Tag: horticulture

A farm is placed in one of three tiers based on its risk to water quality: tier 1 being the lowest risk and tier 3 being the highest. Just as monitoring requirements vary, so too does the usefulness of the data collected. The variance in monitoring information value depends on four factors: where, when, and what parameters are collected, as well as what test organisms are used to assess water and sediment toxicity. There are also noteworthy differences in the usefulness of data depending on whether data is collected from surface water or groundwater. While this chapter largely focuses on surface water, the challenges of groundwater monitoring and assessment will also be addressed. The location of the monitoring station is an important element in identifying what farm is polluting and to what extent. For example, upstream edge-of-field monitoring on a tributary offers more precise and detailed data on the pollutants discharging from surrounding farm; whereas data from a monitoring station located downstream along the main stem of a river are a composite of all upstream sources, making the task of teasing out probable non-point sources of pollution near-impossible The timing of data collection is also important because water quality can change during and after storm or irrigation events, or during or after fertilizer or pesticide applications, increasing pollutant concentrations. If monitoring data were taken before applying a pesticide, for example,cut flower transport bucket that information might not accurately portray the pollutants present in the waterways for the next several months. The issue of timing is even more problematic when testing groundwater; research has shown that it can often take decades for leached pollutants, particularly, nitrates, to show up in groundwater .

Thirdly, the parameters limit the extent of knowledge about the health of a given waterway. For example, collecting basic parameters, such as dissolved oxygen, turbidity, temperature, nutrients, metals, and pH, provides a good baseline by which to assess water health, but other important parameters, such as the amount of a specific prevalent pesticide in the water column, might be overlooked, and could be the key to more accurate problem identification. Finally, certain test organisms are more appropriate for certain pollutants. For example, Ceriodaphnia dubiais an appropriate test organism for testing water toxicity, while Hyalella aztecais more suited for assessing sediment toxicity. These two are commonly used in regulatory monitoring programs, however, other new classes of pesticides in the offing will require new test organisms, ones that are not part of the current cadre of test organisms used for regulatory monitoring in the Central Coast region and California in general. For example, a more suitable test organism to use for burgeoning classes of pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, but one that was not incorporated into monitoring programs until 2015, is Chironomous dilutus. Tier 1 and 2 water quality monitoring is conducted in the main stem of a tributary and reported as an aggregate twice a year. The usefulness of these data pales in comparison with that of individual discharge data taken at the edge-of-field from tier 3 farms. One of the biggest concerns among growers during the drafting and implementation of the 2012 Ag Waiver was public disclosure. Farmers soon to be classified in tier 3 were concerned about reporting individual discharge water quality data due to matters of privacy and value of information, but also due to fear of being regulated as point source dischargers.

Three factors that weigh heavily on tier criteria are a farm’s size, risk to nitrate pollution, and risk to water column toxicity. Mounting scientific evidence of nitrate groundwater contamination as well as pressure from environmentalists and environmental justice groups elevated the nitrate issue to the top of the agenda during the 2012 Ag Waiver negotiation process. Additionally, a series of several scientific studies from the Granite Canyon Laboratory pointed to two particular types of organophosphate pesticides—diazinon and chlorpyrifos—as the culprits of water toxicity in the region. While pesticides did not receive specific attention in the first Agricultural Waiver, these two pesticides found their place at the top of the agenda during the 2012 regulatory process over a long list of other potentially harmful pesticides used in the region. Agricultural use of chlorpyrifos and diazinon has decreased dramatically in California’s Central Coast region over the past decade .However, while chlorpyrifos use in the region has plummeted, statewide use has stayed relatively consistent over the past decade, with minor fluctuations. What causal factors drove the regional chlorpyrifos and diazinon decline, and how much of the decrease can be attributed to the 2012 Agricultural Waiver? What conditions made the chlorpyrifos decline possible in the Central Coast region, but not in other regions or California as a whole? What societal, environmental and regulatory implications have resulted from farmers’ decisions to stop using both chemicals? The following section explores these questions by assessing data collected from interviews, survey responses, a thorough review of policy related documents, water quality information, organic production data and pesticide use records in three different California regions. Survey responses were collected from a subset of questions in a 2015 study on growers’ opinions of water quality management practices and policies in the Central Coast Region .

