Horticulture

The reduced bio-degradation in the SB microcosms may have resulted from the ~40% higher carbon content in the SB microcosms, which would be expected to increase the soil-water distribution coefficient by a comparable amount. Reduced TCS concentration in soil pore water would be expected to slow bio-transformation, potentially in a nonlinear fashion. Another possible contributor to the slower degradation of TCS in SB is the greater availability of alternative, likely more easily degradable, carbon sources in SB than soil microcosms, reducing the use of TCS as a substrate. Selective bio-degradation of one carbon source, and inhibition of the degradation of other chemicals also present, has been observed for mixtures of chemicals in aquifers . To assess which of these mechanisms was controlling, measured Freundlich isotherm parameters for TCS adsorption on bio-solid amended Yolo soil were used to calculate equilibrium pore water concentrations in the soil and SB microcosms over the course of the experiment. Using estimated pore water concentrations of moistened soil and SB samples,pe grow bag instead of total soil concentrations to perform half-life calculations, resulted in modest increases in the rate constants and decreases in half-lives of soil samples and did not narrow the significant gap between half lives in soil and SB .

This suggests that the primary reason for the slower degradation of TCS in bio-solid amended soils is the increase in more labile forms of carbon because organic material is highly porous and has a lower particle density. Previous research shows that TCS biodegrades within weeks to months in aerobic soils , although Chenxi et al., found no TCS degradation in bio-solids stored under aerobic or anaerobic conditions, Kinney et al., observed a 40% decrease in TCS concentrations over a 4-month period following an agricultural bio-solids application. Because the slopes of the lines in Fig. 1 are not significantly different as a function of spiking level , the slopes were averaged for each treatment type, yielding apparent first order rate constants of 0.093±4% d−1 for soil samples and 0.024±41% d−1 for SB samples where the percent error represents the relative percent difference between the 10 mg/kg and 50 mg/kg degradation curves. These apparent rate constants translate to half-life estimates of 7.5 d in soils and 29 d in bio-solid amended soil. The estimated half-life of TCS in soil is within the range of previously reported half-lives of from 2.5 to 58 d in soil . The half-life determined here in bio-solid amended soils is lower than the one available literature value of 107.4 d . The microbial biomass decreased in the TCS spiked samples after 7 or 30 days of incubation in comparison with the unspiked controls, for both soil and SB, and the decline was statistically significant at 50 mg/kg .

Although exposure to TCS caused declines in biomass in both soil and SB microcosms, the total microbial biomass was two times higher in SB than soil probably due to the increased availability of nutrients and/or possibly due to addition of bio-solid associated microorganisms in the latter . The total number of PLFAs ranged from 42–47 in soil and 48–59 in SB . No significant change in numbers of PLFAs was evident with increasing dosage of TCS for any incubation time suggesting that TCS addition did not adversely affect microbial diversity. Microbes respond to various stresses by modifying cell membranes, for example by transforming the cis double bond of 16:1ω7c to cy17:0, which is more stable and not easily metabolized by the bacteria, reducing the impact of environmental stressors . Consequently, the ratio of cy17 to its precursor has been employed as an indicator of microbial stress that has been associated with slow growth of microorganisms . Increases in this stress biomarker were observed in both soil and SB samples as TCS concentrations increased , suggesting that TCS has a negative effect on the growth of soil microorganisms. The overall level of cy17 to its precursor is lower in SB than soil samples, suggesting that nutrients contributed by the bio-solids reduce stress on the microbial community. Our study agreed with a previous study showed that carbon added to soil led to a reduction in the cy17 fatty acid TCS additions, however, increased the stress marker compared with that detected in the corresponding samples with no added TCS.

A broader implication of this result is that presence of bio-solids may mitigate the toxic effects of chemicals in soil, or chemicals added in combination with bio-solids, on soil microbial communities. Groupings of microbial communities, based on CCA analysis of their composition as estimated by PLFA, were distinguished primarily by whether they were in soil or SB treatments and secondarily by time since spiking . To isolate the effects of bio-solids and TCS amendments on microbial community composition, the data was analyzed using pCCA considering TCS and bio-solid amendment as environmental variables, and incubation time as a covariable . This confirmed the results of the CCA indicating that the strongest determinant of microbial community composition was addition of bio-solids to soil. TCS concentration, on the second axis, described only 3.6% of the variation, showing TCS effects were overshadowed by the effects of bio-solid amendment. Bio-solid amendments caused an approximately two-fold increase in PLFA biomarkers for Gram-positive bacteria, actinomycetes and eukaryotes in SB compared to soil samples . Even larger increases were observed in biomarkers for fungi and Gram-negative bacteria, which were up to three times higher in SB than soil. Again, these changes were likely due to increased nutrient availability in the bio-solid amended samples and/or the biomass added along with the bio-solids, growing bags consistent with previous studies that found that the fatty acid 18:2 ω6, 9c and monounsaturates were increased by addition of these materials . The effect of TCS on microbial community composition was greater in soil than SB. Spiking with 10 or 50 mg/kg TCS decreased the abundance of Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria as well as fungi, with reductions ranging from 14 to 27% by day 30. Additionally, actinomycetes, which are Gram positive bacteria, were reduced in the 50 mg/kg TCS samples after 30 days of incubation . Eukaryotes were negatively affected after 7 and 30 days of incubation at both concentrations of TCS in soil but not SB samples. Biomass results for all microbial groups were consistent in suggesting that the presence of bio-solids mitigated the potential toxicity of TCS. It is important to note that the spiking levels used here are similar to levels found in the upper half of U.S. bio-solids, but would be unlikely to be achieved in bio-solid amended soils even after continued long term application. Therefore, the effects observed at the 10 or 50 mg/kg spiking levels should be viewed as a conservative upper bound on potential effects expected in the field. In addition, since all of the results in this study are based on an observation period of 30 d, the extent to which the observed effects persist is not known. Future studies should, in particular, investigate longer term changes in community structure in response to addition of bio-solids both with and without specific contaminants.

Over the past 30 years, nanoparticle engineering has led to the development of novel delivery systems for active ingredients with medical, veterinary, and agricultural applications. The increasing cost of research and development combined with the growing number of competitive manufacturing entities, short patent cycles, and the tightening regulatory guidelines for active ingredients, have made it difficult to bring new formulations from the bench to the market.Furthermore, the efficacy of many drugs is limited by their low solubility and/or stability, as well as off-target effects following systemic delivery. For example, cancer therapy is often unsuccessful due to the toxicity of cancer drugs towards healthy cells and/or the development of resistant cells over expressing efflux transporters and multi-drug-resistance proteins.The resulting low bio-availability of the active ingredient in the tumor requires the administration of larger doses to ensure the drug concentration stays within the therapeutic window, which in turn increases off target toxicity. Nanocarriers can address this challenge by delivering active ingredients via the enhanced permeability and retention effect, a well-established phenomenon based on the combination of leaky vasculature and poor lymphatic drainage at the tumor site.The EPR effect only increases the tumor homing of nanoparticles by two-fold compared to normal tissue,so nanoparticles can also be functionalized with targeting ligands, aptamers, antibodies, or antibody fragments to promote their binding to receptors overexpressed on tumor cells or in the surrounding extracellular matrix.The entrapment of active ingredients in nanocarriers also reduces the clearance rate via renal elimination and phagocytosis, which increases the active ingredient circulation time and therefore its therapeutic longevity. The medical and veterinary applications of nanocarriers are analogous, but only experimental veterinary applications have been reported.Most research in veterinary drug delivery has focused on diseases in animals that can be translated to humans. However, the importance of animal welfare per se is increasingly important to consumers, and nanocarriers that improve the efficacy and safety of active ingredients are demanded in the context of companion animals such as cats, dogs and horses, as well as farm animals such cattle, sheep, swine and poultry.Pet owners consider companion animals as an extension of the family and are willing to pay their bills, including the high cost of cancer treatment, with the cost of veterinary care in the USA therefore rising from $7 billion in 2001 to $19 billion in 2019.This increase most likely reflects a combination of inflation, high drug costs, better treatment options , and an increased willingness to care for pets. In contrast, the food industry works with low profit margins and would only treat animals suffering from temporary and low-risk diseases, such as infections.Veterinary nanocarriers must therefore combine low costs with the release of active ingredients for sustained periods to minimize the frequency of animal handling and improve therapeutic efficacy. For example, animals are often subject to bacterial infections, and a nanomedicine approach could achieve the targeted delivery of drugs to pathogens, killing them on demand. This avoids the unnecessary use of antibiotics, which can encourage the emergence of resistant strains. The controlled delivery of agrochemicals and nutrients to plants is conceptually similar to drug delivery in humans and animals. However, agricultural delivery takes place in an open field, with variable weather and geographic features and no specific transport pathway to the target, in contrast to the closed and regulated nature of the bloodstream. Nanocarriers can be administered via the foliage, where they are taken up passively through stomata and any wounds, or can be transported through the soil and taken up via the roots.Among the agrochemicals that can be delivered using nanoparticles, pesticides are particularly suitable candidates because they are effective at very low doses but are difficult to apply in such small amounts due to their non-uniform distribution in the field.To compensate, the active ingredient can be diluted within a mixture of liquid or solid diluents. However, the active ingredient is often unstable, sparingly soluble, and binds with high affinity to soil particles, thus reducing its efficacy against target pests and increasing the amount required to achieve an effective dose.In an analogous manner to the off-target effects caused by systemic drugs, the persistence of large quantities of pesticides in the environment is toxic to other species, and contaminates the soil and groundwater leading to health problems in domestic animals and humans, including cancer and infertility.In one strategy, the active ingredient is enveloped in organic or inorganic coatings for protection against photolysis or bio-degradation, allowing the controlled release of the ingredient.But even microencapsulation is limited by the poor chemical and thermal stability of the capsules, and degradation promotes the acidification of soil, which can impair its fertility. As discussed in more detail below, these drawbacks can be addressed by a new generation of nanocarriers based on polymers, lipids and other materials. The definition of a nanomaterial is not yet harmonized, but the International Organization for Standardization defines nanoparticles as objects with dimensions of 1–100 nm, because the physicochemical properties of the material at this scale differ from the bulk material. Unfortunately, this ISO definition excludes most nanomaterials that are relevant in the medical, veterinary, and agricultural sectors.

In this chapter I have presented an attempt to estimate the effect of rural out-migration on rural wages. I find a strong positive and robust effect of rural out-migration on rural wages in Brazil during the period 1991-2000. Using a cohort analysis my results suggest that rural out-migration flows between 1991 and 2000 have increased rural wages in Brazil by 6.5%. One concern is that rural out-migration may be accompanied with changes in the workforce composition in rural areas since those who migrate do not constitute a random sample of the initial rural population. I find that changes in the workforce composition do account for some of the wage increase due to larger out-migration rates. Controlling for observable measures of workforce composition such as educational attainment and gender composition, I find that the wage effect of rural out-migration flows between 1991 and 2000 drops from 6.5% to about 3%. Due to data limitation, the analysis in this chapter did not measure the short-run effect of rural out-migration on wages by taking into account dynamic adjustments in physical capital. Future research in this areas could she light on which rural population groups lose or gain in the short-run as rural out-migration increases.Because of their dependence on rain-fed agriculture a large proportion of households in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to rainfall shocks.

Moreover the usual mechanisms for smoothing income or consumption may be missing or limited in such economies. In addition,flower bucket since shocks such as weather and pests are likely to affect the income of all households, they cannot be insured locally through non-market mechanisms. Households and individuals inability to transfer resources across time and states of the nature may lead them to adopt coping strategies that are detrimental to asset and human capital accumulation. For instance, a negative income shock may lead households to draw on monetary or liquid savings to smooth income and consumption. Households who experience a negative shock can also smooth income by increasing labor supply or reducing spending in some food or investment groups. Increasing labor supply may entail putting children to work, while the need to reduce spending can result in less health and schooling investment. Jensen finds that among households who experienced a rainfall shock in Cote d’Ivoire, enrollment rates and child growth drop considerably relative to one year before the shock. Jacoby and Skoufias find that household income fluctuations in India lead to year-to-year variations in school attendance. Beegle et al. find evidence of increased child labor following crop losses using longitudinal household data from Tanzania. Examples include Funkhouser for the debt crisis in Costa Rica, Thomas et al. who examines household response to the financial crisis in Indonesia and Rucci for the Argentine peso crisis.

