Horticulture

Participants mentioned that specific technologies or technical messages were often provided to farmers through interaction with the SANE representatives tackle agricultural and climate adaptation challenges with a focus on nutrition-sensitive agriculture. SANE representatives are also members of the NACDC. CGIARs and NACDC have in-degree scores of 4 and 3, respectively. Several participants noted that CGIARs work closely with Malawi’s technical agriculture departments to develop technologies that can be scaled up. A government representative from DAES noted that in some cases CGIARs will bring a new technology to Malawi that has yet to be tested locally. In those cases, the technology will first be analyzed by the appropriate MoAIWD department before it is disseminated throughout the extension system. Several participants noted that new technologies developed by international institutions like the CGIARs will be presented to extension stakeholders during a meeting of the NACDC. A Malawi NGO participant noted that it could take up to three years for the NACDC to analyze and disseminate a new technology because of the thorough process undertaken by stakeholders on the NACDC.

Another participant noted that the NACDC is spearheaded by representatives of MoAIWD and allows extension providers in the public sector, NGOs, farmer organizations,black flower bucket and the private sector to harmonize the messages that are disseminated to farmers. A Malawi NGO participant commented, “we always want to make sure that that the thematic areas that have been developed by the National Agriculture Content Development Committee are things that can be put in place at district level and demystified to fit the conditions that are prevailing on the ground for each district.” It is also worth noting that several participants had never heard of the NACDC and two others had only heard of the committee by name but did not know its function or membership. DCP was also common content developer referenced by participants and has an in-degree score of 3. Participants explained that DCP develops new crop technologies for farmers to use stating, “the crops department along with the agriculture researchers are responsible for developing technologies which we disseminate to farmers for their interventions.” In order to increase the production of crops like maize, DCP will partner with research institutions to develop new seeds and methods from increasing yields. Similarly, several participants mentioned that agricultural technologies are developed by MoAIWD’s technical departments and then disseminated to farmers through the public extension system.

Stakeholder Engagement .This section provides an analysis of the relationships within Malawi’s extension network that were described by participants in order to answer the research question, “how do extension providers engage and share information with other organizations to address climate change?” The network analyzed through this research contains 85 organizations and 170 unique relationships or ties between those organizations. The average degree of collaboration between organizations within the network is 6.2 or 7.3% of total organizations in the network. Therefore, most extension providers operating in Malawi are only connected to a few organizations in the network. The network density is .037 and reveals that organizations within the network are not as closely connected as they could be. The relational ties and node connectivity within Malawi’s extension network ties as described by participants through a sociogram are shown in Figure 7.Both one direction and two direction relationships that were described by participants with the size of node indicating the level of betweenness with other organizations in the network are illustrated in Figure 7. Thirty-eight out of the 85 organizations in the network, or 45%, are only connected to one other organization and are therefore operate within the periphery of the network. These 38 organizations are also seen on the edges of the network and therefore less connected to the greater extension community. It is also clear that certain organizations are central to the transfer of information within the network. Centrality measures for the 10 core organizations with the highest degrees of collaboration and information sharing within the extension network are shown in Table 5 . The average information in-degree is 3.1 and average information out-degree is 3.1.ADDs also have the highest information betweenness of 1936 which shows organizations that hold the network together and collaboration degree of 42 which shows the total number of ties of the organization.

The top three organizations identified are government and include ADDs, DAES, and MoAIWD. Other top organizations include those from Malawi NGOs, international NGOs, and farmer organizations. NACDC, Catholic Relief Services, and NASFAM also have high collaboration degrees indicating their importance in sharing information and connecting organizations within the network. Catholic Relief Services has the second highest betweenness score of 1350 indicating that this organization is situated between a large number of organizations and provides a connection between a high number of organizations that otherwise might not be able to share information as easily. Farmers have one of the highest out-degree collaboration degree , and betweenness score . This shows that farmers are critical links of information sharing between organizations in extension network. The third research question posed in this study and addressed in this section was, “what advisory methods do extension providers use to educate maize farmers about climate smart agricultural practices?” The advisory methods used by extension providers to communicate messages to farmers about climate smart agricultural practices are categorized into three distinct themes: ICTs, trainings, and written materials. The percentage of participants by organization type using each advisory method is shown in Table 6. Of the ICTs used by participants, radio was the most commonly referenced communication channel. Almost 58% of participants reported using radio platforms to disseminate messages to farmers including community radio and national radio stations often utilizing radio listening clubs comprising small groups of farmers with radio access within a village. According to a participant from the Malawi government, “when programs are aired on the radio, we encourage our farmers to go to their radio listening groups. So, if one farmer has a radio in a village, then that radio is used by a group of farmers to listen to the messages that are on the radio.” Organizations also utilize radio platforms to share weather forecasts and provide other timely messages to farmers. According to a participant from an international NGO, “we’re disseminating messages on climate change and weather forecasts through radio. They learn about the things that they need to know before the disaster comes.” The use of mobile phones was the second most common ICT referenced by participants. Short Message Service messages are sent directly to farmers by extension providers and are used by 53% of participants.

Participants noted that SMS allows farmers to receive both text messages and Interactive Voice Response messages. A representative of the Malawi government noted, “We send messages using phones and we reach about 24,000 Lead Farmers across all the districts.” Once Lead Farmers receive text messages, they will then share the information with fellow farmers in their locality. Participants also commented that SMS platforms often complement one another and increase access to information. Internet platforms are used by 32% of participants and included social media, WhatsApp groups, and videos. A participant from the Malawi government commented, “Some content is now being accessed online. We partner with Access Agriculture. Access Agriculture has a lot of videos that have been translated into Chichewa, the local language.” Increasingly,square black flower bucket organizations are leveraging internet content to disseminate information to farmers and increase knowledge about new agricultural technologies. According to a representative from an international NGO, “we have WhatsApp groups where farmers are able to share videos of the technologies that they’re learning. I’m also able to post some videos on nutrition or soil fertility management. These technologies are being promoted in order for them to increase production.” The use of these internet platforms broadens the source of content and allows for the rapid transfer of knowledge with those who have access. Almost 16% of participants mentioned using television programs to communicate messages to farmers. Participants commonly noted that farmers receive information about weather conditions from television weather forecasts. In other cases, documentaries are produced and then aired on television to disseminate information about agricultural technologies and innovations. One government representative noted that his department is responsible for the development and dissemination of content through electronic media including television. Call Centers and Mobile Vans are used by 11% of participants. Call Centers allow farmers to ask questions and receive quick feedback from extension experts. A participant from a Malawi NGO commented, “with the Call Centers, farmers can call for free to ask any question relating to their farming activities. That provides near real-time feedback to farmers for whatever inquiries they have.” Several participants from the Malawi government also noted using Mobile Audio Vans to disseminate various messages to farmers in the field. One stated, “if we want to reach out to the masses with some awareness messages that are very simple and not technical, we could use Mobile Vans. A Mobile Van is effective just to communicate simple issues on awareness.” Yet a Mobile Van might be less effective at communicating highly technical messages that require training and real-time feedback from farmers.

About 90% of participants mentioned using some form of trainings to communicate information to farmers and this was the most common advisory method used among extension providers. Common training methods utilized by participants included Lead Farmers, Farmer Field Schools, site visits, demonstrations, and the Model Village Approach. Trainings facilitated by Lead Farmers are common among NGOs, the government, farmer organizations, and private sector participants. Participants mentioned that Lead Farmers train up to fifty farmers at one time depending on their own skills, experience, and the community’s needs. One private sector participant noted that Lead Farmers are regarded as “knowledgeable individuals who can lead their fellow farmers.” Other participants vocalized additional benefits of Lead Farmers including high rates of technology adoption and trust among community members. Lead Farmers within this structure have different responsibilities to their villages, EPAs, and Districts. Lead Farmers involved in the Executive Committees of the Association may also hold substantial decision-making power and influence. Another participant noted that Farmer Field Schools are often used, “when we have specific issues that we want to deal with or when you have a particular problem that farmers face and it requires a lot of time to study that problem, look at the causes, and look at various ways of overcoming that issue.” The length of farmer trainings mentioned by participants varied from a single, one-hour to several, week-long trainings and the number of training participants ranged from ten to thirty. One participant from a farmer’s organization described the detail and intentionality of planning and facilitating a Farmer Field School Training. This participant explained the steps their organization takes including 1) determining the focal audience and their needs; 2) identifying the training’s objectives; 3) creating a workshop outline including proposed activities; 4) developing training support materials; 5) facilitating the training; and 6) implementing monitoring and evaluation components for future training improvement. The use of site visits and demonstrations were also mentioned by some of the participants as a way to train farmers. Participants explained that farm or site visits allow individual or small groups of farmers to receive feedback or learn about a new technology to adopt on their farms. Demonstrations allow farmers to observe the results of a new technology that they can choose to implement on their own farms.Several government participants also mentioned using the Model Village Approach to promote new agricultural technologies and innovations within a certain village. One government representative noted, “we conduct training on participatory rural appraisal or PRA with farmers in the Model Village. We also mount demonstration in the village depending on the technologies we are promoting in that particular village.” After observing a demonstration from another Model Village, Lead Farmers are often instructed to establish a model village back in their own villages. Participants noted that this process can help to facilitate widespread adoption of a particular technology among members of a village who are closely connected. Written materials are also common and were mentioned by 63% of participants. Written materials used to communicate messages to farmers included leaflets, extension manuals, and newspapers. A private sector participant noted, “it is the extension workers who use the government extension manual for promotion of modern agriculture production technologies including the right farm inputs.

There has been an overall agreement that past policies have been inefficient and that income-support policies “overshot” in assuring and providing food supply and have become too costly and barely affordable. This suggests the need for “decoupling”-setting entitlements criteria that do not affect production while attaining other objectives. Government policies have resulted in substantial excesses of the productive capacities of agriculture in the United States, Western Europe, and other developed countries. A policy refornl should consist of two elements. First, it will induce gradual down scaling of agricultural sectors of these countries so that, within a transitional period of, say, 10 years, agricultural markets will attain a sustainable set of equilibria which improves welfare and the performance of the agricultural and food production sectors. Once agricultural markets approach these equilibria,plastic flower bucket government policies will operate to attain sustainable growth in the future and make the agricultural sector more flexible and progressive. The design of a policy reform requires the identification of effective policy instruments and the development of procedures for setting their levels as well as for their enforcement, monitoring, and adjustment over time.

The assessment and selection of policies should be done within a decision-making framework that operates to increase economic efficiency while recognizing and incorporating political economic constraints. The next section introduces such a framework and spells out its implications regarding information and assessment criteria for the policy instruments’ selection. The paper, “Building Sustainable Coali tions for Welfare Improving Policies,” argues that efficiency and equity considerations have to be balanced when designing a policy reform that is both welfare improving and politically feasible. Thus, a framework for the determination and analysis of pol icy reform should include functional relationships measuring the economic welfare effects and political feasibility of policy instruments. Welfare economics provides justification for the use of appropriate summation of economic surpluses as a measure of economic welfare and efficiency. The recent literature on political economy provides alternative frameworks for modeling the politically feasible set of agricultural policies. The model here applies assumptions and fonnulations that are similar to the ones used in recent empirical political economic models of agricultural policy choices . Specifically, it assumes that a policymaker presents a propos:ll for a vote by a legislative body or even a referendum by the general population. The choices of the voters are assumed to be affected by the impacts of the policy on the welfare of different groups they represent, belong to, or support. It is also assumed that the policymakers cannot predict voters’ responses to policy proposals and that proposals are shaped so that the voting uncertainty is controlled.

