The chapters, with their diverse research questions and publication outlets, push back against a food system that destroys human and environmental health alike, and seek out climate friendly alternatives through collaborative, participatory research projects. The research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 make the case for diverse values and benefits associated with relocalizing sustainable and equitable food systems centered around small diversified farms, in places where this type of food system transformation is sought. Rather than arguing for the complete overthrow of the current industrial food system, the primary contribution of these cases is to argue that shifts to current practices are both necessary and possible yet must be supported by appropriate and enabling governance structures. There are social, ecological, and educational benefits to adopting agroecological food system practices, but it is difficult to enact these practices holistically and systemically across food system elements in the current U.S. political economy. The cases offer lessons or “pilots” that are relevant to the operations of large-scale farms and industrial processes as well as small scale, agroecological operations: through adding plant diversity and minimizing soil disturbance, for example, numerous benefits can be achieved for farmers , for local ecology, and for global climate change. Therefore, findings implicate the policy and planning domain in terms of action needed to sustain and scale positive food system reform impacts, on a variety of levels and with attention to social justice implications. The findings also make important contributions to methods of climate change communication and education: effective CCE will manifest differently in different contexts and must allow for each audience to express the environmental concerns that are most pressing, immediate, and relevant in that context.

Through considering food systems and climate systems holistically, opportunities for public health benefits,vertical home farming local environmental improvements, and educational growth can be realized. Lopez Island is situated 4 miles off the Washington State mainland in the Salish Sea, where it is Figure 3- Lopez Island Farmland a lighthouse for an alternative, agroecological model of food production at the community scale. Approximately 18,000 acres of agricultural land in the San Juan Islands chain form a network of non-GMO, non-chemical based agricultural land. The 5,000 acres of Lopez Island farms stand in direct contrast to conventional farming: they are largely small scale, human powered, diversified, educational, knowledge-intensive, reliant on natural fertilizers and integrated pest management strategies, and localized in terms of who they serve2 . The Lopez Community Land Trust lists 27 farms on their annually published “farm products guide,” on this island of 2,500 year-round inhabitants. Lopez farmers seek to optimize many outcomes besides yield and several actively cultivate seed diversity through seed saving and local exchange. Seeds are selected for drought resilience, flavor, nutrient content, ability to withstand disease and pest pressure, and general endurance and adaptability to local conditions. The resident community is invested in local farms, through school food procurement, local markets, and regular volunteer presence. The summer tourism industry can attribute some fraction of its success to the local food system, as a recent tourism survey indicated “natural/rural scenery” as the top reason and “local food” in the top half of 15 listed reasons tourists come to the San Juan Islands . However, the tourism industry simultaneously poses a challenge to the local agriculture community, as the real estate and land markets are increasingly displacing farmers due to development pressures and desires for second homes on the islands. As an island community, Lopez has unique considerations around food procurement. Importing food from the mainland is expensive and risky in the face of natural disasters, as ferry service to the islands is easily disrupted and unreliable in the face of adverse weather conditions.

Ferry service costs $47 round trip from Anacortes to Lopez per vehicle and driver in the summer season. There is an added incentive on Lopez to adopt self sufficient and soil regenerating farming practices at the community scale due to its geographic isolation in combination with rocky, relatively poor soil quality. This “island incentive” is important to factor in when considering the widespread adoption of sustainable agriculture on Lopez; as the San Juan County Agricultural Strategic Action Plan reports, “islanders naturally place a high value on food security and may benefit from their isolation to preserve genetic diversity, for example, by establishing an organic seed industry” . As food supply chains in today’s globalized food system are increasingly threatened by natural and climate-exacerbated disasters, all communities will soon have increased incentives to invest in sustainable food production as a form of resilience, food security, and climate adaptation. In the realm of food self-sufficiency, innovative production systems, and climate resilience, there is much to learn from island nations and communities that are on the front lines of adapting food systems to and mitigating climate change. Lopez is striving to create a robust, resilient, socially just local food system, a distinct and more complex goal than merely investing in and promoting local food production. Individual farmers starting to adopt and successfully deploy regenerative practices is not the same as creating a sustainable and resilient local food system. A local food system, as outlined in the previous chapter, includes not just production, but transportation, distribution, marketing, retail, preparation, consumption, waste recycling, and education across system elements. A food system that is socially just, compensating farmers fairly for their labor while balancing affordability for the consumer across income groups, requires a change in food system economic transactions from the status quo. A food system that is environmentally sustainable and mitigates climate change, storing more carbon in the soil than it releases and minimizing emissions throughout the system elements, requires transformation of the dominant industrial food system. Lopez farmers are striving to increase and quantify their soil carbon reservoir, with less progress to date on reconfiguring the economic status quo. What can this island farming community tell us about creating and scaling alternatives to the chemical-industrial farming industry? What are the key challenges, tensions, and opportunities on Lopez for building a local food system that is socially just and environmentally sustainable? What are the next steps for Lopez, and other counties or regions, in moving towards goals and vision statements for re-localized food systems? These questions, when answered, become relevant not just to farmers and researchers, but importantly, to policymakers, economists, and businesses that must implement new policies and economic structures effectively in partnership with farmer- and community-generated vision statements. Significant to the presentation of results and discussion is the supremacy of private property in the United States legal system. When comparing the Lopez agricultural case study to “idealized” visions of agroecological food systems, many steps towards the “ideal” are thwarted by private property “enclosures” of the agricultural commons,vertical growers which is more pronounced in the United States than in other geographic contexts.Thus, progress towards visioning and establishing agroecological local food systems must reconcile with unique challenges in the U.S. land tenure system, and ultimately promulgate strategies for loosening the supremacy of private property if real power is to be restored to those growing our food. Through a compilation of fieldwork, ethnographic notes, participant-observation, and immersion into the community, this chapter presents data on the Lopez Island sustainable food system case study, and constructs analysis of food system transformation framed by the paradigm of agroecology .