However considerably less attention has been devoted to the medium to long-run consequences of income shocks on children’s schooling in developing countries. In the presence of state dependence, an income shock may have permanent effect on a children schooling. De Janvry et al. find strong evidence of state dependence in child school enrollment using a panel of households in rural Mexico. I contribute to this literature in this paper by examining to which extent short-run drops in enrollment rates affect medium-run enrollment decisions and years of education using a period of drought in Southern Africa. This paper is related to Meng and Qian’s analysis of the long term link between famine and educational attainment in China; but it also differs in several ways. The two papers have different notion of “long term”. While Meng and Qian analyze the impact of the 1959-1961 Famine in China over 30 years after, my medium to long-run analysis is carried out within the 10 years following the droughts. This allows me to observe individuals before they have completed their schooling which, in turn, permits an analysis of their school enrollment decisions adding to our understanding of their educational attainment. Following this approach, I show that individuals exposed to the droughts tend to stay in school at older ages, and that this leads to partial catch-up in educational attainment, especially in regions where the intensity of the shock was not too high. The policy implication of this finding is that simple means testing could help target policies aimed an dampening the negative effect of agricultural shocks. In 1991/1992 and 1994/1995, the southern region of Africa experienced two major droughts.

The 1992 drought was qualified as one of the most devastating droughts in the region and followed a 60-year low rains and over two million cattle lost. Figure 3.1 shows the logarithm of the ratio between rainfall and its mean between 1940 and 1995. The graph confirms that during this 26 year period rainfall was lowest in 1992 and 1995. In 1991/1992 rainfall was about 65.8 per cent of average rainfall in the sample period, while in 1994/1995 rainfall was about 66.5 of average rainfall. These low rains have had a large negative impact on food production. Figure 3.2 shows an index of food production in Zambia between 1960 and 2005 and its deviation from a quartic time trend. In 1991/1992 food production was 14 per cent below the trend. While 1992/1993 and 1993/1994 were relatively good years, in 1994/1995 food production dropped by 8 per cent relative to the estimated production. 2 . In this paper I use data from Zambia to explore the short-run and medium-run consequences of rainfall shocks on children’s schooling. I use three cross-sections of the Zambian Demography and Health Survey, one collected during the first months of the 1991/1992 rainy season and two other surveys in 1996 and 2001/2002, to investigate the impact of the droughts on school enrollment and years of schooling of children exposed to the drought. A major drawback of the ZDHS is the absence of measures of income and consumption,square flower bucket or information on children’s time allocation or work inside or outside of the household. Thus I focus on a reduced form analysis where I compare the schooling of school aged children affected by the drought with children of the same age-group interviewed before the drought. I control for trends in schooling using enrollment and years of schooling of older youth and adults. The estimates using this strategy are biased if other aggregate shocks correlated with schooling took place during the same period. To address this issue, I employ a triple difference strategy to confirm that the effects on schooling can be attributed to the drought. I use rainfall data from actual rainfall gauges and exploit variation across provinces in the intensity of rainfall deficit during the peak of the drought. My triple difference approach consists in comparing differences in schooling across highly and moderately affected provinces between school-aged children affected by the drought and children of the same age-group interviewed before the drought. I find that exposure to the drought reduced enrollment rates by 10 percentage points and years of schooling by 8 percentage points in the short-run. I also find some evidence of partial catch-up in the medium-run in provinces moderately affected by the drought which suggests that children exposed to the drought remained in school at older ages. However, in the provinces most affected by the drought, I find no evidence of such accumulation of delayed education.

Within such provinces, young children who were in school during the drought were up to 7 percentage points less likely to be enrolled in school five to six years after the drought. Given the existing literature, the medium-run consequences on delayed entry in the job market, forgone earnings, lower wages might be large. These findings have important policy implications. They suggest that technologies to reduce the impact of rainfall shocks and safety nets may have large benefits in reducing delays and increasing the rate of human capital accumulation. Moreover education policies should target regions and individuals exposed to agricultural or income shocks in order to limit drops in enrollment rates and facilitate the return of students who temporarily left school. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. In section 3.2 I develop a simple dynamic model of income shock and investment in school to motivate the empirical analysis. Section 3.3 describes the timing of the data collection and the rainfall season in Zambia and some basic summary statistics. Section 3.4 explains the empirical strategy, and section 3.5 presents the main results and some robustness checks. Section 3.6 concludes. The onset of the rainy season in Zambia is normally during October or November. Rains are usually recorded up to March or April of the following year. Since I am using the 1992 ZDHS to control for an age-group’s pre-drought schooling, my estimates of the impact of the 1991/1992 and 1994/1995 droughts will be biased if, for instance, households started reducing investment in schooling during the first months of the raining season. My estimates will also be biased if data collection occurred too early relative to the raining season for households to be affected and to adjust their schooling decisions. As a consequence it is important to understand the timing of the ZDHS data collections relative to the onset and offset of the raining season in Zambia; the diagram below provides a basis for this. Data collection of the ZDHS-1992 was carried out between January and May 1992 meaning that the issue that households may have started reducing investment in schooling during the 1991/1992 raining season. In the analysis below I present a robustness check to judge the severity of the concern. The robustness of the results are tested by restricting the ZDHS-1992 sample to households surveyed during the 1991/1992 raining season, period during which the impact of the drought on harvests was not yet felt. On the other hand, the ZDHS-1996 data was collected between July and December 1996, so 3 months after the end of the poor 1994/1995 raining season suggesting that I should be able to capture the impact of the two droughts on schooling. Primary and secondary education in Zambia is divided in three levels : Primary education , Junior Secondary , and Upper Secondary. My analysis focus on school enrollment, and years of schooling for individuals 6 to 40 years old living in rural areas. I first present some graphical analysis of educational attaintment before and after the drought to motivate the empirical strategy. Figures 3.3 to 3.6 report school enrollment rates and average years of schooling by age for the ZDHS in 1996 and 1992. The general patterns reported here are similar using non-parametric regression of enrollment rate and years of schooling on age. Figures 3.3 to 3.4 show enrollment rates in the full sample and for males and females separately. Enrollment status is only recoded for residing household members between 6 to 24 years old. Figure 3.3 shows that for individuals from 6 to 13 years old, current enrollment in school is higher in 1992 relative to 1996. For individuals ages 15 to 19 years there is a less clear ranking of enrollment rate between individuals interviewed in 1992 and 1996. For individuals 20 to 24 years old, the difference in enrollment rates in 1992 relative to 1996 is much smaller. Turning to years of schooling, figures 3.5 to 3.6 show years of schooling in the full sample, and for males and females separately. For individuals 6 to 13 years old, years of schooling is larger for individuals interviewed in 1992 relative to those interviewed in 1996. There is no difference in education between 1992 and 1996 for individuals 14 to 30 years old. For older cohorts, individuals interviewed in 1996 have slightly higher schooling consistent with the overall increase in education over time. Taken together these graphics suggest a strong negative impact of the drought on individuals that were 6 to 13 years old in 1996. This cohort of children is a judicious group of interest to analyze the schooling consequences of the drought for two main reasons. First, the threshold of 13 years old is important as it represents the final year of primary education for children who started school at age 6 and had a normal progression through school. Moreover about 91 per cent of the sample has completed 7 years of schooling or less. Second, exposure to drought for children ages 2 to 5 years old is likely to affect children’s educational attainment.

From 2000 and 2015, the organic production of spring mix lettuce increased 153% in Monterey County. Short-term lettuce data in the County reflect this trend. Since the passage of the 2012 Ag Waiver , organic head lettuce production has increased 155%, from 112 acres to 174 acres, organic romaine lettuce has increased by roughly the same percentage, from 2,750 to 4,096 acres, yet organic leaf lettuce production in the county has increased decreased slightly from 1,088 acres to 1,066 acres. An upward trend in organic production is also true for the two other crops in Monterey County for which there are longitudinal data—organic cauliflower has more than quadrupled, from 180 acres to 780 acres between 2000 and 2013, and organic strawberries production has grown exponentially, from 48 acres in 2000 to 2,082 acres in 2015. Despite the appeal of using fewer pesticides for human health, the environment and higher profit margins, a possible drawback associated with less pesticide use and/or organic production is increased pest damage resulting in crop loss. The amount of crop loss depends greatly on the pest pressure in a particular area and crop type and stage. Even within the same cropping system, pests can have varying levels of destruction.

For example,procona valencia cabbage maggots can cause yellowing, retarded growth or even plant death on brassicas , but in some propitious situations , the same brassica plants could survive cabbage maggot infestations unimpeded . The severity of pest damage can also differ within a particular region, as it does with cabbage maggot in the Salinas Valley . For example, the acceptance of pest pressure on farms could also greatly vary. The two survey responses that referenced pest damage, both from San Luis Obispo County and both who previously used diazinon demonstrate the varying degrees of frustration growers have with accepting crop loss. One respondent who previously used diazinon to control beetle populations shared his sentiments of surrendering to the pests, “We are accepting cucumber beetle damage on annual crops.” The second survey response offered a more exasperated reaction to increasing pest pressure, alluding to the fact that he wished there was alternative pesticide to use, “There is no substitute. The ants are thriving.” The two responses could be representative of varying degrees of pest pressure on two different targeted pests , different value systems, or different financial circumstances allowing one farm to accept pest pressure more readily than another. Using fewer pesticides, however, does not automatically mean a farm will experience more pest damage and lower yields . For example, a study comparing organic and conventional apple production in the Central Coast showed not only increased profits from transitioning to organic production, but also increased yields .

Additionally, a recent study in Nature found that organic farming methods promote a stronger pest control among natural enemies as well as yield larger plants than management practices typical under conventional farming systems .The costs of chlorpyrifos and diazinon also could have played a small part in some farmers abandoning their use. Clearly, data on chlorpyrifos and diazinon pricing varies substantially based on the size and cropping system of the agricultural operation and the volume discounts that large farms might receive. UC Extension, however, has estimated operating costs in their detailed Cost and Return studies, including specific material and labor costs related to insecticide use for a variety of California crops. In 2009, Smith and his colleagues at UC Extension published a Cost and Return study for leaf lettuce producers in the Central Coast region. This report estimated roughly 1 lb/acre of diazinon use on lettuce at a price of $10.45/acre. Compared to the costs of other insecticides, such as Radiant SC , or other herbicides, such as Kerb 50W , diazinon was a minor cost, and only 4% of overall insecticide expenditures . Additional costs associated with diazinon include cultural costs . In the report, these costs were estimated as an aggregate totaling $128/acre for several pest control agents, including diazinon. Weighing these costs against estimated net returns per acre is complicated by the range of farm productivity and prices received for lettuce; for example, net returns for a head lettuce farm producing 400 12-3 count cartons per acre at an average market price of $11/acre was estimated around $-2,407/acre, whereas a production of 1000 12-3 count cartons per acre at the same price was estimated to yield $111/acre in net gains.

None of the recent Cost and Return studies on broccoli in the Central Coast include estimations on chlorpyrifos use in their calculations. However, a UCE study on a related crop, cauliflower, estimates about 7.00 lb/acre of chlorpyrifos is needed for root maggot control, the target pest for both cauliflower and broccoli. The cost of the chemical was valued at $2.80/acre for a total of $19.60/acre . Compared to total operating costs for cauliflower and broccoli , expenditures on chlorpyrifos for this specific pest were relatively small . As with lettuce, net returns on broccoli vary substantially by productivity and price. A farm producing 545 boxes/acre receiving an average price of $6.80/box had an estimated net loss of $569/acre whereas a farm producing 785 boxes/acre receiving the same price was also in the red with a net loss of $112/acre. These data suggest that cost was not a persuasive factor in growers’ decision to cutback on chlorpyrifos and diazinon use. The lack of survey responses highlighting cost to be a major impetus in decision-making corroborate with these data; only one survey respondent cited the cost of diazinon and chlorpyrifos as playing a part in his decision-making to stop using them.In the Central Coast region, broccoli has historically been one of the top three crops with the heaviest use of chlorpyrifos, and lettuce is the chief crop with the highest diazinon use. The region’s year-round mild climate offers the ideal growing conditions for these cool season crops; however, the cool, wet weather is also favorable to cabbage maggots ,flower bucket the predominant target pest of chlorpyrifos on broccoli. Monterey is the leading broccoli-producing county in the state, with 40 percent of the acreage and production . The Salinas Valley, located in Monterey County is the “salad bowl of the world,” producing 80% of the salad greens consumed in the U.S.