Surplus measures can be utilized to obtain the distributional effects of policies within markets. For example, analysis of the market effects of a pesticide control policy can apply surplus measures to estimate the impacts of the policy on consumers, producers in different regions , pesticides, other input manufacturers, etc. . While applications of this type of analysis seem straightforward, note that appropriate incorporation of international trade considerations, monopolistic and oligopolistic behavior, and imperfect information and uncertainty consideration within this framework requires much ingenuity and effort. Still, these distribution effects can be presented in clearly defined monetary terms. Quantification of nonmonetary effects of policies might be very difficult, and expression of these effects in monetary terms is sometimes impossible. For example, a pesticide control policy may affect the health and well-being of growers, pesticide applicators, farm workers, and consumers; and the estimates of such effects are Subject to very high degrees of uncertainty . There is much controversy regarding the appropriate procedure for monetary assessment of days lost due to diseases and lives lost due to accidents . Therefore, for analysis, it may be useful to present estimates of the real impacts of policies on health and lives with a given degree of statistical significance and not mone tary estimates. The distributional effects of policies are represented by the function Win the model.

The model suggests that assessment of political support for policies also requires knowledge of H, the weight that different impacts have in shaping voting be havior. Several studies have applied econometric techniques such as logit and Tobit to congressional voting data to estimate impacts of certain factors on voting behavior. These studies clearly show that voting pallerns of individual representatives are consistent with the economic interest of the regions represented by these representatives. Further applications of these kinds of models, using appropriate measures of distributional effects as explanatory variables, are needed to allow better prediction of voting patterns in response to policy changes. etermination of a policy that values the decision problem in requires knowledge of the efficiency and distributional impacts of alternative policy instruments. The assessment of these policy impacts should not be restricted to analyses of impacts of individual policy instruments but should include assessments of the impacts of policy instl’uments’ mixtures. Policy instruments may have complementarity of substitution relationships. They operate jointly and in correlated manners to affect distributions of key variables such as farmers’ earnings and food prices and quantities. These correlations and dependency relationships suggest that prices of a policy mix are likely to be different sums of outcomes and impacts of the individual components. Just, Lichtenberg, and Zilberman have demonstrated that independent management of grains and water inventories by uncoordinated activities of government agencies may lead to substantial welfare losses. Lichtenberg and Zilberman have shown that the market efficiency impacts of environmental regulations in agriculture are likely to be substantially overestimated when the existence and effects of commodity programs are ignored.

Therefore, policy analyses and policy design should develop mechanisms for coordinated management of policy instruments and also assess impacts of policy mi xtures. he construction of a policy reform is an intensive and iterative process involving several rounds of negotiations at different levels. There are many participants in this process including government officials whomay initiate the process, representatives of interest groups , and the voters. These voters are not passive participants in the process but, rather, active participants in negotiations and modifications of proposals. There are many who view these process as a game with many participants and who analyze its outcome accordingly . The model presented above may provide the agencies which initiated the policy reform with a good .initial proposal and help to guide them in negotiations and when updating reform parameters. Figure 2 illustrates how the approach presented here can be incorporated in the iterative process of shaping the policy reform. First, a data collection and modeling effort will be taken to estimate parameters needed to predict impacts of alternative policies and the political importance of different power groups. Parallel to these data collection and estimation efforts, different interest groups and their political representative organizations should be identified. These available information will be used in the establishment of an initial proposal that will be negotiated with representatives of interest groups and other political power brokers. The negotiation process may lead to either passing of a proposal or to a reassessment of political realities,flower buckets wholesale redesign of policy, and a new round of negotiations. These negotiations will continue until an acceptable formula is reached. As both political and physical realities are changing over time, key elements of the policy reform will have to be modified and updated. Thus, the legislative process described in Figure 2 wi 11 have to be conducted once every 5 or 10 years. The modeling approach presented here will provide a consistent and systematic framework for assessment of realities and introduction of policy changes. Some of the classic works on the economics of public policy view policy design as the choice of instruments to allain social objectives. One of the implications of the model presented here is that policies are evaluated by their contribution to efficiency and the weighted welfare of different groups in the economy, where the weights reflect the political power of the different groups. Since surplus measures are used to evaluate the groups’ welfare, interest groups are designated in correspondence to goods analyzed in the model. Thus, producers of corn in different states, consumers of milk, and users of water which was contaminated by wheat production are examples of the types of interest groups treated by the model. Measures of welfare of these types of groups are likely to be related and even expressed in terms of objectives such as producers’ income, affordable food, and water quality. Hence, the model implies that policy instruments are selected in a way that maximizes social welfare as a multidimensional function of policy objectives. Thus, the outcome of the “political economic” framework presented here C:1Il be expressed in terms of the Tinbergen framework.

In the next section, the impacts of some of the instruments proposed as part of the policy reforms are analyzed qualitatively. Impacts of policy instruments will be analyzed in terms of policy objectives and in terms of welfare of certain groups. This is a “safety net” program that assures farmers a certain income floor. Entitlement for the program will depend on income, wealth, and a socioeconomic factors . This program may have two goals. One is to assist the very poor and raise their income and living standards constantly. The other is to assure rural citizens adequate income at low points of the business cycles. The two goals may require separate mechanisms and are likely to be relevant for separate populations. The first goal is a standard antipoverty goal and is appropriate for the very poor and disadvantaged in the rural sector. It has very little to do with agriculture since the very poor gain very little income at all limes. The second goal is to protect farmers and other members of the rural community from “hard time” periods when prices are low, yields are low, etc. Farmers may not be in the greatest need for such a program since they are protected by crop insurance, may use futures markets, etc. Individuals who provide services to farmers-small dealers, farm workers, etc.-are at least as vulnerable economically at the downside of agricultural business cycles as farmers; and such programs may protect them. One way to prevent misuse of this anticyciical income assurance program is to make it a subsidized insurance program. Eligible individuals-farmers, farm workers, and agro-businessmen-may need to buy the rights for this income-support program by paying a fee or a premium. The goal of assuring minimum income to all members of most sectors may be obtained best within the framework of general assistance programs that exist in many countries. Such programs may have stipulations that may discriminate against the rural sector . As agricultural support programs are being down scaled and eliminated, the range of entitlements of farmers and rural people for the benefits of general welfare programs should increase. The minimum income assurance program mentioned above is, in essence, a welfare program applicable only to part of the farm sector’s population. However, low farm product prices affect all members of the farming community and reduce farm incomes across the board; revenue assurance programs address this issue. In the program considered here, each entitled farmer is assigned a target revenue and an output base and receives the difference between the target revenue and output base times actual price when this difference is positive . This program is essentially a deficiency payment program where each farmer is assigned a revenue base instead of a yield and acreage base. The key element of this program is that it will be set for a long time, and the revenue basis will not be modified according to past behavior. Disallowing modification of the base according to performance will serve to reduce the impact of the program on supply . It is difficult not to modify entitlement bases as time passes since there are dynamic changes in land allocation, and base assignments need to resemble reality. Therefore, one cannot maintain a decoupled revenue support program forever. Such a program will be used for a transition period when agriculture is down scaled and the range of support provided by the program will gradually decline.

Micrographs and panoramic images were taken with an FEI transmission electron microscope at an acceleration voltage of 80 kV with a TVIPS TemCamF416 digital camera using the software EM-MENU . Panoramic images were aligned with the software IMOD.Sharp drops in employment have characterized the economic transition occurring in Central and Eastern Europe. Their persistence has been a surprise to those who anticipated rapid economic recovery . The situation in Bulgaria echoes that in other countries and is of political concern because of its impact on people and the country’s well being. The symptoms are well known . Overall employment dropped by 28 percent between 1989 and 1994, and agricultural employment declined by 13 percent. The principal reasons for these reductions are the abrupt decline in production and the restructuring of Bulgaria’s economy. But there are offsetting factors, such as technological changes, that have slowed the employment loss. An understanding of the dynamics of unemployment is needed if remedial strategies are to be developed. The research reported here adds a component to the extensive review of Bulgaria’s agricultural transition by Schmitz et al. Its focus is on rural employment and its relation to agriculture.

Non-agricultural employment fell more rapidly than agricultural employment but the impact of this on rural areas is not well understood. Agricultural employment declined less rapidly than did production,plastic pot manufacturers suggesting a shift in technology and the emergence of under-employment. There is inadequate information about which groups have been most affected or what has happened to the people. National data provides only a partial picture of this situation and therefore is an inadequate base for public policy choices. Further, there is the question raised by Bartholdy about the ability of data systems to retain accuracy during a period of fundamental change to a country’s economic system. The problem is how to obtain sufficient information about rural employment to permit better policy choices to be made. Two approaches have been followed to improve the data base for policy decisions. The first approach involves comparing agricultural employment with scientifically determined labor requirements for agricultural production. This permits measurement at the national level of how the surplus of agricultural labor changed between 1989 and 1994. The result helps in isolating the impact of output changes on employment from technology and other changes, and helps identify the size and character of the agricultural labor pool. It also permits an estimation of the impact of future changes in productivity and production patterns.

The second approach uses local data, obtained through a survey of village households and cooperatives, to provide information about rural employment that is not available from existing national data. It helps determine how rural households, enterprises, and communities have been affected by production and employment changes and how they might be helped. The village survey, conducted in the Summer of 1995, provided unique data that are being reported here for the first time.The problems and policy implications of unemployment in Central and Eastern Europe have been studied extensively, primarily at the aggregate rather than sectoral level . Some studies focus principally on policy or statistical issues . Important attention has been given to the dynamics of unemployment, including its persistence, and the flow between vacancies, unemployment and jobs. These studies examine policy implications of changes in productivity, real wages, employment and labor force participation rates . Other studies have emphasized the link between unemployment, income, and poverty . Relatively few studies have focused on Bulgaria and they tend not to emphasize agricultural and rural employment . The European Union study briefly analyzed the agricultural labor situation, using national statistics to comment on labor inefficiency. Mihailova computed national agricultural labor requirements using norms developed through studies of agricultural production processes. Sotsiologicheski Pregled, in a special issue, provided an overview of poverty, unemployment, and social policy as it affected rural and urban areas in Bulgaria.The practical problem of evaluating the employment situation in Bulgaria is tremendously difficult.

Rock lists 8 external and 5 internal factors affecting employment in Bulgaria, and concludes that transition has been hindered by an enormous number of external and internal constraints. Boeri commented that “conventional wisdom does not seem to offer many clues to the factors lying behind the dynamics of unemployment in CEEC.” Just the same, theory offers a framework for classifying the variables influencing labor demand and can be helpful in guiding the way through the complex network of cause and effect. The demand for agricultural labor is a function of output , wages, other input costs, and the structure of agriculture. Supply is a function of wages, opportunity costs , population, and the institutional structure within which decisions are made. Employment changes in Bulgaria, as in the rest of central and eastern Europe, have been caused by reductions in labor demand rather than reductions in its supply. First, output of agricultural produce has fallen because both domestic and foreign demand has fallen. Second, labor has become cheaper relative to other inputs and stimulates the use of more labor intensive technology. The third factor is the restructuring of agriculture through the privatization of land and the liquidation of collective farms that affects both technology and output. Both domestic and foreign agricultural demand have contracted, causing the agricultural demand curve to shift to the left. Given the generally inelastic nature of agricultural demand, prices would have had to drop precipitously to maintain the same volume of demand. Other factors shifted the aggregate agricultural supply curve, shifting it upwards and to the left. These included the increase in input costs relative to output prices and the disruptive effects of farm restructuring. The net effect of these shifts was that output declined, the real value of output dropped, and agriculture’s contribution to GDP fell. Since the focus here is on labor demand, the shifts in agricultural demand and supply are taken as exogenous. The effects of the change in wages relative to other input costs can be analyzed in the standard neoclassical two-factor model in which the demand for labor and capital depends on their relative values, w Ir, and on the level of output, Q. The pre-reform level of labor and capital usage depended on these factors,black plastic plant pots wholesale which in turn were influenced by technology and by various policy interventions. Post-reform there are at least 3 shocks to the system. The first is the drop in output caused by demand and supply shifts and agricultural restructuring. This shifts the “Q” isoquant in the model inwards . Because of technology changes, the new isoquant may not be based on the same production function as in the pre-reform period. Second, the stock of capital is diminished because of deferred maintenance and the resulting accelerated depreciation and non-renewal of obsolete assets. The third change is the fall in the relative cost of labor. The first factor can be neutral, although in Bulgaria it is evident that restructuring has caused a change in technology usage. The second and third factors favor the substitution of labor for capital. To the extent that there is a rational economic response to the new wir value and the output level, Q, then more labor will be used relative to capital than was the pre-reform case. This phenomena is investigated by comparing changes in agricultural labor requirements with shifts in agricultural employment. Restructuring refers to a complex mix of changes in farm land ownership and organizational relationships used in operating farms.