I draw on social science research methods including semi-structured interviews and ethnographic techniques to bring forward ideas and solutions from leaders in the agricultural community of the San Juan Islands. Research partners include the San Juan Island Agricultural Resource Committee , the San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild , the Lopez Community Land Trust , the Lopez Island Farm Education program, Washington State University San Juan County Extension, San Juan Islands Conservation District , Midnight’s Farm, Stonecrest Farm, Sweet briar Farm, and Lopez Harvest. I find that the Lopez food system transformation towards resilience, sustainability, and equity is a work in progress, requiring political and economic shifts in order for regenerative food production practices to spark regeneration and equity in other branches of the food system. Significantly, farmland transition barriers and land access challenges3 combined with new and beginning farmer training are areas requiring further investment, investigation, and institutional capacity in order to secure the progress made to date into subsequence generations of sustainable farmers.It is already well established in the agroecology and sustainable food systems literature that the chemical-industrial farming system causes adverse human health, labor, social justice, environmental and climate outcomes . Thus, alternatives to the chemical-industrial farming system are imperative to develop and advance for environmental and social justice reasons. The current dominant food system is driven towards yield-maximizing outputs enabled by increasingly consolidated, mechanized monocultures, which are in turn reliant on a potent mix of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels. This system functions at the expense of human health, fair labor conditions, equitable food distribution, and environmental preservation. Furthermore, the current food system contributes significantly to the problem of climate change, emitting approximately 25% of the global greenhouse gas emissions portfolio . Conversely, regenerative agroecological food systems have the potential to store more carbon annually in the soil than what is emitted through processes like respiration and plant decay, which at scale could amount to significant global carbon offsets , buying time for the planet to adopt other necessary technological and social changes to reduce carbon emissions . Agroecological, sustainable, and organic farmers are leading the way towards demonstrating new ways to both produce sufficient quantities of food and mitigate climate change through soil C sequestration. Regenerative agriculture 4’s climate mitigation potential is highlighted in a recently released report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, stating that “negative emissions technologies—natural and engineered strategies for actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere such as agroforestry and silvopasture, biomass gasification and bio-char—deployed at scale in the United States could sequester between 0.6 and 1.4 gigatons of C annually by 2050” . A report by Terra Genesis International further breaks down the mitigation potential of regenerative agriculture practices per hectare as depicted in Figure 4. According to Silver, “plants, and the soils they live in, are tremendous resources in the battle against climate change… soils have the potential to be deep, long-term repositories of some of the carbon captured by plants, keeping it from returning to the atmosphere for years to decades or longer” . Silver and her team of researchers quantify the impact of existing “agricultural mitigation practices” as potentially lowering global temperatures by 0.26°C by 2100, under RCP 2.6 . Other researchers helped develop the “Soil C 4 per Mille” initiative, launched at the COP21 talks in Paris in 2015, calling for all nations to increase soil carbon storage on agricultural lands by 0.004%, which would create a significant global carbon drawdown effect of 2-3 Gt C annually, offsetting 20-35% of anthropogenic emissions . What are these “agricultural mitigation practices” and how exactly can they be scaled across global agricultural acreage? Undoubtedly, local geography and context matter, along with available social, intellectual, and financial resources. This chapter will explore the first half of the question and explore the application of mitigation practice in the San Juan Island geographical context. A selected list of practices most relevant to Lopez Island farms are listed in Table 1 below. It is worth noting that many of these practices, in particular no-till and cover cropping, are broadly relevant to agricultural producers in both the conventional and organic industry, offering opportunities to build a “big tent” in the agriculture sector’s response to climate change.Agroecological research often ties together the climate mitigation impacts of ecological farming with the social justice impacts of farming practices that are regenerative for both land and people, building a framework for conceptualizing and studying the health of interlinked human and natural communities. In the words of Steve Gliessman, “Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems, from the farm to the table, with a goal of achieving ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and change-oriented research and action, agroecology links together science, practice, and movements focused on social change” . Thus social movements focused on poverty reduction, public health, and racial justice are linked in with the agroecology paradigm. This triple bottom line of social, economic and ecological sustainability must be investigated in each context that claims “agroecology” as its mantle.