A closer look at chlorpyrifos and diazinon application on broccoli and lettuce in Monterey compared to other regions and the state as a whole sheds light on why crop type may be a pivotal factor in allowing Central Coast growers to give up chlorpyrifos, while growers in other regions haveheld on to it for survival, and why crop type did not have as powerful an effect on diazinon’s demise.Chlorpyrifos has been one of a handful of insecticides that broccoli farmers rotate into their pest management plan to slow potential pest resistance . According to pest advisors and the UC ANR IPM program, growers tend to use chlorpyrifos on broccoli prophylactically, targeting cabbage maggots at the larval stage before the pest hatches and before it can cause damage to crops. Encouragingly, despite cutting back on chlorpyrifos, the Monterey County broccoli industry appears to be thriving. The number of acres in production and the total amount of broccoli produced continue to climb . At the same time, the market price for the crop is also on the rise, making the value per ton the highest it has been in recent years. In just over a decade, from 2000 to 2013, the value of Monterey County’s broccoli crop rose from $280.4 million to $426.9 million . These data suggest that regional broccoli growers on average are not only surviving, but thriving without the use of chlorpyrifos. As with broccoli, Monterey is the leading producer of lettuce in the state with 57% of production. Monterey and the second-lettuce producing county in the state, the Imperial County, together account for 70% of all lettuce produced in California, or roughly half of all lettuce produced in the U.S. Unlike chlorpyrifos, diazinon is used on lettuce for a variety of insect controls; and for each pest, there are a handful of readily available chemical alternatives. Consequently, the world-renowned “salad bowl” was unscathed by diazinon cutbacks. Both the production in lettuce acreage and crop totals have steadily increased in Monterey County as well as the price/value of the crop . In 2014, the most recent data available, Monterey’s lettuce crops were the highest they had ever been, valued at $1.2 billion. Comparing these same data with the second highest broccoli and lettuce-producing county in the state, the Imperial County, demonstrates that the Central Coast’s unique cool season cropping systems may be at the core of why agricultural production can thrive without chlorpyrifos, while growers in other regions are not willing or able to give it up so readily. The Imperial Valley is located in southeastern Southern California in the Colorado River Basin Region. With high summer temperatures, the Valley is well known for its number one agronomic crop, alfalfa, grossing $220 million in 2014. The region also has a reputation for its midwinter vegetable crops, including head lettuce, leaf lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. Alfalfagrowers in the Imperial Valley have become ever more reliant on chlorpyrifos due to the increased pest pressures from blue alfalfa aphids.

Chlorpyrifos is preferred by alfalfa growers for the suppression of these aphids over alternative insecticides, and is a fundamental tool in most growers’ IPM programs . Consequently, the region has not experienced the same downward trend in chlorpyrifos use that Monterey and the Central Coast have. Though broccoli farmers in the Imperial County were able to curtail chlorpyrifos application, alfalfa farmers in the region use a much larger share of the chemical, trumping any decline benefited by chlorpyrifos cutbacks on broccoli . Diazinon use in the Imperial Valley has declined on broccoli as well as on all crops.Fresno County, the third largest broccoli and lettuce-producing region in the state, has a parallel story to the Imperial County. Fresno County is located in the Central Valley and is characterized by its hot mediterranean climate. Taking advantage of Fresno’s ideal growing conditions as well as the lucrative almond market, farmers have been steadily converting land to almond production. In 2014, almonds were farmed on 170,711 acres up from 82,700 acres just a decade earlier. In 2013 and 2014 almonds grown in Fresno surpased the billion dollar mark, outdoing grapes for the number crop value in the county. As of 2013, almonds had the highest economic value of any California nut crop and were the highest export value of any American specialty crop .The county is the third largest producer of broccoli and lettuce in the state, and produces a variety of other vegetables including tomatoes, onions and melons. In 2013, chlorpyrifos had the greatest percentage increase in use among insecticides and most of this increase was dedicated to almond production . Almond growers became increasingly dependent on the chlorpyrifos due to budding populations of two crop pests: leaffoted bugs and navel orangeworms . Chlorpyrifos use on broccoli, on the other hand, steadily decreased as it did in Monterey and the Imperial Valley, and was trumped by use on almonds and other crops .Over the past decade, diazinon use in Fresno has declined overall as well as specifically on lettuce crops, mirroring Monterey, Imperial Valley and statewide trends. Comparing chlorpyrifos use between Monterey County, the Imperial County and Fresno County underscores the importance of crop type and pest pressure on growers decision to apply the chemical or not. This comparison leads to several interesting policy questions: Would the Imperial Valley or Fresno County have stopped using chlorpyrifos on alfalfa or almonds if it were held to Central Coast Tier 3 requirements? Or would growers have complied with Tier 3 requirements to continue producing their most profitable crops? Or, lastly, would growers have given up the alfalfa and almonds altogether to escape individual monitoring mandates? The widespread decline in chlorpyrifos use on broccoli in three different regions under three different regulatory programs gives considerable credence to other macro-conditions, besides the 2012 Ag Waiver, as causes for the pesticide’s demise. However, before jumping to this conclusion, other factors, such as differing pest pressure, must be considered.

The bio-assessment studies show a clear relationship between increased water pollution and increased agricultural and urban land use . Nationwide, agricultural non-point pollution is the chief impediment to achieving national water quality objectives . The EPA lists the chief components of these non-point source agricultural pollutants as nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers, pesticides, animal sources, soil erosion, and salts from irrigated fields. The National Rivers and Streams Assessment, conducted by the U.S EPA in 2004 and again in 2008/9, uses separate monitoring data from the 303 listings. Over the course of five years, between 2004 and 2009, the Assessment found seven percent fewer stream miles were in good biological condition. Similar to the Central Coast, throughout the U.S. changes to water quality in streams were variable over time and space. Overall, the report found that U.S. streams and rivers are “under significant stress and more than half exhibit poor biological condition” . Despite the diverse datasets,30 litre plant pots bulk frequency and consistency of monitoring data are still not sufficient to verify the effectiveness of the Agricultural Waiver .

The following two sections will assess the value of the Ag Waivers requirements, particularly the monitoring provisions.A closer look at the requirements themselves highlights why compliance may not lead to improved water quality. The Agricultural Waiver, in theory, uses an approach that gradually increases compliance requirements, called an “iterative approach,” meaning dischargers implement increasingly improved management practices until the region has achieved clean water. This approach recognizes that progress towards achieving water standards can take time. Logically, the 2012 Waiver should be significantly more rigorous than its predecessor. While Tier 3 farms might have more stringent requirements, a handful of significant provisions for Tier 1 and 2, which make up 99% of all growers, have been so watered-down and in some cases eliminated that the 2012 Ag Waiver has been regarded as “only marginally stronger than the 2004 Ag Waiver” . Several examples illustrate this point. First, in its modifications to the 2012 Agricultural Waiver, the State Board eliminated the only enforceable provision that would control nitrogen pollution—the nitrogen balance ratio target2 . Instead, grower snow only need to report the total N applied. Even with the 100% compliance rate of this mandate, the total N reporting provides substantially less information about which farms have nitrogen surpluses and might be contributing to pollution. Second, and arguably most importantly, the Ag Waiver does not have any quantifiable mechanisms to determine if management practices implemented by Tier 1 and 2 farms reduce pollution . Third, choosing which management practices to implement is largely up to the discretion of agricultural operators.

The Ag Waiver does not define what management practices should be implemented or verify if those practices are actually improving water . Though management practices are a means to reduce pollution discharges and achieve water quality, the California’s Non-point Source Policy establishes that “management practices may not be substituted for actual compliance with water quality standards” . One new requirement that can aid the Regional Board in estimating improved water quality is the mandate to report all water quality management practices and outcomes. The online form requires growers to check all nutrient, irrigation, pesticide and sediment management practices that are being implemented and the number of acres on which the practices are applied. While this new tool will provide baseline data for the Regional Board to better understand how growers say they are managing their land and crops, there are no means to verify if those management practices are effective. Growers have the opportunity to report if they have seen a positive outcome from their implemented management practices, yet outcomes are measured by the grower’s perception of change rather than a numeric or quantifiable water quality data. For example, in the 2014 annual compliance form, the most commonly used method to confirm sediment reduction was by walking the perimeter of the property to verify erosion controls were in place and that sediment did not leave the ranch/farm during irrigation events and/or storm events; the least commonly used method to confirm sediment reduction was to measure turbidity in stormwater runoff.

The Agricultural Waiver has significant monitoring limitations. In the 2012 Ag Waiver, the Regional Board acknowledged that a critical limitation of the 2004 Ag Waiver was “the lack of discharge monitoring and reporting… and the lack of public transparency regarding on-farm discharges” . The 2015 Superior Court Judge ruling reiterated this point: “The 2004 Waiver has not been successful because it lacks adequate standards and feedback mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of implemented management practices in reducing pollution and preventing further degradation of water quality.” Despite adding a handful of modest monitoring requirements to contend with these limitations, the updated 2012 Ag Waiver suffers from the same shortcomings as its predecessor. The biggest deficiency in the monitoring program is that data collected are neither comprehensive enough to verify the effectiveness of the management practices nor to identify individual operations that cause impairments . This issue points to the most controversial AgWaiver topic: public disclosure and transparency of information. The most effective means of identifying a polluter is to conduct individual discharge monitoring at the edge of a discharger’s field where pollutants enter the water. Because of its controversial nature, and the difficulty to collect data from thousands of individual farms, the 2012 Ag Waiver compromised by mandating that only the highest risk polluters—Tier 3 farms—need to report individual surface discharge monitoring. The biggest fear among growers is that of being identified as a point source polluter, and subsequently regulated under WDRs or NPDES permits, rather than a Waiver. As one Regional Board staff member put it, growers “don’t want to deal with a government agency managing their land and water, and they don’t want to be called part of the problem.” With individual discharge monitoring requirements as the driving force,wholesale plant containers growers did anything they could to get out of Tier 3. Farm operations split their ranches into sub-parcels, stopped using certain pesticides, or stopped farming altogether. To depict the drastic exodus out of Tier 3, in 2010, over 10% of farms were categorized in Tier 3, yet as of September 2015, only 1% of all farms in the Region are regulated under that Tier. As a result of the shift to lower tiers, monitoring and regulatory provisions, and the overall Ag Waiver itself, have been severely hindered, since most growers are not held to sufficiently strict mandates. A goal of requiring individual surface water monitoring of Tier 3 farms was to evaluate effects of waste discharge on water quality and beneficial uses; it remains to be seen whether data from such a small subset of growers will adequately achieve this objective. In contrast, the 99% of other growers must report surface receiving water monitoring, either cooperatively or individually. Surface receiving monitoring is conduced on the main stem of a river, rather than near a grower’s fields. For growers, this is a much more attractive scenario: data are reported as an aggregate and pollutants detected from surface receiving water data can rarely be traced back to its source. Additionally, the cost is generally less than the fees associated with the individual surface water discharge Sampling and Analysis Plan and Quality Assurance Project Plan .