The outcome of restructuring by the end of 1994 was a mixture of smaller cooperatives, large scale farming companies, private partnerships, and family farms. The essence of restructuring is that it creates enterprises with different mixes of management skills, technology,resource mix, and objectives. These, in tum, lead to different outcomes in the factor ratios employed and the level of productivity. The balance between labor shedding by the more commercially operated farms versus the labor absorption of the more numerous, labor-intensive family farms, will depend on the relative numbers in each of these categories. This report makes no attempt to isolate the impact of restructuring on labor demand, but rather concentrates on measuring the impacts of output and technology changes. Since the explicit nature of technology in 1994 could only be inferred in the absence of updated studies on production labor requirements, the effects of output and technology were estimated according to the following model. The ratio of agricultural employment to agricultural labor requirements in 1989 is considered the measure of pre-reform agricultural technology. This measure is multiplied by labor requirements calculated for 1994 and provides an estimate of what employment would have been in 1994 if technology had not changed between 1994 and 1989. The difference between this number and employment in 1989 is the loss in employment caused by the decline in output. The difference between this number and actual employment in 1994 is a measure of employment change created by technology and other changes.The national employment data used here reports all persons carrying out certain activities in public and private enterprises and receiving payments or income. The amount of work performed is not specified. The data exclude work performed by students, army, or others in agricultural brigades prior to reform. 2 This was predominately for harvest. Consequently, the employment figure for 1989 understates the number of people actually performing agricultural work while the data for 1994 are more nearly correct with respect to harvesting. The data also exclude labor performed on private plots, even if some of the resulting products were sold on the market. Agricultural production in Bulgaria dropped by an estimated 29 percent between 1989 and 1994, more than double the rate of decline in agricultural employment . Agricultural labor requirements, as discussed in the following section, declined at an even faster rate of 38 percent. The differential between these 3 rates indicates clearly that more labor was used per unit of output in 1994 than was the case in 1989. How can this be explained? First the production structure in Bulgarian agriculture has changed resulting in different scales of operation and probably more labor intensive technology. Although some case studies indicate that new specialized farm organizations can obtain greater yields and use less labor the average of Bulgarian agriculture in 1994 was more labor intensive than before. Secondly, the non-availability of student and military help after 1989 had to be offset by employed labor in 1994. Consequently, employment could not shrink as rapidly as output.Normatives are labor inputs measured in number of workers or time needed to complete component parts of some agricultural process. Norms are the summation of labor inputs needed to complete a determined volume of work or to produce a defined quantity of product under specific conditions. The calculations of normatives and norms are based on careful observation and analysis of labor-using activities. Those used here were developed or compiled by the Research Institute for Agricultural Economics from observations made throughout the country. With knowledge of the technology applied and the output achieved, one can use norms to estimate how much labor would be required in producing that output under perfectly efficient conditions. Normatives and norms evaluate the important factors in plant and animal breeding. In plant breeding, these include technical, organizational, agricultural, biological, phYSiological, hygienic, and natural factors. In animal breeding the factors include the kind, purpose, and productivity of animals, the quantity and quality of fodder, and the type and characteristics of equipment, machinery, and buildings.We calculated the average number of days worked per year by employed persons by multiplying 240 days per year by the ratio of labor required to persons employed. The number of days worked per year dropped from 191 in 1989, after adjusting for work provided by brigades, to 148 days in 1994. The relative drop would have been greater if the employee work had not been displaced by brigades in 1989. These data show clearly that the surplus of labor in agriculture increased and that the existing work force is, on average, a part-time work force. The difference in agricultural labor requirements calculated for 1989 and 1994 reflect three important changes: a significant drop in agricultural production; an important shift toward more labor intensive practices; and a decline in the average number of days per year worked by those employed.

Since Mn dust loading is likely to be on the casual pathway for some of our predictors of exposure, such as farm worker shoes in the home and proximity to agricultural use of Mn fungicides, we used a structural equation model to evaluate casual pathways of exposure in the model that included participants with Mn dust measurements. We constructed a structural equation model to simultaneously estimate Mn tooth levels and Mn dust loading as outcome variables, with Mn dust loading also included as a predictor variable in the Mn tooth model. Maternal smoking during pregnancy was associated with a 34% and 40% decrease in MnPN levels in models with and without Mn house dust loading, respectively. We excluded from the multivariable models those variables that were not significant predictors of MnPN , including traffic density, Mn outdoor air concentration, acres of lettuce near the home, estimated total dietary Mn and iron intake, tap water consumption, estimated prenatal Mn tap water concentration and Mn tap water intake, maternal country of birth, maternal education, household income, housekeeping practices,raspberry grow in pots and maternal hematocrit to hemoglobin ratio during pregnancy. The coefficient of determination was 22% for the model with Mn tooth measurements and 29% for the model including both Mn tooth and house dust measurements.

There was no spatial auto correlation between the residuals for either model . Table 3 also provides the proportion of the variance explained for the predictor variables from multi-variable models of MnPN for all children with tooth measurements and those with Mn measured in both teeth and dust . The number of farm workers storing shoes in the home , maternal smoking during pregnancy , prenatal residence on Antioch Loam soil and agricultural use of Mn fungicides within 3 km of residence explained the greatest amount of variability of MnPN in the model without Mn house dust loading. Maternal smoking , prenatal residence on Antioch Loam soil , the number of farm workers storing shoes in the home , Mn house dust loading and maternal farm work during pregnancy explained the largest proportion of variability of MnPN in the model for children that also had Mn measured in prenatal house dust. Using structural equation models, the same predictor variables were significant and no new significant predictors of Mn levels in teeth were identified. The percentage change and significance level was nearly identical for maternal smoking, maternal farm work and residence on Antioch Loam soil which were predictors of Mn levels in teeth. However, agricultural use of Mn fungicides near the home and the number of farm worker shoes stored in the home were significant predictors of Mn dust loading. As a result, the percentage change associated with an increase in Mn dust loading corresponding to the interquartile range was 17.4% in the structural equation model compared to 3.4% in the ordinary regression model because Mn dust loading now included the effects of agricultural Mn fungicide use near the home and farm worker shoes stored in the home.

We report that Mn levels measured in prenatal dentin using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy were associated with estimates of prenatal environmental Mn exposure. Our findings suggest that deciduous teeth provide a biomarker of prenatal Mn exposure that is available retrospectively for the study of Mn related health effects, which would be especially useful in case-control studies. We observed that agricultural applications of widely used Mn-containing fungicides, maneb, and mancozeb, contribute to higher Mn tooth levels in this population of children living in an agricultural community. This is the first study to evaluate Mn measurements in deciduous teeth as an age-specific indicator of exposure from agricultural or industrial use of Mn. The only previous study that assessed Mn exposure from fungicides found that pregnant women who reported pesticide spraying less than a kilometer from their house had significantly higher blood Mn concentrations in a community where apple orchards were sprayed with mancozeb.An evaluation of Mn concentrations in house dust found higher levels in residences located within 500 m of agricultural fields than residences located farther from fields.Ethylenethiourea measured in urine has been used as an indicator of occupational exposure to maneb and mancozeb.In the CHAMACOS cohort, ethylenethiourea was detected in 24% of maternal urine samples collected near the beginning of the second trimester suggesting maternal exposure to maneb occurred during pregnancy in this cohort.38 Our results add to the existing evidence that household proximity to farmland and parental occupational take-home increases children’s exposure to other classes of pesticides.

Importantly, agricultural-related variables such as farm work by the mother, storage of farm worker’s shoes indoors and agricultural use of Mn containing fungicides within 3 km of the residence were significantly associated with increased tooth Mn levels and along with maternal smoking explained the largest proportion of the variance in this cohort. Including Mn house dust loading in the ordinary regression model reduced the amount of variability explained by the number of farm workers storing shoes in the home and agricultural use of Mn fungicides, and based on a structural equation model this was a result of Mn dust loading being on the casual exposure pathway for Mn from these sources. Nevertheless, the predictors we identified explained only 22–29% of the variability in Mn levels in prenatal dentin suggesting that other unknown factors contributed to Mn body burden. Iron status and iron metabolizing genes such as hemochromatosis and transferrin may play an important role in Mn biomarker levels. Mn levels in blood were 12% lower among women carrying any variant allele of HFE than women with no variant alleles and these results were replicated in a knockout mice model, suggesting that HFE contributes to variability in Mn exposure biomarkers.Mn levels in hair and estimated ambient Mn air concentrations near a ferromanganese refinery in Ohio were significantly correlated only when HFE or TF genotypes were included in the models.Women with low serum ferritin levels had higher blood Mn levels than the normal group in Korea.A limitation of the present study is that we did not have information on iron-metabolizing genes HFE and TF or serum ferritin levels. We did not observe a relationship between maternal hematocrit to hemoglobin ratio or estimated dietary iron intake during pregnancy and MnPN. Although we had few mothers that smoked in our population , we observed significantly lower MnPN levels in children whose mother smoked during pregnancy in multi-variable models. One previous study also observed a negative relationship between smoking and Mn blood levels in the second trimester but not at delivery,30 planter pot while a national study in Korea also found lower Mn blood concentrations among current and former smokers.Similar findings have previously been reported in relation to placental transfer of zinc; umbilical cord blood zinc levels were lower in mothers who smoked during pregnancy compared to nonsmokers.Mn is an essential nutrient that protects against oxidative stress.As a result, Mn levels in blood may be lower in smokers and less available for fetal transfer in pregnant smokers. Further studies are needed to evaluate the relationship between smoking and biomarkers of Mn and to identify the mechanisms by which smoking reduces Mn transfer to the fetus. We also found higher MnPN levels in children whose prenatal residence was located on Antioch Loam, soil which can be high in manganese content.A previous study found an association between Mn levels in soil outside the residence and Mn concentrations in house dust, showing that Mn levels in the home can be influenced by Mn soil concentrations.Previous exposure studies found that Mn levels in children’s hair decreased with residential distance from a ferromanganese alloy plant, and residential duration and proximity to the plant explained 37% of the variance.A recent study using a new method for cleaning hair prior to analysis found significantly higher Mn levels in children living in the vicinity of active, but not historic, ferroalloy plant emissions.

