to an underestimation of inbreeding. In the cases of genotypes of open-pollinated origin , numbers OP1, OP2, and OP3 were given to the pollen parent in order to be distinguishable for genetic studies. Also, all mutants were considered to have no genetic differences from the original cultivar, thus GC = 1. Since the differences between such mutants and the original cultivar are expected to be caused by a few mutations in the DNA, this simplification avoids the overestimation of inbreeding coefficients. Cultivars like Supernova and Guara were considered as “Tuono” clones. Regarding the different clones of the French paper-shell cultivar Princesse, used in both the USA and Russian breeding programs, we adopted the approach of Lansari et al.by analyzing both clones as the same cultivar. Historical reports suggest that the Hatch series “Nonpareil”, “I.X.L.”, and “Ne Plus Ultra” were seedling selections from an open-pollination progeny of the early-introduced cultivar Princesse.

This cultivar probably originated from the Languedoc region in France. Also, “Nikitskij” was selected in France in 1902. Because their specific origins remain uncertain, we analyzed these genotypes as nonrelated, which, however, could lead to an underestimation of inbreeding. Pedigree data were analyzed at four levels: worldwide, by country , by breeding program , and by genotypes carrying the Sf allele for self-compatibility.Our genetic study of almond breeding programs worldwide demonstrated that the most widely used cultivars were Nonpareil, Tuono, Cristomorto, and Mission. “Nonpareil” had a large influence in USA and Australian programs, where soft-shelled nuts are bred. This reference cultivar was present in all the breeding programs studied . The self-compatible “Tuono” and the late blooming “Cristomorto” were extensively used in the Mediterranean programs, where hard-shelled nuts are bred. “Mission” initially showed a considerable importance worldwide, but deeper analysis demonstrated that it was mainly influential in private American programs. Taking into account these results, we can establish two main breeding lines based on the use of three different founders: the European programs based mainly on “Tuono” and “Cristomorto” , and the North American–Australian programs based on “Nonpareil” . The French and Spanish breeding programs were based directly on “Tuono” and “Cristomorto”. In the French INRA program, the Italian cultivars Tuono and Cristomorto account for 60.0% of total GC and were present in the pedigree of all ten cultivars and selections evaluated. Also, the local French late-flowering and Monilinia-resistant cultivar Aï was a parent to both “Ferragnès” and “Ferraduel”. In the three Spanish breeding programs, the importance of “Tuono” and “Cristomorto” cultivars was very high, accounting to 46.2% of total GC. These two cultivars were present in the pedigree of 53 out of 59 cultivars and breeding selections from Spain. These results can be explained by the large influence of the French germplasm on the Spanish breeding programs, causing a high relationship between the programs of both countries . In the North American breeding programs, “Nonpareil” accounts for 43.7% of the total GC and was present in the pedigree of 48 out of 56 cultivars and breeding selections from the USA. In Australia, ‘Nonpareil’ accounts for 39.3% of the total GC and is present in the pedigree of 6 out of 7 cultivars and breeding selections. Also, “Lauranne” reaches an importance similar to ‘Nonpareil’, explaining the close relationship between the Australian and French programs . Even in other countries with noncontinuous breeding initiatives, such as Russia, Greece, or Argentina, the use of “Nonpareil” as a founder was common. Israel was the only country where these cultivars had a relatively low influence. This may be due to the extreme Israeli climatic conditions, forcing breeders to use locally adapted selections as parents. In Spain, the use of locally adapted cultivars such as Bertina at CITA as a donor for Polystigma ochraceum Sacc. resistance was successful but used only to a limited extent. Other examples of secondary founders include “Primorskyi”, used regularly as late-blooming and Fusicoccum-resistance donor in two of the Spanish breeding programs and “Eureka” and “Harriott” in the North American breeding programs.Pedigree analysis is a cost-effective and well-established way to monitoring inbreeding and relatedness among controlled breeding populations. However, the veracity of any analysis based on this kind of data relies on the accuracy of records collected across multiple institutions and by many breeders. In order to verify parental relationships of the genotypes under study, we used SSRs, SNPs, and self-incompatibility S-allele data from previous analysis carried out by the breeding programs taking part in this study. Our molecular marker analysis confirmed 146 parentage relationships and found three errors , which were corrected accordingly. Thus, the marker-based pedigree analysis performed showed only small parental changes and corroborates the consistency of the results reached by this study.However, several reports have demonstrated that large scale genomic analysis may provide more accurate results than pedigree analysis. This kind of genome-based pedigree analysis has already been performed in apple.