Monitoring challenges are exacerbated by the diffuse nature of non-point source pollution. Because agricultural runoff does not enter a stream at a well-defined point, and often occurs episodically , continuous or targeted monitoring are needed to evaluate the rapidly changing and dynamic local environmental conditions. Growers and the cooperative monitoring program are not required to collect data at the same time or even during the same rain event, making it difficult to compare results and establish trends. A nonprofit, the Coastal Watershed Council , has attempted to address this problem by testing several water parameters in watersheds throughout the region during the first rain event, or “First Flush”, in their annual Snapshot Day. By collecting water quality data during the first rainfall, the CWC attempts to capture the most concentrated pollutants washing off the landscape in significant levels at the same time from year to year. The CWC’s Snapshot Day found nutrients and turbidity from agriculture and urban areas to be a major source of regional water contamination. However, the CWC program is volunteer-based and has a limited capacity to carry out high quality comprehensive monitoring.A related complaint by growers is that they will be substantially harmed by the cost of compliance. A 2012 Ag Alert article reported that the regulatory requirements in the 2012 Order amounted to more than $230 million in lost revenue and an estimated 2,500 to 3,300 in lost agricultural jobs . The Growers-Shippers Association of Central California added that the adopted regulations are “over-board and intrusive on grower operations” . Some growers claim that the compliance costs are unwarranted because farm management practices similar to the ones being mandated are already in effect. A representative from the Santa Cruz Farm Bureau voiced the agricultural community’s frustrations, “in general, there has been a lot of concern about the regulations being applied. In particular, the Regional Board did not take into consideration what was already being done on the farm. [The Agricultural Waiver] adds a financial and time burden on growers.” Several growers and agricultural organizations, including seven county Farm Bureaus, put into writing the perceived economic burden in their appeal to the 2012 Ag Order. In their request, agricultural petitioners claimed the cost of compliance would amount to 1.3-2.5%, 0.13-0.3%, and 0.8-1.5 % of gross crop revenues per acre for leaf lettuce, strawberry, and head lettuce, respectively. Some asserted that the methods employed in the agricultural group’s cost analysis were “not credible” and the numbers were “inflated,” and “self-serving” . In its argument against the agricultural industry’s estimated compliance costs, the Regional Board claimed that because the potential costs vary widely from farm to farm it is impossible to estimate the range over all farms. Another example of cost discrepancies was in the estimated monitoring expenditures for the two pesticides regulated in the Ag Waiver, diazinon and chlorpyrifos: the Regional Board estimated the total cost to monitor these two pesticides would be $250 per farm, whereas the agricultural petitioners estimated $7,000 to $11,000 per farm. It is nearly impossible to put a dollar value on the public health and ecological benefits gained from the two Agricultural Waivers, but it is worth mentioning some potential benefits from the Ag Waiver. In their rebuttal to the request for a “stay,” the Regional Board listed several environmental benefits that would result from the 2012 Agricultural Waiver including improved drinking water, overall public health, decreased pollutant loadings in surface and groundwater, reduced threat to sensitive aquatic habitats, and more stabilization of stream banks in riparian areas. Whether these improved societal and environmental conditions outweigh the estimated 0.8- 2.5% of gross crop revenues it would cost to comply will largely depend on who is asked.Issues of equity are at the heart of public policy controversies , and can be used to measure policy effectiveness two ways: fairness or redistribution . Factors that may play a role in measuring equity through the lens of environmental justice include the level of participation among stakeholders and/or distributive outcomes of pollution . These types of concerns harken back to the founder of policy studies, Harold Lasswell , who encouraged policy scholars to ask: “Who benefits? Who gets what, when, and how?” Answers to such questions attempt to uncover the inevitable unequal allocation of resources that result the dynamic relationship of power and bargaining inherent in the making of any set of rules and regulations . In the case of the Central Coast Ag Waiver, three main distributional consequences of compliance have been highlighted as unfair. The first two are contestations among growers themselves. First, Tier 3 growers contend that the three tiered system is imbalanced because it distributes a substantially higher burden on a small number of farms. This assertion represents a classic policy paradox: “equal treatment may require unequal treatment; and the same distribution may be seen as equal or unequal, depending on one’s point of view” .

Exclusion discourse placed Chinese as more efficient than whites, whose “manhood” is wasted in repetitive tasks such as mining and service work. Lye shows that the Chinese were for this reason seen as more “modern,” more suited to a future of proletarian work. The Anglo-Saxon’s supposedly large, violent, inefficient body had been well adapted to hunting and Indian-killing, an era that had ended. Thus the anxieties around Chinese Exclusion were partially a result also of the closing of the frontier. The Octopus represents the Chinese as docile and feminized, but for that very reason as more refined. Unlike anti-Black racism, where the African is animalized in contrast to the European, in the American West it is Anglo-Saxons who are closer to animals because they are more alive, virile, and so on. They are “red-blooded Americans.” When the Anglo-Saxon farmhands and the Chinese cooks appear together, it is when the former are eating, and Norris’s description emphasizes the scale of the operation,best grow pots the frenzy of impersonal activity: “The half hundred men of the gang threw themselves upon the supper the Chinese cooks had set out in the shed of the eating-house…

The table was taken as if by assault; the clatter of iron knives upon the tin plates was as the reverberation of hail upon a metal roof” . The way the Chinese “set out” the food appears refined in comparison to the naturalist cacophony of “the gang’s” eating, as unstoppable as the weather. The cooks are set apart from the farmhands, but are an integral component of the large-scale ranch. Like the new machinery, the Chinese cooks allow for the rationalization and division of labor of the new agriculture, as opposed to the archaic animal nature of the farmhands: “It was a veritable barbecue, a crude and primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric. But in all this scene Vanamee saw nothing repulsive… this feeding of the People, this gorging of the human animal, eager for its meat.” The feasting is both “barbaric,” those outside of civilized discourse, and “homeric,” the origin of Western civilization—this is a tension internal to the Anglo-Saxon race, internal to “the People” and their holy destiny of Indian-killing, and is best captured by the phrase “the human animal.” The otherness of the Chinese, who are not hungry for meat, is of a different order, on par with the introduction of machines into the landscape.

The labor of “the gang” is what is being replaced by mechanized agriculture, whereas the Chinese domestic servants’ positions are secure, as they work in the house feeding the ranch’s owners as well. Norris signals the defeat of the white workers when, for all the talk of Chinese famine, it will be a white farmer who actually starves to death in the novel. Mrs. Hooven, the widow of a German immigrant farmer killed at the irrigation ditch, is dispossessed of the family’s land by the railroad and travels to San Francisco with her two daughters. This account of proletarianization is formally the most elaborate section of the book, with the events presented out of temporal sequence. The teenage daughter, Minna, becomes separated from her mother and young sister, and after witnessing the “horrors” of Chinatown she is the first to face the shock of starvation: “The idea of her starving, of her mother and Hilda starving, was out of all reason. Of course, it would not come to that, of course not. It was not thus that starvation came” . After long descriptions of her physical hunger, she is able to survive by becoming a prostitute. The narrative then juxtaposes the mother’s plight and a dinner party held by San Francisco elites including Cedarquist and one of the railroad barons, as well as Presley due to a series of convenient accidents. The dinner party takes only a few hours while Mrs Hooven’s story unfolds over many days, but the narrative cuts back and forth between the rising dramatic tension of the two plotlines. After twenty pages of intercutting, the section climaxes with “‘My best compliments for a delightful dinner’… ‘she has been dead some time—exhaustion from starvation,” .

The Hoovens lose each other because they are country folk unaccustomed to the scale of the city, and because, as German immigrants, they do not speak perfect English. In the racial schema employed by Gompers and Norris, they are not Anglo-Saxons, and so are technically not part of the labor competition. In the new world of U.S.-Chinese relations, their Europeanness is a comical archaicism that cannot survive: they must either die, as the parents do, or assimilate into degrading wage labor, as Minna does.This is part of Lye’s general focus on how U.S. East Asia policy is related to representations of Asian Americans. But the boycott as a social movement shows that the political consequences of American China policy operate in both North America and East Asia. Any contradictions in The Octopus’s view of political economy are familiar from neoliberal globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, which again advocated for restrictions on racialized immigration but not on goods. We can see this already in the nineteenth-century Exclusion discourse itself, which Cedarquist’s speech does not in fact contradict. Consider this 1886 memorial to Congress, after Chinese had allegedly struck so as not to work alongside white workers: “To begin with, they have a hive of 450,000,000 Chinese to draw from,plant in pots ideas with only one ocean to cross, and behind them an impulsive force of hunger unknown to any European people” . The Chinese are not rational but propelled by impulse, not individuals but a group mind. This naturalist conception of the world, where hunger is an external force, driving them out of the hive from behind, is of a piece with both Turner’s view of forces and what we will encounter in The Octopus. The insect comparison is typical, as shown in an address by Morris M. Estee before the State Agricultural Society at Sacramento, in which the Chinese are so hungry as to be counterproductive in agricultural labor because they eat more than they harvest. He recommends barring from “our orchards, vineyards, hopfields and grain fields […] the thieving, irresponsible Chinaman, who like the locusts of Egypt, are eating out our substance” . It is apparently when working in the fields that such a voracious hunger comes to the fore, unlike the machinic and docile mode when engaged in modern service work. The broader point, however, is that Chinese hunger also underlies U.S. imperial reach in Asia.

As we saw above, Norris describes a shift from war and empire to trade and markets. Lye tends to focus on the rupture between these two, so that empire is now a euphemism or exciting metaphor for what is actually the cold economic logic of the market. I am instead following Eperjesi in emphasizing the continuities, seeing economic power as a new form of empire.For Western understandings of China have long taken famine to be a crucial component of its political system. In The Spirit of the Laws –the most influential text of the Enlightenment on comparative political systems–Montesquieu argued that while the Chinese had the most advanced methods of intensive farming, this could never keep up with their large population. This imbalance somehow derives from a contradiction between low fertility of the land and high fertility of the Chinese female body: “The climate of China is surprizingly favourable to the propagation of the human species. The women are the most prolific in the whole world. …[However,] China, like all other countries that live chiefly upon rice, is subject to frequent famines” . Writing in the mid-eighteenth century, the author does not even explain, let alone support, these fertility dynamics. By comparison, Norris’s version at the turn of the twentieth century is relatively sophisticated, with its pseudo-scientific theory of the decline of Chinese rice’s nutritive value. I raise this long history of the idea of Chinese hunger here to argue that, far from a projection of immigration discourse, it is the historically-primary way of thinking about China in terms of food. Thus the authoritarian rulers are compelled to rule well and provide enough food for the people lest they be overwhelmed by the hungry population. Montesquieu here applies his famous theory of checks and balances to the Chinese system, but these checks are not a separation of powers among institutions but the environmental power of fertility and hunger that checks the emperor. It is a domestic economy rather than a political economy. We see these same themes repeated in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, that China is a land of overpopulation and famine, and that individual Chinese are satisfied with less. It underlies Cedarquist’s vision of Empire marching westward: whoever can feed the Chinese is their rightful imperial ruler, and so the mandate falls to American industry. However, whereas Europeans already viewed the Chinese in terms of food in the eighteenth century—unmatched agricultural innovations coexisting with famine and limited dietary needs—this was in the context of an inquiry into social questions, above all religious, political, and economic organization. By the time we reach the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and specifically in the labor market of the western U.S., these food characteristics were reconceptualized in terms of biological race. One aspect of this is the dehumanization following from extreme hunger, which animalizes them, as in the above quotations where the Chinese emerge from a “hive,” feed like “locusts,” and are biologically different from the “beef-and-bread man.”

These are the characterizations that the Chinese boycott proponents are fighting and they show what is at stake in refusing consumption. Where the Americans use food distribution as a weapon to conquer China, the Chinese politicize food consumption. Where the Exclusion supporters politicize the theory of evolution through biological races, the boycott supporters apply the theory of evolution to the history of political forms to show the need for a strong nation.American Studies scholars have often noted the contradictory attitudes of love and hate that Americans have felt toward China, which in this period can be seen in the contradiction between the twin discourses of the dream of the China market and the nightmare of Chinese invasion, the yellow Peril . While psychoanalytic and other theoretical frameworks can illuminate the dynamics between these two tendencies, we can understand the more direct connections between them by foregrounding the Chinese experience of the U.S. In the U.S. this is primarily a class difference, between the workers who oppose competition, that is, who want a monopoly on the labor market, and the merchants and industrialists who want to increase exports to China. This is not, however, always understood as a direct class conflict, as for example Gompers argues that the boycott threat will never become a reality, and so Chinese workers can be excluded without hurting American capital in Asia. Frank Norris, on the other hand, is more dubious about the China trade’s effect on American workers, as we have seen when Mrs. Hooven starves in San Francisco. The larger point is that U.S. texts from this period generally do not see a causal link between the China market and Chinese immigration; they are two contemporary phenomena which must both be managed. The Chinese proponents of a boycott of American goods, however, articulate a direct connection between the two: cutting off foreign trade is an appropriate response to the mistreatment of Chinese nationals in the U.S. While this is partly a practical matter—the only way ordinary Chinese can affect the us, in however small a way—it also reflects the historical and economic links between Western imports into China and Chinese immigration to the Americas, both of which are the result of Chinese decline and Western military interventions. While many American Studies scholars tend to treat Chinese Exclusion as an internal development in the unfolding national history of race and labor, we should see that this is also a pivotal moment in the history of China. The campaign in support of coolie labor is the first Chinese social movement to be articulated in nationalist terms. On the other hand, while the boycott is often described by historians of China as the first Chinese social movement to define itself in national terms, this relationship with the U.S. at the origin is generally seen as somewhat incidental and not central to the development as Chinese nationalism as a whole. In this chapter I have been arguing that we should recenter this relationship in considering the early twentieth-century development of both countries.