Mn measured in personal air for 38 children living near a ferromanganese refinery were associated with distance to the refinery but Mn in blood and hair were not.Higher nitrogen dioxide concentrations, a proxy for motor vehicle emissions, have been associated with higher Mn levels in cord blood.We did not observe an association between MnPN and traffic density, which is relatively low in our study area, but we did see a borderline significant increase in MnPN with estimated outdoor Mn air concentrations in the model that included Mn house dust loading. We observed higher Mn levels in teeth during the second trimester than the third trimester while previous studies have found higher maternal blood Mn concentrations later in pregnancy.While maternal blood Mn levels fluctuate during pregnancy, they do not necessarily reflect variations in fetal exposure. The use of dentin Mn allows us to measure fetal Mn exposure directly and we observed higher Mn levels in dentin formed during the second trimester in comparison to dentin formed later in gestation. There are no known variations in tooth mineralization over this period that would affect Mn uptake in dentin, and it is possible that the higher Mn levels in dentin formed during the second trimester reflect increased fetal uptake. Future studies should assess the within person variability in MnPN using multiple teeth per child and evaluate Mn levels in different types of teeth that develop at slightly different times. This study had a number of other limitations. We did not have information on time activity patterns for the mothers and using only residential locations to assess proximity to Mn fungicide use and other Mn sources could result in misclassification of exposure. We did not collect personal environmental or duplicate diet samples to measure Mn exposure. Drinking water quality data was collected for regulatory purposes not to determine exposure levels and sampling occurred irregularly over time. Most of our study population drank less than one glass per day of tap water and Mn was not detected frequently in public water supplies in our study area. Future studies should collect tap water samples for Mn analysis to better characterize potential exposure from drinking water. We used data from the Total Diet Study to estimate Mn intake via food items but this study may not be representative of Mn levels in food consumed by our population, however, the primary source of dietary intake in our population was from prenatal vitamin supplements. Strengths of this study include extensive prenatal questionnaire data and prenatal house dust samples with measured Mn concentrations and loadings for a subset of participants. We measured Mn levels in dentin for specific prenatal time points using knowledge of tooth mineralization instead of digesting the entire tooth and combining prenatal and postnatal exposures. Previous studies have used measurements in tooth enamel to estimate Mn exposure; however measurements in enamel cannot be readily linked to developmental timing of exposure because, unlike dentin, initial deposits of enamel matrix are not completely mineralized immediately but rather more slowly and diffusely during maturation. An additional strength of our study is the availability of prenatal latitude and longitude coordinates which allowed the use of GIS methods and publically available data on agricultural pesticide use, drinking water, hazardous air pollutants and traffic density resulting in limited exposure information bias. We were also able to evaluate a comprehensive set of exposure predictors including occupational information, household and demographic characteristics, dietary intake, drinking water consumption, outdoor air concentrations and house dust levels. In future analyses, we will evaluate measurements of MnPN for children newly enrolled in the CHAMACOS study at 9-years of age, utilizing multilevel Bayesian measurement error models to improve exposure estimates.We will also evaluate the relationship between Mn levels in teeth and neurodevelopment in the CHAMACOS cohort. In conclusion, we found that exposure variables related to Mn containing fungicides are related to higher levels of Mn body burden in children. Further, deciduous teeth are relatively easy to obtain and store and measurements in dentin provide a unique opportunity to retrospectively assess prenatal exposure. Do farm workers’ work histories affect their current wages? Based on search theory, we argue that workers with history of unemployment cannot afford to search as long as other workers and, as a result, obtain lower wages. Thus, an unemployed worker suffers from reduced income at the time of unemployment and lower wages in the future.

Research staff reviewed the 24-hr sampling record with the parents to ensure accuracy and completeness. Urine samples were stored in the sample refrigerator until daily collection by research staff. Trained, bilingual study staff administered daily questionnaires that assessed the child’s exposure to pesticides, including questions regarding dietary intake of fruits, vegetables, and juices; time spent indoors/outdoors; parental occupational exposures; and residential pesticide use over the previous 24-hr period. Study staff processed the samples at the study field office, recording the weight and volume . On 24-hr sampling days, staff were instructed to select the first FMV sample plus one to three randomly selected additional spot samples for individual analysis. The total volume of the 24-hr composite sample was based on the volume of the individually analyzed samples plus the volume of all samples that were included in the pooled sample. The DAP concentrations were based on volume-weighted averages of concentrations in the individually analyzed samples plus the pooled sample. Samples were stored at −80 °C until shipment on dry ice to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analysis in August and September 2004. Laboratory methods and quality control procedures have previously been described in detail and are available in the Supplementary Materials.

Total dimethyl , total DE,best indoor plant pots and total DAP concentrations were calculated within each sample by summing molar concentrations. We computed metabolite levels in 24-hr samples using the volume-weighted average of concentrations in all samples collected in that 24-hr sampling period . In California, all agricultural pesticide use, including crop, active ingredient, date, pounds applied, and location of use within one square mile sections defined by the Public Lands Survey System are recorded in pesticide use reports by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation . We used the latitude and longitude of the participant’s home, geocoded from their street address, to map pesticide applications. We considered pesticide use within three kilometers of the home in the six months prior to each of the two 24-hr urine sampling days for each study participant, as these are within the range of distances and time periods that have been mostly strongly associated with OP concentrations in samples from this region . We included 11 OPs that devolve into DAPs that are used in the Salinas Valley, which is representative of the most commonly used OPs nationally in the same time period . These 11 OPs include eight DM and three DE pesticides. All estimates were adjusted for the proportion of time the residence was downwind of each pesticide application .

At each study visit, study staff asked parents to report whether their child had consumed fresh fruits or vegetables from a 21-item list since the previous visit. Parents were also asked to report their child’s consumption of any fruits or vegetables that were not on the list; canned, jarred, or frozen fruits and vegetables; and orange, apple, or other 100% fruit juice . Each year since 1991, the United States Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program has tested food commodities, including fruits and vegetables, for approximately 450 pesticides and their breakdown products . Using a food consumption-chemical residue approach described previously , we used these publicly available data to calculate the mean concentration of the 11 OPs of interest for each of the food items reported in our study.To estimate dietary OP exposure, we multiplied the estimated concentration of the 11 OPs in each food item by the estimated intake of that food item. Per the US EPA Cumulative Organophosphorus Risk Assessment guidelines, we also included omethoate, the dimethoate oxon, in our dietary assessment, however it was not detected on any of the food commodities of interest in 2004. We made the assumption that each reported consumption of a particular fruit or vegetable was equal to one serving and used data for children ages 3–6 years from the 2003–2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey “What we Eat in America” study linked to Food Commodity Intake Database  codes to estimate the weight of each food item. We estimated total exposure for each OP by summing estimated intake across all food items. We included reported food consumption that we were certain had preceded the urine void. For 24-hr samples, we considered the average exposure from all produce reported on the current day and previous day .

For spot samples, we considered all produce reported on the day prior to sampling in order to ensure the produce was consumed before the sample was collected. We used USDA pesticide residue data from 2004 , when available. For commodities not analyzed in 2004, we used data from the most proximate year . PDP samples with values <LOD were set to 0.We used generalized estimating equation models using DAP, DM, and DE dose estimates from each 24-hr composite as the outcome variable and dose estimates from same-day spot as the predictor variable. We also used the combination of each same-day FMV and non-FMV spot sample as a predictor variable by computing the arithmetic average of the dose estimate from the individual samples. Missing voids from 24-hr samples were excluded from the analysis, as both the volume of the sample and DAP concentrations were unknown. Analyses were conducted for volume- and creatinine-adjusted dose estimates. All dose estimates were log10-transformed. We assessed the performance of the models for each predictor variable using the predictive power of the model defined as the coefficient of determination ; the root mean squared error , which is a measure of both precision and accuracy of the model; and the intraclass correlation , which measures agreement between the dose estimates. In this study of 25 children living in an agricultural region, we found that volume- and creatinine-adjusted non-FMV spot urine samples had relatively weak ability to predict 24-hr cumulative OP dose. Moreover, our results indicate that reliance on non-FMV spot samples may underestimate daily cumulative OP dose and the percentage of samples exceeding regulatory guidelines, regardless of the method used to account for expected daily urinary excretion. Models including the average of an FMV and non-FMV spot had the greatest ability to predict 24-hr dose, however models containing just an FMV sample were often similarly predictive of daily dose. Our findings are consistent with previous analyses in this population in which we found that spot urine samples had relatively weak ability to predict cumulative exposure over one week and that reliance on spot samples to reflect chronic OP pesticide exposure may result in exposure misclassification that could bias effect estimates towards null findings . Because 24-hr sampling, considered the “gold standard”, or the collection of multiple daily spot samples is infeasible in most epidemiologic studies, we recommend that future studies prioritize the collection of FMV samples to most accurately characterize OP dose. To our knowledge, only two other studies have examined the ability of same-day spot urine samples to predict 24-hr OP pesticide exposure or dose . In a study of 13 2–5 year old children, Kissel et al., analyzed OP metabolite concentrations from urine samples collected during each of two 24-hr sampling cycles in two different seasons and found that FMV samples were the best predictor of weighted average daily metabolite concentration in both creatinine-adjusted and unadjusted analyses . They also observed high intra-child variability in metabolite levels from urine samples collected on the same day . Their findings indicate that full 24-hr sampling may reduce measurement error due to within-person variability, however if spot sampling is to be conducted,blueberry container size collection of FMV samples are preferable for analytes with short half-lives . In another analysis of 20 farmers and their children, Scher et al., analyzed agreement between two OP parent compounds/metabolites and 3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinol in morning void samples with 24-hr composite exposure and dose estimates from urine collected between 24 h before through 96 h after pesticide application .

Compared to estimates based on 24-hr samples, investigators found that single morning void urine samples tended to overestimate daily exposure and dose estimates of 2,4-D and chlorpyrifos . More specifically, four children had chlorpyrifos dose estimates above the acute population adjusted dose regulatory level of 0.5 μg/kg/day based on morning void samples, whereas no 24-hr dose estimates exceeded EPA safety thresholds . Taken together with our results, these findings suggest that reliance solely on non-FMV spot samples may underestimate OP dose, whereas analysis of FMV samples alone may overestimate dose. Previous epidemiologic analyses among children living in the Salinas Valley have found DMs to drive associations between urinary DAPs and adverse child neurodevelopment . We observed that DMs had a substantial influence on OP dose estimates and ability of spot samples to predict 24-hr dose. There are a few possible explanations for this. First, of the 11 OPs examined in this analysis, 8 are DMs and only 3 are DEs. These eight DMs had a much higher total molar mass than the three DEs . Second, oxydemeton methyl, a highly toxic DM with a large RPF , increased in use in the Salinas Valley shortly after our study started ) and may be influencing the associations observed in our study and previous epidemiologic analyses from this region. Pesticide use trends have shifted drastically since we conducted this study and some of the most toxic OPs have largely been phased out of agricultural use in the Salinas Valley and across the United States. Additional investigations are needed to examine cumulative OP dose estimates and potential contributions from DEs and DMs with the current mixture of OPs being applied. In addition to the potential influence of specific OPs, it’s possible that DEs are chemically less stable and have higher intrinsic variability than DMs . We found that estimates adjusted for expected 24-hr creatinine had similar ability to predict daily OP dose as estimates adjusted for observed 24-hr creatinine excretion or urine volume. Conversely, in a study of 109 children living in an agricultural area in Washington State, investigators found that creatinine-adjusted doses tended to be lower than those calculated with daily urine volume . Previous studies have found that creatinine concentrations may be highly variable due to factors such as age, sex, BMI, diet, and fluid intake and that correcting for specific gravity may introduce less variability and may be a more robust method in studies focusing on children . Additional research may be needed to evaluate the validity of creatinine correction in children. Furthermore, we recommend that future studies collect urine specific gravity information, particularly given the ease of measuring this metric . This study has multiple strengths and implications for future risk assessments and epidemiologic studies. We extended previous examinations that estimated cumulative OP dose from diet and nearby agricultural pesticide use  separately by considering these exposures in conjunction. Additionally, this is one of only a few studies to examine cumulative OP pesticide dose among children living in an agricultural area and to examine the ability of spot samples to predict 24-hr dose. These results have important implications for risk assessments and could be applied to other non-persistent environmental chemicals. This study also has limitations. We did not have specific gravity measurements and could not compare adjustment for urinary dilution using specific gravity. Notably, while DAPs represent exposure to approximately 80% of the OPs used in the Salinas Valley , children may have been exposed to other OPs that do not devolve into DAPs. While California’s unique and comprehensive PUR database allowed us to estimate the mix of pesticides participants may have been exposed to from nearby agricultural pesticide use, relying solely on these data to estimate all non-dietary exposures may not adequately account for all sources and pathways of exposure. We examined agricultural pesticide applications near participants’ residences in the six months prior to each 24-hr sampling in order to tiy to account for exposures from multiple sources, including agricultural drift and accumulation of pesticides in the home , however participants may have also been exposed to pesticides via the take-home exposure pathway, particularly if they lived with farm workers . However, because the dose calculations incorporate the proportion of potential exposure to each pesticide in relation to total DEs and DMs applied, rather than a sum of each pesticide, and because we anticipate that children living with farm workers were likely exposed to a similar mixture of OPs from para-occupational exposures, we do not believe that this impacted our results substantially.

This is truer than ever now, with pressing fiscal issues preventing the expansion of most federal programs. How, then, can we influence the dietary quality of food stamp recipients, especially given the fact that increased benefits are unlikely to cause recipients to purchase healthier foods? I argue that the answer lies in creating marketplace incentives targeted to certain products , rather than the current FNS approach of developing nutrition-education and social-marketing messages . Congress and the USDA could create such an incentive program for food stamp participants by redirecting part or all of the funding currently distributed through the commodity support program. Any cuts or changes to the commodity support program would probably have to be designed to minimize impacts to existing food assistance programs, depending on commodity distribution. For example, some commodities that currently qualify for direct payments — which eventually make their way to entities such as food banks and schools through FNS food distribution programs — could be negatively affected by a reduction in commodity availability and price. A FSP incentive program could reduce the retail price of healthful food items by providing retailers,square plant pot wholesaler distributors and growers with reimbursements and direct subsidies to cover costs and lost revenues.

Lower costs would lead to increased demand, which, coupled with targeted subsidies and reimbursements, would act to stimulate production and increase retail access. The enactment of country-of origin labeling laws would provide a mechanism to ensure that only products of U.S. growers would qualify. Such an incentive program might work as follows. Food stamp recipients would receive a significant discount — 50%, for example — when they use benefits to purchase qualified products that meet certain nutritional guidelines at FNS-authorized retail stores. FNS would then direct reimbursements to retailers, wholesaler distributors and growers to make up for decreased revenues at the retail level. Because roughly 30% of the retail price of fruits and vegetables represents gross retail profits, reducing retail prices by 50% would allow for retail profit margins to remain constant with decreased revenues coming out of product costs, which would be paid by USDA directly to wholesaler-distributors. A similar transfer would occur at the wholesale level, with the USDA paying up to 100% of the amount normally paid to growers — roughly 20% of the retail price. The USDA would ensure that everyone’s gross profit remains constant. To do so, it would actually not need to reimburse the retailer for lost revenues at all . The retailer would continue to purchase produce from wholesaler-distributors, but a portion of that payment would in fact be made by the USDA, effectively discounting the price for retailers. This would allow retailers to charge customers a lower retail price while paying for costs and generating the same gross profits off larger gross margins, due to decreased product costs.

Instead of dedicating 70% of the retail price to pay for product costs, the retailer would now dedicate only 40%, thereby generating the same gross profits off a larger gross margin . The USDA would make payments at the farm gate and at the wholesale level. It would pay the wholesaler-distributor three-fifths of the discount, ensuring that the gross profit at the wholesale level remains equal to what it was before the price was discounted to the retailer. The remaining two-fifths would be paid to the grower, ensuring that their payments remain unchanged as well . Needless to say, the exact manner in which the USDA would pay reimbursements would need to be carefully designed and implemented to avoid market distortions and fraudulent activities. Similarly, the method for determining which foods do and do not qualify for discounts would need to be developed by an entity not influenced by the food industry or particular crop associations — perhaps the Institute of Medicine, which was recently charged with reformulating the Women, Infants, and Children food package.So far, I have discussed targeting incentives to purchases made only at traditional, FNS-authorized retail outlets such as supermarkets. Such a program would no doubt provide indirect incentives for the expansion of fruit and vegetable production nationwide . But because the vast majority of produce supplied to the conventional retail grocery industry is grown on the largest, most profitable farms, the bulk of payments would still be directed to those farms, as is the case currently with the commodity support program. However, the USDA could use this opportunity to ensure that smaller-scale and regionally based growers engaged in direct marketing benefit as well, by expanding the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, another FNS program that distributes coupons to WIC recipients and qualified seniors once yearly on an annual federal budget of only around $20 million .

Food stamp recipients, and perhaps WIC recipients, might also receive a 50% discount when benefits were used to purchase qualifying products at certified farmers’ markets, with reimbursements going to growers and market operators instead of wholesaler-distributors. Dedicating other funding, perhaps through the Risk Management Agency or Agriculture Marketing Service, toward a farmers’ market incentive program could increase the amount of discount offered, and provide farmers’ market operators and participating growers with a level of reimbursements necessary to subsidize the development and operation of farmers’ markets in currently under served low-income neighborhoods.Costs. When crunching the numbers, one finds that a redirection of all 2003 farm commodity payments to a marketplace based incentive program would represent $104 per month per food stamp household, or a 56% increase in the average monthly household benefit. Redirecting the 87% of farm commodity payments paid to the top 20% of farms would provide each food stamp household with an additional $90 in purchasing power each month. Remember that these dollars are not being paid directly to food stamp participants as benefits, but rather to retailers, wholesaler distributors and growers to create retail price reductions that apply to purchases made by participants. Furthermore, it is unlikely that these incentives would simply result in product substitution, because food stamp recipients — like the majority of Americans — do not currently purchase significant quantities of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products. Benefits. Many low-income Americans find healthful foods expensive and hard to find, and they need and deserve targeted assistance to help purchase them. A typical food stamp household, with one female adult and two children ages 3 and 7, might receive roughly $250 in benefits each month. The Thrifty Food Plan is an economic model developed by the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion to create a “market basket” of items that meet U.S. Dietary Guidelines for nutrient intakes while constraining costs; the TFP is used as the basis for food stamp allotments and assumes that all food is purchased at stores and prepared at home. According to the USDA,plastic potting pots the monthly cost of the TFP for this family in July 2003 — containing 25.2 pounds of vegetables other than potato products and 46.48 pounds of fruit — was $301.20 , of which perhaps $100 is allocated to purchase fruits and vegetables. However, it is highly unlikely that our typical food stamp family is following the TFP and purchasing anything close to 70 pounds of fruits and vegetables each month. This is because over half of all food purchases today are consumed outside the home, and because fruits and vegetables are often much more expensive and less available in the inexpensive restaurants, small neighborhood markets, and food-service settings likely to be frequented by low income Americans. What would in effect be half-off sales would provide a significant incentive for food stamp recipients to purchase more nutritious foods. Although these “sales” certainly would not guarantee that all food stamp recipients meet the recommendations in the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans overnight, such incentives would no doubt cause a great many recipients to start purchasing and eating more health-promoting foods such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains .

In fact, these incentives might go a long way toward eliminating two of the main barriers that consumers cite as keeping them from eating a better diet: cost and access. What’s more, by linking incentives directly to products that have known health benefits, there is a high likelihood that these redirected subsidies would result in additional future cost savings, in the form of improved health, increased productivity, and other economic and social benefits. With such significant potential impacts, one must ask why the USDA isn’t more willing to consider making targeted cuts in the commodity support program in order to improve the FSP. Does it really make sense to support the production of products such as high-fructose corn syrup by giving corn growers direct subsidy payments, and to support the purchase of products like Coca-Cola by giving food stamp recipients benefits but no incentives to spend extra for nutrients instead of maximizing calories? Why not instead invest in the health and good dietary habits of low-income Americans, while providing marketplace support for the producers of health-promoting food products? The USDA and members of Congress would do well to ask themselves these questions, perhaps while they’re debating the 2007 Farm Bill .For example, cereal crops decreased in harvested area by 3.6% between 1985 and 2005, yet their total production increased by 29%, reflecting a 34% increase in yields per hectare. Oil crops, on the other hand, showed large increases in both harvested area and yield , resulting in a 125% increase in total production18. While most crops increased production between 1985 and 2005, fodder crops did not: on average, they saw an 18% production drop as a 26% loss in harvested area overrode an 11% increase in yields. Using geospatial data, we can examine how yield patterns have changed for key commodities . These geographic patterns show us where productivity gains have been successful, where they have not, and where further opportunities for improvement lie.The allocation of crops to nonfood uses, including animal feed, seed, bio-energy and other industrial products, affects the amount of food available to the world. Globally, only 62% of crop production is allocated to human food, versus 35% to animal feed and 3% for bio-energy, seed and other industrial products. A striking disparity exists between regions that primarily grow crops for direct human consumption and those that produce crops for other uses . North America and Europe devote only about 40% of their croplands to direct food production, whereas Africa and Asia allocate typically over 80% of their cropland to food crops. Extremes range from the Upper Midwestern USA to South Asia . As we face the twin challenges of feeding a growing world while charting a more environmentally sustainable path, the amount of land devoted to animal-based agriculture merits critical evaluation. For example, adding croplands devoted to animal feed to pasture and grazing lands , we find the land devoted to raising animals totals 3.73 billion hectares—an astonishing ,75% of the world’s agricultural land. We further note that meat and dairy production can either add to or subtract from the world’s food supply. Grazing systems, especially on pastures unsuitable for other food production, and mixed crop–livestock systems can add calories and protein to the world and improve economic conditions and food security in many regions. However, using highly productive croplands to produce animal feed, no matter how efficiently, represents a net drain on the world’s potential food supply.The environmental impacts of agriculture include those caused by expansion and those caused by intensification . Below, we use new data and models to examine both. Agricultural expansion has had tremendous impacts on habitats, biodiversity, carbon storage and soil conditions. In fact, worldwide agriculture has already cleared or converted 70% of the grassland, 50% of the savanna, 45% of the temperate deciduous forest, and 27% of the tropical forest biome. Today, agriculture is mainly expanding in the tropics, where it is estimated that about 80% of new croplands are replacing forests. This expansion is worrisome, given that tropical forests are rich reservoirs of biodiversity and key ecosystem services. Clearing tropical forests is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and is estimated to release around 1.1 3 1015 grams of carbon per year, or about 12% of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Slowing or halting expansion of agriculture in the tropics—which accounts for 98% of total CO2 emissions from land clearing—will reduce carbon emissions as well as losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Specifically, the effect of flood water application frequency on mineralization of organic N to inorganic forms should be investigated to assess the full N loading amount to groundwater under AgMAR. Although our study was exclusively focused on the impact of AgMAR on groundwater nitrate quality, we believe these findings to be applicable to other similar settings, such as wetlands, floodplains and managed recharge basins. Natural settings such as floodplains and riparian corridors experience ponded water for much of the year and are considered to be denitrification hot spots . These systems are typically associated with higher DOC and therefore, oxygen consumption is expected to occur at much higher rates than our model setup. This rapid decline in oxygen results in reducing conditions that are favorable to denitrification and efficient nitrate removal. Our model simulations of different hydraulic loadings further demonstrate that changing hydrologic regimes in natural and managed landscapes can substantially alter nitrate consumption versus export from these landscapes. The Earth’s human population is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9 billion by 2050. To feed the growing population,growing blackberries in containers and the 70% increase in the demand for agricultural production that is expected to accompany this increase, a broad range of improvements in the global food supply chain is needed.

For example, sustainable agricultural intensification will be important because maintaining current per capita food consumption with no increase in yield, and no decrease in post-harvest and food waste, would necessitate a near doubling of the world’s cropland area by 2050. However, because most of the Earth’s arable land is already in production and what remains is being lost to urbanization, salinization, desertification, and environmental degradation, cropland expansion is not a viable approach to food security. Furthermore, because substantial greenhouse gases are emitted from agricultural systems, expansion of cropland would also substantially contribute to carbon mitigation . Thus, the development and deployment of high-yielding crop varieties will make a vital future contribution to sustainable agriculture because it does not rely on expanding cropland. Water systems are also under severe strain across the world. The fresh water available per person has decreased 4-fold in the last 60 years. Of the water that is available for use, about 70% is already used for agriculture. Many rivers no longer flow all the way to the sea; 50% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared and major groundwater aquifers are being mined unsustainably, with water tables in parts of Mexico, India, China, and North Africa declining by as much as 1 meter per year. Thus, increased food production must largely take place on the same land area while using less water. The need for land and water for food production must compete with demands for ecosystem preservation and biomass production. Compounding the challenges facing agricultural production are the predicted effects of climate change. As the sea level rises and glaciers melt, low lying croplands will be submerged and river systems will experience shorter and more intense seasonal flows, causing more flooding. 