Our results suggest that the yield effects of crop rotational histories in cotton are relatively modest in magnitude: the posterior means for effects of any specific crop were mostly under 15%. However, given the tight profit margins of commercial agriculture, a 15% change in yield could translate into a far greater percentage change in profit, and could therefore be of substantial economic significance to a grower. As we seek to feed a growing worldwide population while doing minimal harm to the environment, crop management practices that increase yield while reducing the need for costly and damaging pesticides and fertilizers are of great value. Crop rotation is one such method, and we are optimistic that ecoinformatics approaches may be helpful in elucidating the details of how to optimally implement crop rotation.On February 5th, 2014, over thirty U.S. food production organizations joined together to form the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food with the aim of lobbying Congress to affirm the safety of genetically modified foods. The organizations of the coalition—the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Council of Farm Cooperatives,large plastic garden pots the National Corn Growers Association, and the American Soybean Association, among others—were on the defensive first of all against ballot initiatives seeking compulsory labeling of genetically modified foods over the last two years in over half of the fifty states.

Secondly, China’s recent ban on certain genetically modified food imports had led to the return of 600,000 tons of American corn in 2013, and perhaps explaining why the front page of the Coalition’s website features a photograph of a smiling East Asian child against a pastoral background, happily biting into a large corn cob . In China, by comparison, the issue had become explicitly nationalist, with GM crops depicted as a threat not only to public health but to national food security and with struggling farmers protesting the “traitors” in the agricultural ministry who had continued some imports. In a video made for army officers but later leaked online, the voice-over makes this clear: “America is mobilizing its strategic resources to promote GM food vigorously. This is a means of controlling the world by controlling the world’s food production” . This dissertation will show that these contemporary conflicts between and within the United States and China over food security have a long history that has defined uneven political and sociocultural relationships between these two countries, and moreover that literature has played an important role in imagining and defining those relationships. Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus famously calls for a rapid increase in food exports to China to sustain the industrialization of agriculture in the American West. A character in the novel declares that for American farmers and industrialists to survive in the coming century, “we must march with the course of empire, I mean we must look to China,” . Suggesting his own views hued closely to this fictional voice, Norris elsewhere linked the close of the frontier to American marines landing in Beijing to help put down the Boxer Rebellion .

In addition to celebrating American power directly through the military, and indirectly through control of the food supply, Norris also contributed to so-called “yellow peril” discourse with stereotypical portrayals such as the Chinese kidnapper in Moran of the Lady Letty . While scholars have explored the connections and tensions in American literature of this period between the fantasy of the China market as an engine for American prosperity and anti-immigrant racism, what remains unexplored is how Chinese writers understood and engaged with these same issues. In 1905, to protest the treatment of Chinese workers in the U.S., activists in southern China organized a boycott of American imports that lasted over a year . In the propaganda literature and other works of cultural production popularizing the boycott, the act of giving up American food products appears as particularly poignant. One popular song, for example, politicizes Norris’s celebrated commodity: “American wheat flower is made with Chinese blood” . In the novella Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott , meanwhile, the protagonist decides that the only way for China to be truly independent of the U.S. is to develop its own food sovereignty, and at the close of the narrative he moves to the countryside to promote large-scale agriculture. In reading these American and Chinese texts comparatively for the first time, this project shows the multifaceted roles of both imaginative literature and other rhetorical forms, and especially literatures of food, on both sides of U.S.-China political struggles.

Furthermore the project demonstrates how these early conflicts informed the later Cold War competition between the two countries, when each attempted to export its own versions of rural modernization to the rest of Asia, from the Korean War era all the way up to the 2014 military video. More broadly, by reading American and Chinese literature about agriculture together, we begin to appreciate how writers and their reading audiences of this period imagined the modernization of food production in their respective national contexts as entwined with transnational exchanges and tensions. In addition to the prominent conflicts over U.S. and Chinese food power during the past century, transnational collaborations between Americans and Chinese are perhaps less well known. Most importantly, from the 1890’s to the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, a steady stream of American agriculturalists travelled to China to research Chinese agricultural practices and recommend improvements. While certain interests, such as International Harvester, hoped to promote U.S. farming technologies, this project will focus on the larger group of researchers with institutional funding—above all the Rockefeller Foundation—trying to solve what they saw as a global food shortage1 . These visitors were graduates of the new U.S. agricultural colleges, and an increasing number of Chinese also travelled to the U.S. to become trained agronomists. The most influential of these consultants was Lossing Buck, husband of novelist Pearl S. Buck. Buck travelled with Lossing during his fieldwork, and edited his first book, Chinese Farm Economy,raspberry plant pot in the year before she wrote The Good Earth. I argue that this novel’s extraordinary binational success—it was widely read and debated in China—can be best understood through the longer history of academic collaboration between Chinese and American agricultural experts attempting to define the nature of Chinese rural society through reference to the U.S. This is furthermore why there is actually significant overlap between her representations of the Chinese countryside and those of the Communist writers ostensibly at the other end of the political spectrum. World War II largely put an end to U.S.-Chinese collaboration in the countryside, and when the Communists came to power in 1949 they renewed the terms of food conflict from the turn of the century. When the U.S. ambassador was recalled to Washington in August 1949, Mao Zedong characterized him as a fleeing colonial governor, and in a widely-read series of essays Mao criticized the American practice of distributing famine relief flour, saying that it was bait intended to catch the Chinese people and devour them. The image is reminiscent of the ending of The Octopus, where the figure of the American industrialist prepares a shipment of famine relief wheat as the first step to expand U.S. food export channels to China and India.

With the opening of the Cold War in Asia during the 1950s, the U.S. and China each launched propaganda campaigns to promote how their competing visions of rural modernization could help the rest of Asia. The earlier work of the agronomists in China, such as Lossing Buck, served as the foundation for the Cold War U.S. program of non-redistibutive, technical improvements aimed at international development, a series of projects in India and other countries that were later collectively dubbed the green revolution. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, went on to implement nearly all of the agronomists’ earlier suggestions, but combined them with land redistribution. As evident in contemporaneous literature and film, both nations championed their own programs as promising the utopian end to rural hunger, in contrast to the failure of the other. In this way the Cold War period shows a synthesis of the earlier two periods, as the old political rivalry renewed but this time through technical discourses of production and development. Just as the two major national powers advancing the Cold War in Asia developed their agricultural and rural modernization programs out of their respective work in the Chinese countryside before the war, so did a third approach that we can now recognize as the prototype of the modern non-governmental organization . Another transnational project of the late 1920s and early 1930s was the Mass Education Movement , headed by James C. Yen, who was born and raised in Sichuan and who attended Yale and Princeton. Through his network of contacts with the YMCA, Yen secured Rockefeller funding for the MEM, giving talks throughout the U.S. and publishing multiple essays and pamphlets for an American audience. In contrast to the technical focus of the agronomists, Yen sought to reform village life as a whole, beginning with literacy and only then moving on to rural economy, health, and government. Literature again played a central but slightly different role in this project, which focused on literacy for the rural population rather than literary representations of those rural communities. American academics also participated in the MEM project, but here they were anthropologists seeking to understand and affirm local traditions, rather than scientists seeking to maximize crop yields. Most notably, Yen strove to remain independent of both the Nationalists and Communists, and after the Communists ultimately came to power, he neither stayed in China nor settled in Taiwan, but instead moved to the Philippines and founded the Institute for Rural Reconstruction. This non-governmental organization has continued to promote grass-roots, community-centered programs throughout rural Asia, later expanding to Latin America and Africa. When in the 1970’s and 1980’s a new generation of international development workers began to question the top-down technical programs that the U.S. promoted throughout the Third World, James C. Yen’s work fifty years earlier in China was rediscovered . In short, this dissertation argues that American and Chinese writers imagined the other through tropes of agriculture, food, and hunger during the early- and mid-twentieth century. Writers producing fiction, poetry, and other forms of literature about agriculture and rural life mediated the material connections between the two countries, including their food trade and agricultural modernization projects. In pursuing these literary and cultural comparisons, the dissertation proposes dialectical relationships along two axes. It begins with the dialectic between imaginative literature and political-economy, specifically the political-economy of agricultural development. Literary and cultural studies as fields have shown that literature mediates readers’ understanding of and engagements with historical processes, which cannot be apprehended in their totality. The relationship between literature and political-economy is dialectical because the former does not simply mirror the latter, but also provides ways of understanding that influence future actions. Many scholars have examined American literature’s dialectical relationship with agricultural development and larger environmental transformations.2 For example, William Conlogue has shown that during the twentieth century U.S. literary authors crystalized for their reading publics various competing directions for future agricultural development. In Chinese literature, understanding and reimagining the countryside and the rural people has been explicitly tied to national transformation since the early twentieth century, and during the Maoist period aesthetic treatments of agricultural production were tightly regulated.In particular, this dissertation builds on Allison Carruth’s work showing that many twentieth-century U.S. literary writers responded to and mapped the growth of what she calls “American food power” abroad. I argue that how Americans and Chinese imagined their competing food interests had long-term consequences for the emergent global food system. As my literary and cultural analyses will show, the most common trope through which the relationship between the U.S. and Chinese countryside—and in turn the shifting political economic relationships between the two nations—was imagined was that of famine, for which I propose two main reasons. First, famine displays most completely the perceived failures of the current rural system, and so the need for modernization. As Marx noted, during the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy, people in daily life experience production, distribution, and consumption as only abstractly connected, but during periods of crisis their direct underlying unity becomes become painfully evident. In this way the representation of rural crisis as famine actually gives the most complete picture of the total food system as analyzed by food studies.

The Southern California Comprehensive Water Reclamation and Reuse Study , for example, provides a comprehensive assessment of existing reuse and reuse potential in Southern California.The following is a review of key moments in history that changed water policy, from passage of water rights legislation to the voter approval of the State Water Project . Although there are other significant events, however, they are not deemed as relevant and significant to this research and hence are not included. As shown in Figure 2-5, the first Colorado River delivery was made to the farmlands of the Imperial Valley was in 1901 and the major compact agreement was signed in 1922, designating specific allocation to the upper and lower Colorado basins for all seven states . The Central Valley Project and State Water Project were authorized for construction in 1933 and 1951 respectively. In 1973, the first State Water Project delivery was made to Southern California and the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 setting the first ever standard for drinking water throughout the country.

In 1998-2003,plastic seedling pots the Colorado Quantification Settlement Agreement was reached between California and other Colorado River Basin states and the Federal Government. As a result of this agreement, California received its allocation of 4.4 MAF which still serves as the state’s allotted water share even until today. Many state agencies are involved with California water management as shown in Table 2-3. While overlapping responsibilities might occur in terms of broad objectives, generally, there is not duplication of functions. Most agencies focus on a specific subset of water management, for example, the State Water Resources Control Board and the Department of Water Resources are the two leading water management agencies. They have mandated water supply objectives, however, their roles differ greatly. DWR focus on water delivery, water supply planning, and infrastructure development, while SWRCB is more of a regulatory body, managing water rights and water quality permitting . These roles are complementary and often require the two agencies to work in concert to address water management at the state level. The management of California water systems consists of three main components: water supply, water quality, and flood control.

Most agencies involved in one or more of these components also have responsibilities for scientific activities and monitoring and administering financial assistance for local water infrastructure. For example, several financial assistance programs attempt to jointly address water quality and water supply needs at the local levels, thereby providing more comprehensive local water supply reliability. Other state agencies not listed may be involved with water management as part of their greater mission . At the federal level, most agencies have distinct roles, for example, the United States Environmental Protection Agency focuses on water quality, while the United States Bureau of Reclamation focuses on water supply. However, these roles can overlap and potentially duplicate state efforts, for example, both state and federal entities estimate the state’s water supply resources, although the state has a more comprehensive role through the efforts of DWR. At the local and tribal levels, most entities play multiple roles including both water supply and water quality ones. Local entities can be both regulated and regulatory entities, receiving permits from state agencies for water quality while in return regulating their constituents to meet those permitting requirements as shown on Table 2-4. In some respects, these roles may duplicate those of state and federal efforts. For example, federal, state and local water agencies may each be independently investigating the development of new water supply sources to potentially serve the same region of the state. Water regions defined by DWR and SWRCB are similar but not identical.

SWRCB works in conjunction with nine semiautonomous regional boards while the DWR divides the state into ten hydrological regions governed from Sacramento headquarters. Although, some activities of DWR and SWRCB require coordination among regions and between the two state agencies, their differences in regional definitions can pose a challenge for implementing programs, planning or accounting for California water resources. Figure 2-6 shows the difference in regional boundaries between DWR and SWRCB.The Federal government holds the most water rights in the state with over 112 MAF of water rights mainly for delivery through the federal Central Valley Project. Second to this area are the water rights held by Imperial Irrigation District serving mainly farms in the Colorado River region. Water rights exceed actual total water volume availability on almost all river systems of the state. This is partly because water may be reused as it runs off farms or may be returned to the river after use for a non-consumptive purpose such as energy production. In some cases, water rights are oversubscribed and exceed actual water availability .As described above, California’s water supplies originate from many sources including local surface water projects, groundwater, inter-regional surface water deliveries such as State Water Project, Colorado River imports, treated wastewater, and natural stream flow. In 2005, DWR estimated that California used about 40.2 million acre-feet of water. Of this amount, roughly 78% was used by the agricultural sector, while the remaining 22% was used by urban users. Table 2-5 shows historical estimates of urban water use published by DWR for the years 1972 to 2005.

Urban water appears to have grown along with the state’s population . Water declined during the drought in the 1990’s, but appears to have rebounded. Per capita urban water use does not appear to have changed significantly over time . From 2000 to 2005, per capita water use averaged 229 gallons per capita per day. The data appear to show that statewide average per capita urban water use has changed little over time over the period from 1972 to 2005 . Compare to the year 2000, a typical water year, total water supply of 43.1 MAF was used to supply agricultural and urban sectors. Figure 2-11 shows the proportions of water use by each sector and the corresponding non-stream supply for California for this year. Almost 80% of non-environmental water supply is used by the agricultural sector,container size for raspberries and more than half of the urban use is by households. One third of all supply originated from local sources and another third is from groundwater and reuse. The remaining third came from the big water management projects – the State Water Project, the Central Valley Project and the Colorado River. Figure 2-12 shows a graphic that illustrates the significant movement of water across the state. The figure shows that about a quarter of the water that flows into the Bay-Delta region from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and other tributaries is diverted from the Bay-Delta region for distribution throughout the southern portion of the state. Much of the supply exported from the Bay-Delta is delivered to agricultural regions in the southern Central Valley, supplementing their surface water and groundwater supplies . The remaining Bay-Delta exports are delivered via the California Aqueduct to urban regions along the Central Coast and to Southern California. Southern California also imports substantial water supply from the Colorado river to supplement its local resources. Water and energy are inseparable. The two resources are inextricably entwined. Energy is needed to pump, treat, transport, heat, cool and recycle water. Likewise, the force of falling water turns the turbines that generate hydroelectric electricity, and most thermal power plants are dependent on water for cooling . In California, concurrent demands for energy and water usage have continued to rise. As a result, the need to plan and implement efficient technologies and using alternative sources are critical to the success of California’s future.

Water usage for energy generation in California varies greatly, depending on the primary energy source, conversion technologies, and cooling technologies used. Figure 2-13 illustrate the state’s typical water use cycle. Water is first extracted from a source. It is then transported to water treatment facilities and distributed to end users. What happens during end use depends on whether water is for agricultural or urban use. Wastewater from urban uses is collected, treated and discharged back to the environment, where it might become a source for someone else. Energy is required in all stages of the water use cycle. It is difficult to measure the amount of water-related energy that is actually consumed. Figure 2-14 indicate the total water-related energy consumption used in California at approximately 19% of all electricity and 32% of all natural gas generated in the state in the year 2005 . Due to significant variations in energy used to convey water supplies form one place to another, the average energy intensity of water use cycle in Southern California is much greater than in Northern California. This is due to the fact that Southern California imports about 50% of its water from the Colorado River and from the State Water Project . Each of these supply sources is more energy intensive than any single source of water supply used in Northern California . Table 2-6 illustrates the combined energy intensity of the water use cycle for urban communities in Northern and Southern California. By and large, California’s reservoirs and water delivery systems were designed and operated based on historical hydrology. However, with climate change, this mode of traditional operation may no longer be valid . When it comes to climate impacts in the next 20- 50 years, “utility planners will have to grapple with many of them prospectively rather than as phenomena that are already observable” . According to DWR, temperatures across California has risen one degree Fahrenheit on average. This increase in temperature has decreased the spring snow pack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by about 10 percent which is equivalent to a reduction of 1.5 million acre-feet of water. Seasonal snowpack in the Sierra Nevada has always been the largest surface water storage for the state. Sea level along the California’s coast has also risen by about 7 inches . Climatology experts advise that the warming of air temperatures may cause our normal precipitation to shift from snow to rain. This would lead to serious reduction in the amount of snowpack, an important natural reservoir for storing water in the winter and supply California with water in the spring snowmelt. Figure 2-16 provides an estimate of the average reduction in snowmelt water content based on rising temperatures. California water planners further suggest that more changes are expected to come as we head towards the year 2050 and beyond. Some of those changes may include another rise in mean temperature by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit which may decrease the Sierra Nevada snowpack further to 25 percent, a near storage volume of about 3.8 million acre-feet. Figure 2-17 provides an estimate of the snowmelt reduction based on projected future temperatures. Figure 2-18 shows the increased in flood events as recorded by DWR from 1910 to 2000. Climate change is already having a profound effect on California’s water systems as evidenced by the changes in snowpack storage, river flows, and sea levels. Scientific studies show these changes will increase stress on the water systems in the future. Because some levels of the climate change is inevitable, California water systems must be adaptable to change . The impacts of these changes will gradually increase during this century and beyond. California needs to plan for water system modifications that adapt to the impacts of climate change. Figure 2-19 shows a possible global sea level rise of 4 to 6 inches by mid-century. Higher sea levels will increase the salinity in the Delta, disrupting the freshwater supply and quality that many Californians traditionally rely on. While California’s urban water use has grown steadily with population, some areas of the state have succeeded in lowering per capita water use. For example, in 2011, urban water use in Los Angeles was 123 gpcd, among the lowest in the state . A Study by DeOreo et al. 2011 found that more than half of California water use for single-family residences was for outdoor uses. DWR 2011 also reported that residences account for about two-thirds of urban water use. In 2005, residential use accounted for an estimated 66% of total urban water use in California. Water planners believe that this number can be curtailed with improvements in water-use efficiency and conservation by means of rebates and incentives. Water agencies and utilities are also encouraged to implement conservation and efficiency programs, termed best management practices, outlined in the of California Urban Water Conservation Council’s Memorandum of Understanding .

Accordingly, foreign monetary authorities will underestimate their own money demands, and their policy will turn out to be more restrictive than desired. Foreign monetary independence from U. S. policies is lost. A second possibility is that foreign authorities recognize unanticipated shifts in U. S. monetary policy quickly. They may act to maintain the value of their currencies rather than allow them to appreciate. They accommodate the U. S. money growth by responding with the same policy. Money is no longer as tight in the rest of the world, but the result is an even greater increase in the world money supply. This is exactly the phenomenon McKinnon has claimed was responsible for the rapid worldwide inflation of the 1970s. As foreign monetary policy is more or less restrictive than originally intended, without monetary independence agricultural exports either fall or rise. The magnitude of changes in foreign income effects, and the resulting changes in export demand, will depend on the failure abroad to anticipate changes in domestic monetary policy. As long as money growth is not perfectly anticipated,raspberries in pots there will be real effects on income and other variables.

The changes in domestic money growth rates can be thought of as sterilizing the effects of unanticipated money shocks abroad. In this context, it is important to clarify the conventional view of the sterilization of reserve flows. The usual interpretation involves a central bank intervening in currency markets to prevent its currency from, for example, depreciation. Since this involves buying its currency with bonds or foreign exchange, there is a reduction in the money stock. Sterilization would involve an offsetting expansion of domestic money so as to maintain previous money growth targets. There is no clear reason, however, for such an operation. As long as capital is mobile, the sterilization operation will indeed leave the total money stock unchanged; but the situation of excess currency supply, pressuring a depreciation, is also unchanged. It will, therefore, be necessary to adjust monetary growth to accommodate, or sterilize, unanticipated changes in money demand. To the extent that monetary authorities are able to make this adjustment, and to the extent that money holders do not perceive this as a shift in policy , there will be no real effects on economic activity. More likely, however, there will be shocks in real variables, such as income and the real rate of interest, as unanticipated money growth is discovered by money holders.

The importance of the disincentives typically inflicted upon agriculture by LDCs can be best dramatized when those disincentives are removed. The reforms in the People’s Republic of China provide the clearest example of what happens when policies become more market oriented. After two decades of sluggish growth, Chinese agricultural output soared after 1978 when regulations were liberalized and prices were allowed to rise and approach market-determined levels. This remarkable expansion, making China now the largest wheat producer in the world, was achieved almost entirely through productivity gains. The amount of land under cultivation and the use of tractors for farming declined between 1978 and 1983–the major change was clearly to the incentive system. Some observers have argued that such policy changes lead to reduced export demand for agricultural products from the developed economies of the world. This is not necessarily the case. By fueling domestic growth and increasing rural income, many of these countries become better customers for some agricultural products for which only developed nations can provide. Studies have shown that the “crowding out” of U. S. agriculture by expanding developing country production are exaggerated. Thus, there may be a basis for cooperation in agricultural trade reform between developed and developing nations. Nations that have not liberalized their agricultural policies, particularly those in Africa, have suffered from food shortages, and even widespread malnutrition and famine. When the enormous surpluses of the developed economies are juxtaposed with the situation of poorer developing countries, the world agricultural imbalance seems particularly galling.

The problem is not one of agricultural supply, however, but one of allocation and distribution. The poorer countries are not poor because they need more agricultural production but because they lack the income to buy more food on world markets. By liberalizing their agricultural policies and allowing market incentives to spur their farmers, poorer LDCs can not only increase domestic production in products for which they have comparative advantage, but they can increase rural incomes so they may trade for the essential foodstuffs. OUr particular concern here, however, is not with the internal policies of LDCs but with the links between industrialized country policies and economic conditions in the developing world. Monetary and fiscal pOlicies, distortionary agricultural policies, and other macroeconomic policies in the developed world affect general economic conditions in LDCs. The implications of these policies for a specific nation depend largely on its internal economic structure. Essentially, industrial country policies can affect an LDC, especially a commodity-exporting LDC, through real rate of interest, the terms of trade, and the stocks of primary products. The effect of these forces will vary with the degree of openness in a particular LDC’s trade structure and its level of initial indebtedness.Macroeconomic policies also affect the level of trade and the competitive advantage of other countries. The major macroeconomic variables are income growth rates, real interest rates, and exchange rates, with the rate of income growth being the most important of these three. Most notably, the income growth of OECD countries is crucial to the growth of world trade in general and of LDC exports in particular.