Yields of our most important food, feed, and fiber crops decline precipitously at temperatures much above 30uC, so heat and drought will also increasingly limit crop production. In addition to these environmental stresses, losses to pests and diseases are also expected to increase. Much of the loss caused by these abiotic and biotic stresses, which already result in 30%–60% yield reductions globally each year, occur after the plants are fully grown; a point at which most or all of the land and water required to grow a crop has been invested . For this reason, a reduction in losses to pests, pathogens, and environmental stresses is equivalent to creating more land and more water . Another important opportunity for increasing food availability is to reduce the amount of food wasted before and after it reaches the consumer . Substantial changes in diet through education and/or technological innovation— while difficult—could also make up a good deal of the shortfall in feeding the world’s population. For example, a reduction in meat consumption would contribute to increasing the food supply, because 1 hectare of land can produce rice or potatoes for 19–22 people per year whereas the same area will produce enough meat for only 1–2 people. Food security, as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, ‘‘exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’’. Currently, there are 925 million people who are undernourished , and nearly all live in less developed countries.

The long-term effects of malnutrition include stunted growth, learning disabilities, poor health, and chronic disease in later life. Growing more staples that are deficient in essential vitamins and minerals will not tackle health problems caused by nutrient poor diets. In this Essay, I discuss how discoveries in plant genetic and genomics research can be translated to create new crops and cropping systems that more efficiently use finite resources and that can enhance the quality and quantity of food production. Each strategy must be evaluated in light of its environmental, economic, and social impacts—the three pillars of sustainable agriculture .The term plant translational research broadly refers to basic research discoveries that are applied to agronomic improvement. For example, discoveries that reveal basic mechanisms of inheritance in a model plant, such as the genetically tractable plant Arabidopsis, can be applied to crops to accelerate plant breeding . Translational research also encompasses a strategy that has worked well in one crop and then was applied to another. Although not covered in this Essay, translational research also includes non-genetic approaches to improving crop yield or quality emanating from fundamental research on plants, such as research into crop water use efficiency.For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops, first through primitive domestication and, in the last 300 years, using more sophisticated approaches. For example, in the 1920s, the first hybrid seeds were commercialized. Hybrids inherit their agronomically useful traits, such as high yield, disease resistance,square pot and environmental stress tolerance, from two genetically distinct parents. Although seeds produced from hybrids can be replanted, they do not have the same combination of beneficial traits as their hybrid parents. For this reason, many farmers who can afford it purchase new hybrid seed each planting season. For farmers who cannot afford hybrid seed or who do not have access to them, it is critical that they have access to improved seed that maintains their parents’ advantageous traits when self-pollinated. Other genetic improvements include mutagenesis—the introduction of random mutations by chemical treatment or radiation, and the interbreeding of related species. Familiar examples of crops generated through inter specific hybridization include many citrus varieties, such as orange varieties, lemon, lime, and grapefruit. The use of wild species as donors of agronomically important traits has also been important to the success of global agriculture. Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that have been genetically altered in one way or another using these well-established.In MAS, researchers first identify the genetic ‘‘fingerprint’’ of the genes that they would like to move from one variety to another, which are usually associated with a desirable trait. Then, two varieties with the desired traits are cross-pollinated, and the breeder identifies those offspring that carry the desirable genetic fingerprint, and eliminates those that don’t. The process is then repeated. The advantage of MAS relative to other established plant breeding techniques is that researchers can screen for varieties with the preferred genetic makeup without the need of large field trials, saving both time and labor. Crops developed through MAS have fewer genetic changes relative to conventionally bred crops because a breeder can track the desired genotype and eliminate undesirable genes at non-targeted loci. For these reasons, the MAS technique is a powerful method for introducing into crop plants traits from their wild relatives and from ‘‘primitive’’ varieties , which are available from more than 1,700 seed banks worldwide.

For example, the development of a new variety of submergence tolerant rice , relied on the existence of an Indian land race called FR13A . Although rice can withstand shallow flooding, most rice varieties will die if completely submerged for more than a few days. In Bangladesh and India, four million tons of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding . Using markers found to be linked to the Sub1 locus , our team isolated the Sub1 genomic region, which facilitated the development of additional markers . These markers allowed breeders to use MAS to introduce Sub1 into a wide range of rice varieties favored by farmers, while at the same time minimizing the introduction of undesirable traits linked to submergence tolerance in the FR13A donor. The new Sub1 rice varieties are popular in South and Southeast Asia because they are 3-fold higher yielding during periods of flood compared to conventional rice varieties. Currently, many such MAS projects are underway to facilitate the exploration of the genetic variability in our existing food crops to advance crop resilience in the face of the changing climate, pests, and disease.‘‘What has long appeared to be simply the agent of a bothersome plant disease is likely to become a major tool for the genetic manipulation of plants: for putting new genes into plants and thereby giving rise to new varieties with desired traits,’’ wrote acclaimed scientist Mary Dell Chilton in 1983. Today, more than 30 years later, we can see how the basic research of Chilton, Marc van Montagu, Jeff Schell, and their colleagues, who elucidated the molecular mechanisms with which the bacterial pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens transfers DNA to plant hosts, has been translated to real-world application—the genetic engineering of plants. In 2012, genetically engineered crops were grown on almost 170 million hectares in 29 countries. To understand why some farmers have embraced GE crops and how they benefit the environment , consider Bt cotton, which contains a bacterial protein called Bt that kills pests, such as the cotton boll worm, without harming beneficial A more recent technology, called genome editing, which makes it possible to precisely alter DNA sequences in living cells, is expected to lead to new crop varieties in the near future . In this technique, targeted double-strand DNA breaks are introduced in the genome at or near the site where a DNA sequence modification is desired using sequence specific nucleases. The repair of the break can be used to introduce specific DNA sequence changes, DNA deletions, or even serve as an insertion site for arrays of transgenes. Genome editing can thus be used to introduce genetic variation without transgenesis, and can even be used to recreate naturally occurring mutations into elite varieties of crops. For this reason, some scientists and farmers believe that crops generated through this technology will prove to be more socially acceptable in Europe and elsewhere than those generated by genetic engineering. As discussed in the accompanying essay , genome editing has been used to engineer rice for resistance to the bacterial pathogen, Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. Researchers created mutations in the promoter of a rice sucrose-efflux transporter gene, which is targeted by a pathogen effector . These mutations, which are mostly DNA deletions, eliminated the transcriptional induction required for pathogen virulence, rendering the plant resistant.Another technique for introducing genetic variation is induced mutagenesis through chemical or radiation treatment . A recent variation on mutagenesis, called Targeted Induced Local Lesions in Genomes , facilitates the identification and deployment of gene variants that encode agronomically important traits. This approach has been particularly useful for improving understudied crops. For example, melon variants have been identified through TILLING that have improved shelf life and those with unisexual flowers, traits that can enhance productivity in India. Another example is the identification of acyanogenic sorghum variants that can be used as improved animal fodder. Genetically improved seed, whether derived from conventional genetic modification or newly developed technologies such as genome editing, must be integrated into ecologically based farming systems to maximize their impact on enhancing sustainable agriculture and food security.

Some gene families associated with plant detoxifcation and insecticide resistance have rapidly expanded , whereas others have contracted . Finally, gene families associated with immune defense exhibit expansions that may be linked to defense against pathogens and parasitoids that commonly attack exposed herbivores. A substantial proportion of the rapidly evolving gene families include proteins with transposable element domains , while other important functional groups include DNA and protein binding , nuclease activity, protein processing, and cellular transport. Diversification of transcription factor families potentially signals greater complexity of gene regulation, including enhanced cell specificity and refined spatiotemporal signalin. Notably, several TF families melanogaster , but also from species as distant as human and mouse . Motifs were inferred for a substantial proportion of the TFs in the largest TF families, including Homeodomain , bHLH , and Forkhead box . We could only infer a small number of C2H2 zinc finger motifs ,growing blueberries in containers which is expected as these sequences evolve quickly by shufing zinc finger arrays, resulting in largely dissimilar DNA-binding domains across metazoans.

Collectively, the almost 200 inferred DNA binding motifs for L. decemlineata TFs provide a unique resource to begin unraveling gene regulatory networks in this organism. To identify genes active in mid-gut tissues, life-stages, and sex diferences, we examined differential transcript expression levels using RNA sequencing data. Comparison of significantly differentially expressed genes with >100-fold change, after Bonferroni correction, indicated higher expression of digestive enzymes in mid-gut versus whole larval tissues, while cuticular proteins were largely expressed at lower levels . Comparison of an adult male and female showed higher expression of testes and sperm related genes in males, while genes involved in egg production and sterol biosynthesis are more highly expressed in females . Comparisons of larvae to both an adult male and an adult female showed higher expression of larval-specific cuticle proteins, and lower expression of odorant binding and chemosensory proteins. The adults, both drawn from a pesticide resistant population, showed higher constitutive expression of cytochrome p450 genes compared to the larval population, which is consistent with the results from previous studies of neonicotinoid resistance in this population.Transposable elements are ubiquitous mobile elements within most eukaryotic genomes and play critical roles in both genome architecture and the generation of genetic variatio.

Trough insertional mutagenesis and recombination, TEs are a major contributor to the generation of novel mutations , and are increasingly thought to generate much of the genetic diversity that contributes to rapid evolution. In addition to finding that genes with TE domains comprise 25% of the rapidly evolving gene families within L. decemlineata, we found that at least 17% of the genome consists of TEs . This is substantially greater than the 6% found in T. castaneum, but less than some Lepidoptera . LINEs were the largest TE class, comprising ~10% of the genome, while SINEs were not detected. Curation of the TE models with intact protein domains resulted in 334 current models of potentially active TEs, meaning that these TEs are capable of transposition and excision. Within the group of active TEs, we found 191 LINEs, 99 DNA elements, 38 LTRs, and 5 Helitrons. Given that TEs have been associated with the ability of species to rapidly adapt to novel selection pressures, particularly via alterations of gene expression patterns in neighboring genomic regions, we scanned gene rich regions for active TE elements. Genes with active neighboring TEs have functions that include transport, protein digestion, diapause, and metabolic detoxifcation . Because TE elements have been implicated in conferring insecticide resistance in other insects, future work should investigate the role of these TE insertions on rapid evolutionary changes within pest populations of L. decemlineata.To understand the propensity for L. decemlineata pest populations to rapidly evolve across a range of environmental conditions, we examined geographical patterns of genomic variability and the evolutionary history of L. decemlineata .

We identified 1.34 million biallelic single nucleotide polymorphisms from pooled RNAseq datasets, or roughly 1 variable site for every 22 base pairs of coding DNA. This rate of polymorphism is exceptionally high when compared to vertebrates , and is 8-fold higher than other beetles and 2 to 5-fold higher than some dipterans. It is likely that these values simply scale with efective population size, although the dipterans, with the largest known population sizes, have reduced variation due to widespread selective sweeps and genetic bottlenecks.Evolutionary relationships and the amount of genetic drif among Midwestern USA, Northeastern USA, and European L. decemlineata populations were estimated based on genome-wide allele frequency differences using a population graph. A substantial amount of local genetic structure and high genetic drif is evident among all populations, although both the reference lab strain from New Jersey and European populations appear to have undergone more substantial drif, suggestive of strong inbreeding . Population genetic divergence values range from 0.035 to 0.182 . Te allele frequency spectrum was calculated for populations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Europe to estimate the population genetic parameter θ, or the product of the mutation rate and the ancestral effective population size, and the ratio of contemporary to ancestral population size in models that allowed for single or multiple episodes of population size change. Estimates of ancestral θ are much higher for Wisconsin and Michigan than Europe , providing support for a single introduction into Europe following a large genetic bottleneck. In all three populations, a model of population size growth is supported, in agreement with historical accounts of the beetles expanding from the Great Plains into the Midwestern U.S. and Europe, but the dynamics of each population appear independent, with the population from Michigan apparently undergoing a very recent decline in contemporary population size .To interact with their environment, insects have evolved neurosensory organs to detect environmental signals, including tactile, auditory, chemical and visual cues.