World demand for typical LDC goods is particularly procyclical, explaining why exports of such goods fell sharply from 1980 to 1982 after the rapid growth in the 1970s. LpG export volumes responded well to the U. S. recovery that began in 1983 and spread weakly to other industrialized countries in 1984. Prices of LDC exports, however, which began to fall during the recession, continued a downward trend through 1985. This was true whether measured in terms of dollars or in terms of LDC import prices. In part because of high real-interest rates, prices of LDC exports, particularly of commodities, have remained depressed throughout the 1980s. The increase in world interest rates,blueberries in containers growing in the early 1980s was primarily the result of U. S. monetary and fiscal policies. This increase has had three major effects on commodity-exporting LDCs. The first effect has been a depressing effect on the price of commodity exports. Since storable commodities are viewed as a portfolio asset, real interest rates will represent the opportunity cost of holding a commodity and will affect the demand for storage.Consequently, the relative price of commodities will decline until the expected rate of change in the product’s value is equated with the real interest rate. The second effect has been an increase in the debt-service burden of the debtors. An estimated 80 percent of all major LDC debt is under variable rate agreements. As real interest rates crept upward in the early 1980s, so did the interest payments portions of their debt service. Additional principal also accumulated with the occurrence of current account deficits due to falling exports receipts .l A debtor carries an additional burden when the value of the debt is fixed in one currency, and the export receipts are valued in another. When the debt currency appreciates relative to the export currency, the value of the LOCs’ external liabilities rises. This was a common occurrence with the huge dollar appreciation in the 1980s. Finally, higher interest rates can also affect internal economic performance by reducing investment in favor of increased saving. Capital flows to countries with higher real rates, and it is not uncommon for real differentials to exist between the developing countries and the United States due to regulated financial markets in the LDCs. Although not easily quantifiable, this channeling of savings may have important consequences for future LDC debt prospects as the stock of capital goods dwindles and with it future production possibilities. This was as important as the loss of export revenue during the early 1980s in the creation of increases in the current account deficit, the external debt, and the debt/export ratio.

The third and final effect of higher world-interest rates is the direct effect on interest rates within each LDC because of arbitrage opportunities. For many LDCs, the magnitude of capital flows in response to interest rate differentials helps explain why local LDC interest rates eventually must adjust. Another major variable, the exchange rate, is influenced not so much by the level of macroeconomic policies but by the differences between macroeconomic policies in the United States and other countries. Although the influence of exchange rate on agricultural trade is indeed complex, a number of direct effects have been captured empirically . These include price effects, cross-price effects associated with sub-stitutable commodities, and policy-distortion effects. If the value of the dollar were to increase by 10 percent, it would make very little difference to the importers of corn in Japan if the price of corn were to fall by an equivalent amount because the net cost in Japanese yen to an importer would remain the same. In the early 1980s, however, with a rapid increase in the value of the dollar, a corresponding ‘fall in the price of U. S. corn was not possible. U. S. support prices were simply too high, and there occurred a so-called policy distortion effect. When the price of corn from other origins is downwardly flexible and currency is arbitraged, the export demand naturally falls for corrunodities with “high” price supports. There are a number of secondary, or indirect, effects of exchange rates that exert influence on agricultural trade. Indirect influences on income and growth affect export demand. One of these indirect effects is from foreign central banks’ systematic intervention in exchange rate markets to influence the value of their currency. When such intervention is not sterilized, it changes money supplies of the intervening countries and, in the short run, also changes the rates of income growth. Another effect is when a change intrade balance due to movements in the exchange rate increases growth in income, a part of which is spent on imports. A third, indirect effect is from wealth transfers associated with current account imbalances. Current flow payments are equivalent to wealth transfers, and such transfers require movement in interest rates to restore equilibrium in money markets. A new equilibrium causes changes in investment income and in export demand for agricultural products. In addition to all of the above effects of exchange rates, there can be additional effects on the debt/export ratio if the currency composition of the denomination of debt differs from the currency composition of the exports. For example, many debtor countries suffered from the sharp appreciation of the dollar when their debts were in dollars, while their exports were in other currencies as well. This phenomenon occurred regardless of whether or not a shift occurred in a debtor country’s terms of trade during the 1980s. For this reason, the dollar’s appreciation has often been listed as one of the three macroeconomic shocks, along with the recession and the increase in real interest rates, that helped precipitate the debt crisis of 1982. The shift to a more restrictive monetary policy and the unprecedented expansion of the fiscal deficit in the early1980s pushed up real ;interest rates both in the United States and abroad. This rise in rates of return directly enlarged the LDC debt service obligations and indirectly drove down commodity prices via overshooting and dollar appreciation. Expansionary fiscal policy can, however, also increase demand for LDC agricultural goods, thereby, producing an offsetting effect on the terms of trade.Because of inadequate domestic savingst current and foreseeable budget deficits will continue to be a major force behind the United States’ large existing trade imbalances. The so-called twin-deficits problem will continue plaguing the export performance of U. S. agriculture. Few policymakers realize that the large budget outlays for farm policy are partially responsible for the dismal trade performance of the sector. The causal flow moves from subsidization of agriculture t to government budget deficitst to the need of foreign countries to generate trade surpluses that will finance their capital flows into the United States. The latter capital flows finance U. S. credit demands.

Prior to Smith and Mendelsohn , several notable studies examined the state of the knowledge of climate assessments at the US level . In particular, Lewandrowski and Schimmelpfennig integrate the knowledge from both programming and econometric studies of the agricultural sector. Other reviews have focused on the technical details of the different modeling approaches without discussing the results of the various studies . Following the pioneering work of Smith and Mendelsohn , this paper also focuses on California. The state is a leader in agricultural production, with $53.5 billion in sector cash receipts in 2014. California accounts for roughly 2/3 of US fruit/nut production, and 1/3 of US vegetable production . Roughly 1/3 of California cropland, or 9 million acres, is irrigated , making the state’s agricultural sector highly vulnerable to changes in groundwater and surface water supply . Several programming and econometric studies have been published after Smith and Mendelsohn , that operationalize the concept of adaptation . It is followed by a review of the results from recent programming and econometric studies.

The final section synthesizes the results from these studies, addressing lessons learned about vulnerability,adaptation,plastic plant pots and adaptive capacity; and how these relate to economic welfare and efficiency.Observational studies indicate that average daily temperature and daily minimum temperatures, particularly during the winter season, have increased in California . Average daily temperature in the US Southwest for the previous decade has been higher than any decade observed in the previous century . Barnett et al. find that daily minimum temperatures in winter have increased between 0.28– 0.43
C per decade from 1950–1999. Not just magnitude, but an increased rate of warming has been observed. Karl et al. suggest that the US Southwest has experienced the most rapid rate of warming in the nation. Observed precipitation patterns are fundamentally more complex and variable than temperature, exhibiting a high degree of variability across space and time. Trenberth et al. indicate that annual precipitation has decreased in the southwestern United States for the period 1901–2005. Consistent with scientific theory, empirical research suggests that warmer climates, such as those projected for the Southwest, will lead to more extreme precipitation intensity and frequency , particularly during the winter season . Since annual precipitation is projected to decline , more extreme events do not translate into higher total rainfall for a given year. Instead, it is projected that light precipitation — an important source for soil moisture and groundwater recharge — will concomitantly decline.

Between 1901 and 2010, the areal extent of drought increased in the southwestern United State . Some have attributed the increasing expanse of drought, particularly in the previous decade, to warmer temperatures . Others have suggested that it is due to changes in atmospheric circulation . In addition to temperature and precipitation, CO2 fertilization is another climate change pathway affecting agriculture. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide stimulates photosynthesis, leading to increased plant productivity and decreased water and nutrient use . Benefits from elevated CO2 concentrations depend upon plant type and irrigation level. C3 photosynthetic plants will benefit more than C4 plants , and dryland cropping systems will benefit more than irrigated systems . The extent to which CO2 fertilization mitigates climate-induced water scarcity in the field still lacks scientific consensus, and there is debate on the extent to which simulating CO2 effects actually reproduces the results in free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments . Agricultural impacts from climate change are rooted in complex pathways. Assessments of crop impacts due to climatic change fall under two, broad categories: process-based and statistical models. Process-based models simulate physiological development, growth and yield of a crop on the basis of interaction between environmental variables and plant physiological processes . Statistical crop models impute a relationship between historic crop yield and climate variables, often in order to project the impact on yield under future climate scenarios.

Process-based models remain the gold standard in crop modeling as one is able to study the relationship between weather and all phases of crop growth in a range of weather possibilities, even those lying outside the historical record . California field crops have been modeled using DAYCENT . Both studies highlight resilience of alfalfa yield under A2 scenario by end of the century, whereas 5 other crops exhibit a decline. Jackson et al. also find alfalfa yield to be particularly resilient to early and repeated heat waves during May–July. Lee et al. also run climate projections with and without a CO2 fertilization effect on seven field crops in the Central Valley of California. They assume a CO2 increase of 350 ppmv from 1990 levels enhances net primary production by 10% for all crops except alfalfa and maize. They find that CO2 fertilization increases crop yields 2–16% above the model without CO2 effects under the high-emissions scenario by the end of the 21st century. There is a much smaller yield increase under the low-emissions scenario. Lobell and Field use two estimation methods in studying the effects of temperature and precipitation on perennial crop yields. Their model includes 72 potential weather predictor variables for each crop, such as monthly averages for max and min temperature and their corresponding squares. They find that cherries and almonds are harmed by future warming out of a set of 20 perennial crops in their analysis. Crop-level adaptations — such as adjusting the planting and harvesting date , and substituting between different crop varieties — have been included to a limited extent in crop models. However, these cannot account for the broad range of decision making at the farm-level under which many of the negative effects of climate change could be partially offset with input and output substitutions, improving information, and effective water institutions. Thus, economic models are necessary to capture a broader range of responsive decision-making as the climate changes.Recently, adaptations specific to California agriculture have been studied using three economic programming models: the Statewide Agricultural Production model, Central Valley Production Model , and the US Agricultural Resources Model . Capturing the decision-making process is an important part of modeling. In programming models,blueberry pot the farmer’s decision is captured by the objective function. The main decision variable in these models is acres of land allocated to a region-specific crop mix. The farmer responds to reductions in water availability and yield by adjusting crop acreage. Exogenous adaptations include institutional , socioeconomic , and technological change . Calibration through positive mathematical programming also captures decision-making by preserving observed crop mix allocation decisions . SWAP employs a PMP cost function to the capture the decision of bringing an additional unit of land into production . Both CVPM and USARM have also been calibrated using PMP . CVPM studies have also generated synthetic crop share data from Monte Carlo runs using a base water supply and groundwater depth with random perturbations. Crop adaptation equations are then derived from a multinomial logit regression of this CVPM-generated synthetic crop share data . In order to represent climate-induced changes in water supply, many mathematical programming models are linked to hydrological management models, such as the California Value Integrated Network , Water Evaluation and Planning , CalSim-II, and C2VSim. CALVIN is a generalized network flow-based optimization model that minimizes economic operating and scarcity costs of water supply, subject to water balance, capacity, and environmental constraints for a range of operational and hydrologic conditions .

CALVIN has the potential to incorporate several basin-level adaptations to water allocation rules such as contract changes, markets and exchanges, water rights, pricing, and water scarcity levels. However, it has limited ability to represent important physical phenomena, such as stream-aquifer interactions and groundwater flow dynamics under different climate and water management scenarios . WEAP has many of the same water management features as CALVIN and CalSim-II. WEAP includes demand priorities and supply preferences in a linear programming framework to solve the water allocation problem as an alternative to multi-criteria weighting or rule-based logic. It is different because analysis in the WEAP framework comes directly from the future climate scenarios and not from a perturbation of historical hydrology as with the other models. Unlike CALVIN and CalSim-II, WEAP only has a simplified representation of the rules guiding the State Water Project and Central Valley Project systems . CalSim-II is also very similar to CALVIN and WEAP . C2VSim is a multi-layer, distributed integrated hydrologic model that could represent pumping from multiple aquifer layers, effects on groundwater flow dynamics, and stream-aquifer interaction . Recent programming studies focus on how certain adaptations may affect costs under relatively extreme cases of water scarcity. These studies thus assess how these adaptations may offset costs under worst-case-scenarios of water supply reductions. Given that reduction in statewide agricultural water use due to the current drought is estimated at 6% , studies on 40–70% flow reduction should be interpreted with caution. The subsequent studies are organized according to magnitude of water supply/flow reduction. Studies on 5–6% reduction in water supply reveal the heavy fallowing and groundwater use . Howitt et al. find that a 6.6 maf deficit in surface water caused by the current drought is largely substituted by 5.1 maf of additional groundwater. This is estimated to cost an additional $454 million in pumping. In addition to over-pumping groundwater, farmers adjust by fallowing crop land. The overwhelming majority of the 428,000 acres estimated fallowed in 2014 are in the Central Valley, where the majority of fallowed acres belong to field crops. However, they project that fallowing will decrease by 43% by 2016, suggesting a trend toward stabilization. Frisvold and Konyar use USARM to examine the effects of a 5% reduction in irrigation water supply from the Colorado River on agricultural production in southern California. In particular, they are able to compare the potential value-added of additional adaptations that include changing the crop mix, deficit irrigation, and input substitution to a “fallowing only” model. They find that these additional adaptations have the potential to reduce costs of water shortages to producers by 66% compared to the “fallowing only” model.1 Medellin-Azuara et al. examine the extent to which more flexible2 versions of California water markets could reduce water scarcity costs under a 27% statewide reduction in annual stream flow. They compare agricultural water scarcity in the year 2050 under two scenarios: 1. Baseline: population growth and resulting levels of agriculture to urban land transfer, 2. Warm-dry: includes population pressure and climatic changes under GFDL CM2.1 A2. Under the warm-dry scenario, even with optimized operations, water scarcity and total operational costs increase by $490 million/year, and statewide agricultural water scarcity increases by 22%. If water markets are restricted to operate only within the four CALVIN sub-regions, statewide water scarcity costs increase by 45% and 70% for the baseline and warm-dry scenarios, respectively. Marginal opportunity costs of environmental flows increase under the warm-dry scenario, with particularly large percentage increases for the Delta Outflow and American River. Medellin-Azuara et al. conduct a similar analysis, adding the comparison with a warm-only 2050 scenario. The agricultural sector water scarcity costs rise by 3% from the baseline to warm-only scenario, versus an increase of 302% from the baseline to the warm-dry scenario.3 Indeed the greater hydrological impact of the warm-dry scenario results in significantly greater scarcity costs than the warm-only scenario. Using the CALVIN model runs from Medellin-Azuara et al. , MedellinAzuara et al. analyze adaptations at the farm-level, including adjustments in crop acreage , and to a more limited extent, yield-enhancing technology . Similar to the 2008 paper, the model compares economic losses between a baseline scenario and a warm-dry scenario . Results reveal an anticipated decline in acreage of low-value crops , which is particularly severe due to the large reduction in water availability. For example, pasture acreage is reduced by 90% across 3 out of 4 agricultural regions. The results also suggest that statewide agricultural revenues decline at a proportionately lower level than the reduction in water availability . Their model also captures the complexity between crop demand and climate-induced supply reduction. Although the demand for high-valued orchard crop increases, production decreases due to the negative impact on yield from temperature increases.The resulting price increase cannot compensate for the decrease in supply, and gross revenue still declines. Two studies examine the impacts of more extreme reductions in water supply .

Sobal sensitivity analysis utilizing polynomial regression like- wise determined FBS, MgSO4, and L-Phenylalanine were the most explanatory components when taking component-component interactions into account. Focusing on optimizing only those components might bring further improvements, which is now feasible because fewer experiments were needed to arrive at this conclusion. Another issue was that the HND algorithm often did not change experimental conditions enough, leading to heavy clustering around early high performing local optima . Myopia should be encoded into the DYCORS arm of the HND to allow for more exploration of the design space, while balancing the need for exploitation of regions of the design space that show promise. It is also possible that initializing the optimization with a more dispersed design would yield a more successful optimization. However, results from indicate that the initialization strategy used may not have a large effect. In reality,growing blueberries in pots the impact of initialization is likely to be a strong function of the design surface and how close initial points are to the true optimum, neither of which are know a priori.

Using α as a metric, HND performs similar to DOE, and both better than GM . This is true over multiple days after cell seeding and is true when using cell number to calculate α , seemingly validating the use of %AB at 48 hr post-seeding in approximating proliferation more generally. However, when measuring cell number at multiple passages both designed media perform worse than GM. This is because the objective function α relied on measurements without multiple passages, so does not account for the dynamics of long-term cellular growth. This was a major shortcoming of the objective function picked, but not the HND or DOE itself. Future work in media design should incorporate more relevant metrics for optimization, such as a multi-passage objective function. Additionally, the %AB metric was not a perfect measure of cell number. Figure 3.5 and Figure 3.2 appears to indicate HND and DOE media outperform GM, but when cell number is measured both optimal media have 8–9% fewer cells. Because AlamarBlue is a metabolic indicator, using it in the objective function for both methods may have biased the process towards higher metabolic activity rather than more proliferation. Despite these shortcomings, the HND has been demonstrated to be able to optimize high dimensional experimental systems.

In our previous work in media optimization, fewer variables required more experiments to complete. In this work, we demonstrate optimization of 30 components with 70 experiments with no dimensionality reduction or screening designs, to our knowledge, a unique accomplishment in experimental optimization efficiency. Therefore, this represents a valuable proof of concept in the field of experimental optimization. While not able to fully replace first principles understanding of systems often based on the DOE approach , we show that the HND could aid in the optimization of the hardest design problems, including those found in the bio-processing and larger cultivated meat industry, reducing the cost of experimentation and time-to-market for a new product. Culture media used in industrial bio-processing and the emerging field of cellular agriculture is difficult to optimize due to the lack of rigorous mathematical models of cell growth and culture conditions, as well as the complexity of the design space. Rapid growth assays are inaccurate yet convenient, while robust measures of cell number can be time-consuming to the point of limiting experimentation. In this study , we optimized a cell culture media with 14 components using a multi-information source Bayesian optimization algorithm that locates optimal media conditions based on an iterative refinement of an uncertainty-weighted desirability function. As a model system, we utilized murine C2C12 cells, using AlamarBlue, LIVE stain, and trypan blue exclusion cell counting assays to determine cell number.

Using this experimental optimization algorithm, we were able to design media with 181% more cells than a common commercial variant with a similar economic cost, while doing so in 38% fewer experiments than an efficient design-of-experiments method. The optimal medium generalized well to long-term growth up to four passages of C2C12 cells, indicating the multi-information source assay improved measurement robustness relative to rapid growth assays alone. Every bio-process in which cells are the final product or used in the production process requires suitable culture conditions for cell growth and product quality. In the rapidly growing cellular agriculture / cultivated meat industry, where cells are grown for consumption to replace carbon intensive and often unethical animal agriculture, cost-effective media has been identified as the most critical aspect in scale-up and commercialization. Optimizing these conditions is difficult due to a large number of media components with nonlinear and interacting effects between cells,medium, matrix material, and reactor environment. Typically, culture media used for processes in cellular agriculture consist of a basal medium of glucose, amino acids, vitamins, and salts supplemented with fetal bovine serum for improved cell survival. FBS is an undefined, animal-derived serum consisting of proteins, hormones, and other large molecular weight components, and contributes substantially to the cost of media. Even when enriched with additional growth factors or FBS, media is often far from optimal for all cell types and requires adaptation and/or optimization, which is difficult for media mixtures with >30 components, as is common in cell culture. To manage this complexity, design-of-experiments meth- ods are often employed in which factors are set to a user-specified value and outputs are measured. These DOE designs are arranged in such a way that statistically meaningful correlations can be found in fewer experiments than techniques like intuition, “one-factor-at-a-time” sequences, or random designs. A more advanced form of this is to use sequential, model-based DOEs such as a radial basis function or Gaussian Process,drainage gutter combined with an optimizer/sampling policy, to automatically select sequences of optimal designs. These approaches are often more efficient than traditional DOE at optimizing systems using fewer experiments and allow for more natural incorporation of process priors, measurement noise, probabilistic output constraints and constraint learning, multi-objective, multi-point, and multi-information source designs. Even with these methods available, limitations still exist. In previous work, we applied a machine learning approach to optimize complex media design spaces but had limited success due to the difficulty in measuring cell number for multi-passage growth.

Therefore, in this study, we utilized a multi-information source Bayesian model to fuse “cheap” measures of cell biomass with more “expensive” but higher quality measurements to predict long-term medium performance. We refer to the simpler and cheap assays as “low-fidelity” IS, and more complex and expensive assays as “high-fidelity” IS. While not always predictive of long-term growth, these lower fidelity assays are at least correlated with cell health and can help in identifying interesting regions of the design space for further study with the high-fidelity IS. We used this model, with Bayesian optimization tools, to optimize a cell culture medium with 14 components while minimizing the number of experiments, optimally allocating laboratory resources, and building process knowledge to improve our optimization scheme and model. In Section 4.2 we discuss the computational and experimental components of this BO method. In Section 4.3 we present the results of the BO method in comparison to a traditional DOE method, followed by Section 4.4 where we demonstrate the importance off using multiple sources of information to obtain relevant process knowledge and/or optimization results. The system under consideration was the proliferation of C2C12 cells. These cells are immortalized muscle cells with similar metabolism and growth characteristics as other adherent cell lines useful in the cellular agriculture industry. Cells were stored in 70% DMEM , 20% FBS , 10% dimethylsulfoxide freeze medium at -196◦C until thawed. Vials were thawed to 25◦C and the freezing medium was removed by centrifugation at 1500 × g for 5 min. The centrifuged cell pellet was resuspended in 17 mL of DMEM with 10% FBS and placed on 15 cm sterile plastic tissue culture dishes . Cells were incubated in a 37◦C and 5% CO2 environment. After 24 h the medium was removed, the culture dish washed with Phosphate Buffer Solution , and fresh DMEM with 10% FBS was introduced. After an additional 24 h, cells were harvested using tripLE solution , diluted in PBS, and counted using Countess II with trypan blue exclusion and disposable slides . The process of removing cells from a plate, counting, and re-plating them with fresh medium is called sub-culturing or passaging. How well the C2C12 cells survive and grow after passaging is indicative of their long-term potential in a large cellular agriculture process. The design space was comprised of the components and minimum/maximum concentrations listed in Table 4.1. These components were chosen because they are often used to supplement standard DMEM to improve cell growth; this represents a reasonable test case for the industrial application of these multi-IS BO methods to the cellular agricultural industry. The composition of standard DMEM , is shown in Table 4.3, and should not be confused with the base DMEM “supplement” , which contains only amino acids, trace metals, salts, and vitamins and none of the other 14 components. pH and osmolarity are not controlled in this study, so act as latent variables. Production scale cellular agricultural processes will require > 10 passages of cell growth so optimizing growth based on single-passage information is not adequate. However, multi-passage growth assays are difficult / expensive to measure, and even more difficult to optimize when given many components. We managed this complexity by coupling long-term cell number measurements with simpler but less valuable rapid growth chemical assays in murine C2C12 cultures as a model system for cellular agricultural applications, capturing a more holistic model of the process. We combined this with an optimization algorithm that efficiently allocates laboratory resources toward solving argmaxD for desirability function D, a function that incorporates both cell growth and medium cost. This resulted in a 38% reduction in experimental effort, relative to a comparable DOE method, to find a media 227% more proliferative than the DMEM control at nearly the same cost. As the longer-term passaging study suggests, our Passage 2 objective function and IS were well calibrated to mimicking the complex industrial process of growing large batches of cells over many passages, with Passage 4 cell numbers well predicted by this objective function. The reasons for the success of the BO are myriad. The BO method iteratively refines a single process model to improve certainty in D-optimal regions, whereas the DOE relies on a series of BB designs where the older data sets are ignored because they were outside of the optimal factor space. The BO also used a variety of IS, whereas the DOE only used a single low-fidelity AlamarBlue metric . Looking at Figure 4.8c, the AlamarBlue and LIVE tended to cluster around the point y =1, making it difficult to distinguish between high quality and low-quality media. The BO method also refined its multi-IS model over the entire feasible design space, allowing it to take advantage of optimal combinations and concentrations of all 14 components over the entire domain, whereas the DOE needed to reduce the design and factor spaces to reduce the number of experiments needed, and may have identified the wrong optimal boundary locations resulting in sub-optimal experimental designs. The BO method was also able to leverage information about process uncertainty to improve the model is poorly understood regions of the design space, whereas the steepest accent method used by the DOE chased after improved D with little regard for overall noise or experimental errors. This was worsened by the sensitivity of the polynomial model to random inter-batch fluctuations in AB%, which may have driven the DOE to sub-optimal media. Note that the success of our BO method should not be taken as generic superiority over all potential instantiations of DOE or commercial media used for C2C12 growth. While the BO method worked well at solving the experimental optimization problem, the multiIS GP accuracy was limited to highly sampled regions of the design space, thus limiting the efficacy of sensitivity analysis. This was a conscious decision made to trade off post-facto analysis for sampling media with high desirability D.