We examined neural receptors, olfactory genes, and light sensory genes to understand the sensory ecology and host-plant specializations of L. decemlineata. We found high sequence similarity in the neuroreceptors of L. decemlineata compared to other Coleoptera. The transient receptor potential channels are permeable transmembrane proteins that respond to temperature, touch, pain, osmolarity, pheromones, taste, hearing, smell and visual cues of insects. In most insect genomes, there are typically 13–14 TRP genes located in insect stretch receptor cells and several are targeted by commercial insecticides. We found 12 TRP genes present in the L. decemlineata genome, including the two TRPs that are targeted by commercial insecticides, representing a complete set of one-to-one orthologs with T. castaneum. Similarly, the 20 known amine neurotransmitter receptors in T. castaneum are present as one-to-one orthologs in L. decemlineata. Amine receptors are G-protein-coupled receptors that interact with biogenic amines, such as octopamine, dopamine and serotonin. These neuroactive substances regulate behavioral and physiological traits in animals by acting as neurotransmitters,square pots neuromodulators and neurohormones in the central and peripheral nervous systems. The majority of phytophagous insects are restricted to feeding on several plant species within a genus, or at least restricted to a particular plant family. Thus, to fnd their host plants within heterogeneous landscapes, insect herbivores detect volatile organic compounds through olfaction, which utilizes several families of chemosensory gene families, such as the odorant binding proteins , odorant receptors , gustatory receptors , and ionotropic receptors . OBPs directly bind with volatile organic compounds emitted from host plants and transport the ligands across the sensillar lymph to activate the membrane-bound ORs in the dendrites of the olfactory sensory neurons. The ORs and GRs are 7-transmembrane proteins related within a superfamily of ligand-gated ion channels. The ionotropic receptors are related to ionotropic glutamate receptors and function in both smell and taste. These four gene families are commonly large in insect genomes, consisting of tens to hundreds of members. We compared the number of genes found in L. decemlineata in the four chemosensory gene families to T. castaneum and A. glabripennis . While the OBP family is slightly enlarged, the three receptor families are considerably smaller in L. decemlineata than in either A. glabripennis or T. castaneum, consistent with the specialization of this beetle on one genus of plants. However, each beetle species exhibits species-specifc gene subfamily expansions ; in particular, some lineages of GRs related to bitter taste are expanded in L. decemlineata relative to A. glabripennis and other beetles. Among the OBPs, we identified a major L. decemlineata-specifc expansion of proteins belonging to the Minus-C class that appear unrelated to the ‘traditional’ Minus-C subfamily in Coleoptera, indicating that coleopteran OBPs have lost cysteines on at least two occasions.

To understand the visual acuity of L. decemlineata, we examined the G-protein-coupled transmembrane receptor opsin gene family. We found five opsins, three of which are members of rhabdomeric opsin subfamilies expressed in the retina of insects. Specifically, the L. decemlineata genome contains one member of the long wavelength-sensitive R-opsin and two short wavelength UV-sensitive R-opsins. Te latter were found to be closely linked in a range of less than 20,000 bp, suggestive of recent tandem gene duplication. Overall, the recovered repertoire of retinally-expressed opsins in L. decemlineata is consistent with the beetle’s attraction to yellow light and to the yellow flowers of its ancestral host plant, S. rostratum, and is consistent with the beetle’s sensitivity in the UV- and LW-range. In addition, we found a member of the Rh7 R-opsin subfamily, which is broadly conserved in insects including other beetle species , although it is missing from T. castaneum. Finally, L. decemlineata has a single ortholog of the c-opsin subfamily shared with T. castaneum, which is absent in A. glabripennis and has an unclear role in photoreception.Insect herbivores are fundamentally limited by nitrogen availability, and thus need to efficiently break down plant proteins in order to survive and develop on host plants. Leptinotarsa decemlineata has serine and cysteine digestive peptidases , as well as aspartic and metallo peptidases, for protein digestion. For the vast majority of plant-eating beetles , cysteine peptidases contribute most strongly to proteolytic activity in the gut. In response to herbivory, plants produce a wide range of proteinase inhibitors to prevent insect herbivores from digesting plant proteins. Coleopteran peptidases are differentially susceptible to plant peptidase inhibitors, and our annotation results suggest that gene duplication and selection for inhibitor insensitive genotypes may have contributed to the success of leaf-feeding beetles on different plants. We found that gene expansion of cysteine cathepsins from the C1 family in L. decemlineata correlates with the acquisition of greater digestive function by this group of peptidases, which is supported by gene expression activity of these genes in mid-gut tissue . The gene expansion may be explained by an evolutionary arms race between insects and plants that favors insects with a variety of digestive peptidases in order to resist plant peptidase inhibitors and allows for functional specialization. Cysteine peptidases of the C1 family were represented by more than 50 genes separated into four groups with different structure and functional characteristics : cathepsin L subfamily, cathepsin B subfamily, TINAL-like genes, and cysteine peptidase inhibitor domains . Cathepsin L subfamily cysteine peptidases are endopeptidases that can be distinguished by the cathepsin propeptide inhibitor domain I29. Within the cathepsin L subfamily, we found sequences that were similar to classical cathepsin L, cathepsin F, and cathepsin O. However, there were 28 additional predicted peptidases of this subfamily that could not be assigned to any of the “classical” cathepsin types, and most of these were grouped into two gene expansions according to their phylogenetic and structural characteristics. Cathepsin B subfamily cysteine peptidases are distinguished by the specifc peptidase family C1 propeptide domain . Within the cathepsin B subfamily, there was one gene corresponding to typical cathepsin B peptidases and 14 cathepsin B-like genes. According to the structure of the occluding loop, only the typical cathepsin B may have typical endo- and exopeptidase activities, while a large proportion of cathepsin B-like peptidases presumably possesses only endopeptidase activity due to the absence of a His-His active subsite in the occluding loop, which is responsible for exopeptidase activity. Only one gene corresponding to a TINAL-like-protein was present, which has a domain similar to cathepsin B in the C-terminus, but lacks peptidase activity due to the replacement of the active site Cys residue with Ser. Cysteine peptidase inhibitor domain genes encode the I29 domain of cysteine peptidases without the mature peptidase domain.

This addendum called for the establishment of an Urban Agriculture Program to coordinate public efforts to encourage and develop urban gardens . The legislation also updated city goals for urban agriculture to facilitate incentive programs and resource distribution to urban gardens . In April 2013, the City Administrator’s Office initiated a task force to gather information from the Recreation and Park Department, SFUAA, and SPUR’s Food Policy Committee . The resultant report recommended establishing the Urban Agriculture Program housed within the Recreation and Park Department . After Supervisor Chui and the Recreation and Park Department co-hosted an open house in May 2013 to present and gather feedback on the City Administrator’s recommendation, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation and funded the creation of the Urban Agriculture Program in July 2013. On January 1, 2014, Hannah Shulman, a former CASFS apprentice and coordinator of the SFUAA, was hired as the full-time program coordinator with a one-year contract,greenhouse snap clamps with the expectation of future funding . SFUAA members celebrated the creation of the Shulman’s position and the institutional imprint the position could make in the long term.

Since January 2014, Shulman has worked with other City Departments, such as the Department of the Environment’s Urban Forestry and Agriculture Coordinator and other agencies, to coordinate an urban agriculture working group whose goal is to figure out the commonalities between urban garden efforts of different offices and to make City policy more cohesive and strategic . Thus far, the land inventory has not been made public, potentially due to differing information contained in different lists agencies have developed. To accomplish the goals of increasing access to material support for urban gardeners, the Program has opened their first resource center in Golden Gate Community Garden where during each summer month, gardeners can obtain free mulch, compost, and soil . Yet, the commitment to Shulman’s position and the program has been an inexpensive one as compared to the overall municipal budget. Several other City efforts have increased support and visibility of urban gardening with more significant financial support. This included support for many garden projects through Community Challenge Grants, which in 2010 alone offered nearly $300,000 to twelve garden projects and one farmers market . It also included the development of gardens on agency land at the airport, libraries, public housing, and La Honda Hospital and the expansion of gardening projects within the San Francisco Public Utilities Commissions .

In 2011 the PUC initiated an Urban Agriculture Pilot program to actively engage PUC land in urban gardening . Prior to 2011, the PUC had already offered land for urban agriculture and food movement projects including Garden for the Environment, the Garden Project, and the Sunol Ag Park. The Pilot program intends to extend PUC’s engagement and commitment to “harvesting public land to promote environmental, social and economic equity in our communities”. The PUC owns or operates approximately 66,000 acres of land in the Bay Region and watersheds that provide water for Bay municipalities. According to Yolanda Manzone, “fundamentally with that land ownership comes with both a responsibility to have, you know, maintain good environmental stewardship but, we think, also a great opportunity to grow actively and provide secondary opportunities on our land for community purposes like growing food, whether it’s a community garden footprint or more of an actual farm footprint.” . She goes on to describe that gardens are good uses for PUC land that may have pipes or tunnels underground, where playgrounds or permanent structures aren’t possible, and parcels that are oddly shaped or small enough that they would likely never be developed, which means the PUC is not forfeiting potential profit from rent nor needing to ask gardeners for rent to offset costs. In addition to piloting three new projects in San Francisco over the next five years, the PUC has developed a simple application process for any residents interested in using PUC land .

These projects, while receiving more municipal financial support, depict the city’s commitment to using public land for gardening when it is not viable for other development.Since the 2009 directive, The City of San Francisco has increased the opportunities and visibility of urban agriculture to the City’s benefit. As San Francisco continues to get local and national press for their support for urban agriculture, the multiple benefits of gardens to the City or personal careers have not been lost on officials such as Supervisor David Chui . Gardening advocates at the SFUAA and SPUR are also aware of the potential benefits to building their political capital with supporters in the city.On October 6th 2014, SFUAA along with CUESA, the Marin Food Bank, and Roots of Change, hosted California’s first food-focused political debate between the two candidates for a San Francisco seat in the State Assembly, San Francisco supervisors David Chiu and David Campos, a race that Chiu went on to win . San Francisco has developed new zoning and city policy, which encourages the development of urban gardens and commercial urban agriculture. City officials have enthusiastically supported gardening as a part of the continued growth of the city’s economy, as evidenced by San Francisco being the first California city to enact AB 551. Projects like the Growing Home Garden, Hayes Valley Farm, and AB 551 have encouraged gardens as temporary community improvement projects that can align well with developers or the City’s real estate development priorities. Through visible partnerships between city officials and projects such as Little City Farms, San Francisco is able to draw on the appeal of creative sustainable food businesses. Allowing for the sale of garden produce and urban gardening throughout the city promotes the image of San Francisco as an environmentally focused, creative hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. At the same time city officials have committed public space not suitable for residential or commercial development to urban gardening, sometimes with financial support from the city and sometimes by encouraging citizen public space management. The City has developed an active and supportive relationship with the SFUAA, which has played a key role in the relatively smooth and quick implementation of their initial goals.

As a community, Oakland has in many ways been at the forefront of the new wave of urban agriculture projects focused on food justice with projects like People’s Grocery, City Slicker Farms, and Acta Non Verba. And yet, unlike San Francisco, the City has had only a tentative relationship to this movement. Urban gardening has thrived throughout East and West Oakland in communities where food insecurity, poverty, and histories of racism deeply affect residents. Oakland has had a majority non-white, predominately African American, population for decades since African American migration began during WWII with Oakland’s industrial and maritime expansions. The city has been the home to iconic anti-racist struggles including the Black Panther Party and significant organizing in the Chicano movement. Today’s food justice activists place institutional racism at the forefront of their work. Yet Oakland is also experiencing rapid gentrification,snap clamps for greenhouse losing about a quarter of the African American population between 2000 and 2010 largely in part due to lack of affordable housing . Neighborhoods like North Oakland are attracting residents priced out of San Francisco and new tech industry employees. The complex struggles over gentrification and its relationship to social movement gardeners are discussed in Chapter 4 and relevant here to a municipality both actively trying to attract investment and serve its current population. In contrast to San Francisco, Oakland city officials are suspect that enthusiastic municipal support for urban agriculture will aide with these goals. In September of 2014, after a five-year advocacy process, the city revised its zoning regulations to better support gardening. In addition, while it had embraced public-private partnerships to allow garden projects to use parkland, little progress had been made on codifying these partnerships into programs or long-term agreements, such as the proposals from the Edible Parks Task Force. The City has taken the position that they are responsible for promoting the well being of all residents and that while gardeners are residents they are only a minority whose interests may be in tension with other community members and interests. In June 2005, the office of former Oakland Mayor and now Governor, Jerry Brown, initiated a study of the Oakland food system. The study, A Food Systems Assessment for Oakland, CA: Towards a Sustainable Food Plan, was conducted by two masters students in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning . It provided a baseline analysis in which the authors advocated the passage of a city council resolution authorizing “the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to develop an Oakland Food Policy and Plan for thirty percent local area food production,” . In December 2006 the City Council allocated funding for the creation of the Oakland Food Policy Council in support of the primary recommendation of the report to establish a Food Policy Council and Plan . In May 2008, after a competitive RFP process through the City Department of Human Services, Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy was contracted by the city to be the incubating agency for the Oakland Food Policy Council . In fall 2009 the OFPC met for the first time with twenty-one volunteer members selected through an application process.

In 2009, using the Public Health Law and Policy’s work on North American urban agriculture , OFPC members developed a set of recommendations outlining land use definitions for urban agriculture, providing guidance on where it could be practiced and the purpose of agricultural production . Similar to in San Francisco and occurring at about the same time, Oakland advocates wanted to make zoning policy more friendly to urban agriculture. The first objective of the recommendation was to eliminate the need to obtain Conditional Use Permits for small scale, neighborhood urban agriculture. Municipal code allowed for “Agricultural and Extractive Activities”, which included crop and animal raising and plant nurseries, throughout most of the city with a CUP, but excluded the industrially zoned flat lands where many urban agriculture projects had arisen. In addition to addressing the restricted geographic range of the previous code, OFPC proposed changes to the expensive and time consuming process needed to obtain a CUP – approximately $3000 and up to twelve months . Gardeners and advocates expressed strong opposition to city policy that required residents to pay to be able to grow and eat their own food. McClintock described these changes, “While we felt that a CUP made sense for large-scale commercial urban farms—the type of urban agriculture that still existed in Oakland in 1932 and 1965 when the use definition was written and last updated—the requirement no longer seemed appropriate for the community gardens and small-scale market gardens that typify urban agriculture in Oakland today… Updating these use definitions and zoning to better reflect contemporary forms of urban agriculture therefore seemed a low hanging fruit on which to focus during our first year. Furthermore, these changes seemed to also be fundamental to protecting and expanding urban agriculture.” . In their recommendations, OFPC advocated for the permitted use of “urban agriculture – civic” and “urban agriculture – residential” in all zoning districts without permit, and the use of “urban agriculture – commercial” in commercial and industrial zones without permit and “urban agriculture – commercial” with CUP in residential areas . Commercial urban agriculture was differentiated as for the primary purpose of food production for sale. In addition to zoning code definitions, the OFPC recommended operating standards including standards for hours of operation, fencing and on-site structures, accessibility, and ecological practices . The OFPC first introduced these recommendations to the city in 2009 during a period when the City was updating residential and commercial zoning regulations. Unfortunately for advocates the agency leading the updating work, the Community and Economic Development Agency , had already concluded the majority of their work and were unwilling to include the recommendations at that time. During a public comment period, the Deputy Planning Director stated “that there was not time, staff, or money available to include such changes into the current Zoning Update” . The OFPC continued their advocacy throughout the next year lobbying CEDA, Planning, and City Council representatives.

While squatting and the politicized aims of land reclamation remain in common, gardens have become an important part of oppositional spatial politics of radical urban movements not necessarily interested in long-term gardening. Today organized garden projects engaged in occupations may have momentary, short-term, or long-term aspirations of access to garden space. Guerilla gardening continues to be an important frame for numerous garden activists employed and engaged in non-profit supported gardens. One such gardener describes his desire for new kinds of subjectivities of responsible city residents: “the city had planted crabapples here, and they plant plums that don’t fruit. We went in and we cut them during the winter, we cut the tree and grafted it… Yeah, so now all these trees that are in the front here, they used to be crabapples and now they fruit Fujis. But people did that in San Francisco and it’s called ‘misdemeanor vandalism’… So we want to, I guess, elevate the vandalism, and say ‘Ok well if this is vandalism, then, we need more rebels, we need more vandals, because this is the type of vandalism that we want’” . Other activists discussed their first experiences with getting their hands dirty by gardening the land outside the homes in the city owned space on the other side of the sidewalk and engaging neighbors in conversations about growing food in these spaces.

Squatting vacant lots is a popular strategy to gain land access despite the rapid turn-over of properties due to increased development. Squatting is most popular in Oakland,pot with drainage holes where at several locations where I interviewed respondents who were involved in squats. Typically, neighbors or particularly motivated activists see a vacant lot that may be enclosed with a fence and lock. The land may have been vacant for a few years or decades. For example, on one site in Oakland, the garden was located on a lot where a house burnt down over fifty years ago. Many gardeners look up the property with the County Assessor to determine if there are back taxes that haven’t been paid, indicating an absent landlord. Gardeners know they may not have long term access to this space but feel their contribution to the community, the land, and their lives are worth the short term access. For these squatters, the need for healthy food and engaging spaces for youth expression outweigh the boundaries of private property, the lock on a fence or the ideology that says they are breaking and entering another’s property. Gardeners express the need to value the land for its uses to the community above the economic motivations of landlords. Temporary uses of vacant spaces, the neighborhood organizing necessary to transforming these into used, vibrant spaces, and the resistance to their closure when the city or landlord eventually reclaims the land are as important to these gardeners as the horticultural practices they engage in.

In San Francisco and Oakland there is significant overlap between urban gardening and occupy activists. This has brought a new approach to even temporary occupations of potential garden space. For many activists, gardens prefigure the ways land can be valued in non-capitalist markets. But the act of occupying the land can be equally important in shifting cultural approaches to property and land. Several gardeners, who have been involved in momentary occupations of land, cite that their actions are intended to disrupt norms of development. For one gardener of a momentary project: “[The garden] was successful insofar as it challenged this idea of private property being the be-all-end-all of how urban space is divided and designed… and inspired and educated a lot of people around how to garden… and to questions the access to the land that was around them” . Another gardener described the questions she would like people to ask themselves: “I think an occupation is an exercise of one’s entitlement to place and home and to have a voice… We have every right to do it sort of mentality, you know? That asks questions of a lot of the basic assumptions that we make about who makes the rules and what are their rights and what role we have in questioning those roles and those systems” .

For a third gardener, an occupation and garden creation was important in his personal reframing of possibility in the current capitalist context of cities: “we were certain that if we actually picked a fight about land we were sure we were going to be crushed, so when we stayed through the night, stayed through the week, through three weeks, we were like what’s going on… We were able to achieve something we didn’t think was possible” . Many of the claims of occupiers engaged in garden projects are similar to those of occupations in general, i.e. , to the degree that their actions gain attention by reclaiming land, oppositional activities force the public to consider the questions: What should urban space be used for? And who should decide? The case of the Hayes Valley Farm, which became the Gezi Garden, provides an important example of a garden project that turned into an occupation and the controversy that occupations bring up within urban gardening communities. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Central Freeway was damaged and torn down on the 2.2 acre site to later become the farm. In January 2010, after two decades of slow clean-up with the land laying vacant, the Hayes Valley Farm opened. Leading up to the opening of the farm, the ownership of the land had changed hands from Cal Trans to the former Redevelopment Agency, and then to the City of San Francisco’s Office of Housing, and the two parcels had been slotted for future development. In 2009 Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city’s office of Office of Economic and Workforce Development partnered with gardeners from the Urban Permaculture Institute to determine if an urban farm or garden could succeed on the site . In 2010, with a $52,950 grant from the OEWD, the Hayes Valley Farm was started as an interim use project to last between three and eighteen years . In June 2013, the farm closed its doors and the developers Avalon Bay Communities, a national development company, and Build Inc., a small San Francisco based real estate development company, bought one of the parcels for $9 million and made plans to start construction on a housing project .While the leadership team embraced the interim use quality of the project as an opportunity ,large pot with drainage some garden volunteers and other Bay Area activists did not and questioned why the lot should be sold. A protest was organized, “Liberate the Land”, where organizers claimed, “We are being called to defend the land we grow on. While 36,000 housing units are left empty in San Francisco, property owners and developers plan to build condominiums and high-end housing structures at the cost of displacing urban farms and gardens. We can out-grow the old power structures!” This occurred shortly after the Turkish Taksim Gezi Park mass protests objecting to the development of one of the few green spaces left and open to the public in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district. Protesters in San Francisco drew inspiration from the masses coming out to protest the development and the repression of free speech of original protestors. The Hayes Valley Farm was occupied and named Gezi Garden in solidarity with the Turkish activist efforts. Protestors spoke to the necessity of defending urban green space as open space for people to gather and connect with the soil. They spoke of the value of urban land for something other than development. The value of these parcels lay in their use and the ecological contributions to the city. The occupation lasted two weeks, when the gardeners and three tree sitters were forcibly removed from the site. The occupation sparked a powerful and sometimes quite contentious debate within urban agriculture communities across the bay region.

The debate revolved around whether the occupation benefited urban gardening and its prospects in San Francisco. For those opposed, the occupation represented a naïve and short-sighted action aimed at agitating instead of growing food. One garden advocate argued: “I don’t think the people who squatted Hayes Valley after the actual organizers left had a sense of how we were going to get from where they were and where we are as a society to where they wanted us to be which is a society without private property…Their feeling was the land is for the people but that’s not how we’ve set up society… I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon” . For another, the opposition to private property and idea that urban residents should reclaim control of urban green space was even more problematic: “They took it for granted – felt like it was their right to be there. That can’t happen. It’s a privilege to be able garden. The time that it’s there is a gift. That’s the classic example of why land owners don’t want to do this” . As this quote indicates, a major anxiety for many gardeners after the occupation was if this action, or similar ones like Occupy the Farm outside of Berkeley, would scare landlords or municipal agencies out of wanting to work with gardeners. In an opinion piece in the SF Bay Guardian blog, Erin Dage, echoed a question many gardeners brought up in interviews “might it [the Gezi Garden occupation] actually make property owners less likely to allow community-based temporary uses on land awaiting development?” . Pastor Megan Rohrer of the St. Paulus Lutheran Church, the landlord of the former Free Farm, was the project sponsor of the community garden project, which was demolished less than a year after the Gezi Garden occupation in order to make way for new housing . Rohrer, who was very supportive of both their garden project and the important issues that the occupy protestors were raising, still worried “that what happened with Hayes Valley Farm may happen with my garden. I just want everything to end smoothly and peacefully” . Other gardeners appreciated the work of the occupiers, claiming the conversations about development and the evictions of gardens is something the urban agriculture community needs to face directly. Whether or not urban agriculturalists agree that gardeners have an entitlement to urban space, many see the fast paced development market and politics in the region as a threat to their growing projects. A few garden projects have drawn inspiration from People’s Park as an occupation that lasted decades, eventually gaining significant institutional support and legitimacy. As the result of a multi-year process including a nationally recognized land occupation and protest of the planned development of the property, a university community partnership and participatory research project and garden, Occupy the Farm, Students for Engaged and Active Learning, and the Gill Tract Farm Coalition was born. Starting in the late 1990s, when the University of California Berkeley decided to sell development rights to a tract of land that had previous laid fallow in Albany, adjacent to Berkeley family student housing, UC students, neighbors, and urban garden advocates led by Peter Rosset and others at Food First organized to resist the development and advocate for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture training center 1997.OTF continues to highlight the UC’s shift towards increasing privatization while little support is given to projects that support local agriculture, food security, or serving the local ecological and human communities. For example, OTF activists protested the December 2013 hiring of Robert Lalanne as the first ever “vice chancellor for real estate” for UC Berkeley. On October 1, 2014 members of OTF, the student group running the new community garden, SEAL, and the Cal Progressive Coalition occupied the office of Capital Projects holding a sit-in until Chancellor Dirks met with the occupiers and provided several important documents about the Gill Tract development, both of which activists were promised in May but never saw materialize . Soon OTF activists have also developed a connection with the MST, organizing events that connect food and land sovereignty work in the global south to the struggle for the Gill Tract Farm. OTF has organized a learning exchange between Gill Tract and MST activists for 2015.