The set of survey questions relevant to this study asked growers if and how their use of chlorpyrifos and diazinon had changed since the Agricultural Waiver was implemented. Sixty-five growers responded to this optional part of the survey. Forty-seven of the 65 reported a change in chlorpyrifos and diazinon practices; their responses are reported below. Results from the survey and other data suggest that a grower’s decision to apply the two pesticides or not depends on several factors, including specific regulatory requirements embedded in the 2012 Ag Waiver as well as regulations generally, concerns over workers safety, harm to the environment, the cost of pesticides and their application, the availability of alternatives to manage pests, as well as the extent of pest damage and the value of the crop; each of these will be discussed in more detail. Another motivation for the decline in diazinon and/or chlorpyrifos use was that growers simply did not like using the two pesticides knowing they caused harm to their workers and the environment. It appears that growers were aware of the growing scientific evidence documenting the impacts of chlorpyrifos and diazinon on the environment, ranging from water and air quality to small invertebrates to human health. Of the survey responses, 5 stated they stopped using the pesticides because of worker safety, while 10 cited environmental factors as their motivation. Selected quotes from survey responses are reported below.Several pesticides are popping up as the next big threat to water quality . Malathion is the third most commonly used OP insectidide next to diazinon and chlorpyrifos with similar chemical characterists, yet interestingly,procona flower transport containers was not targeted in the 2012 Ag Waiver. Imidicaloprid is in the neonicatinoid class, and studies have linked the pesticide to bee colony collapse disorder . And third, pyrethroid chemicals, such as bifthenthin and lambda-cyhlalothrin, are being linked to sediment toxicity issues in the region. While less toxic than OP pesticides, neonicotinoids and pyrethroids have longer halflives. As chlorpyrifos and diazinon have steadily decreased, many of these new pesticides, which are differently or equally as harmful as OPs, have increased. To address if growers have switched to other chemicals to replace diazinon and chlorpyrifos in the Central Coast region, growers’ use of possible substitutes were assessed. Two datasets were reviewed: the University of California Integrated Pest Management reports, CDPR pesticide use data, as well as scientific literature. In Monterey County , chlorpyrifos use on broccoli declined by 86% from 2000 to 2013, yet the total pesticide use on broccoli only declined by 47% over those years. Were growers substituting chlorpyrifos for another pesticide to control cabbage maggots? UC IPM reports show that one of the only viable alternatives for use on a commonly targeted pest is diazinon.

From pesticide use records, it is apparent that broccoli growers are not readily switching to diazinon, since it comes with the same baggage of regulatory and environmental problems as its counterpart. In response to the growing demand for an alternative pest management strategy to control cabbage maggot, a new study by Joseph and Zarate in the Journal of Crop Protection explored at least eleven other insecticides with similar or superior efficacy to chlorpyrifos on cabbage maggots; of these five of these are pyrethrins plus pyrethroids, and one is a neonicotinoid. To identify if growers were switching over to any of these five promising, but potentially environmentally-harmful, new pesticides, CDPR use data on broccoli was assessed for each chemical. Results from this analysis showed that while these alternative pesticide numbers are still relatively small, growers might be increasingly turning to them in the future, especially if cabbage maggot pest problems escalate and the value of broccoli continues to rise. Diazinon’s demise has been even starker in lettuce than chlorpyrifos on broccoli in the Central Coast, as well as in the two other regions assessed in this study and the state as a whole. From 2000 to 2013, diazinon use on lettuce in Monterey County dropped by 99% compared to a 26% drop in the total pesticide use on lettuce, with diazinon removed. However, data from UC IPM reports and CDPR pesticide use data, as well as scientific literature do not suggest a widespread switch to other pesticides, rather organic practices might be the larger force. Diazinon use on lettuce crop pests is more diversified, making any switch from diazinon to another chemical more dispersed. With broccoli, because chlorpyrifos use is limited to controlling cabbage maggots, a switch to another chemical was more easily identifiable. Diazinon use on lettuce, on the other hand, has historically been used to control at least six different pests , each opening up a pandora’s box of alternative chemicals. CDPR pesticide data on diazinon’s use on Monterey County lettuce shows no dramatic chemical-for-chemical switch. For example, as diazinon dramatically falls, no single pesticide rises up to take its place. Because diazinon’s use on lettuce was so varied, it is logical that several different chemicals might be used in its stead to fit one or more specific needs pest needs.The lack of readily available pesticide alternatives for use on broccoli’s cabbage maggot, or the scarce use of them thus far, alludes to growers simply using fewer chemicals to grow broccoli, and perhaps switching to organic farming practices. The same appears to be true for lettuce growers, although the data are more limited. The option of switching to organic production with higher profit margins and the consumer demand for less chemical use offer appealing motives for many growers to curtail their diazinon and chlopryifos use, in addition to other pesticides. The number of farms, value and acreage of organic production has blossomed over the past decade in the Central Coast. The top three agricultural producing counties in the region have steadily increased the amount of land in organic production every year. In San Luis Obispo County, the conversion to organic was even more staggering: In 2005, 4,493 acres were dedicated to organic production and by 2014 50,636 acres were grown organically—an eleven-fold increase. In Santa Cruz County, 2,700 acres were under organically production in 2005, and by 2014 4,058 acres were grown organically. In Monterey County, the organic production nearly tripled, from 16,410 acres in 2005 to 46,570 acres in 2014. More specifically, in Monterey County organic production of broccoli doubled over the past decade and a half: 1,430 acres of broccoli were grown organically in 2000, increasing to 2,862 acres in 2015 . Organic’s proportion of the total broccoli grown in Monterey County also grew: in 2000, organic production accounted for 2.3 % , and by 2015, roughly 4.5% of all broccoli production was devoted to organic. Although organic still does not account for a significant portion of total Monterey County broccoli production and cannot explain the chlorpyrifos decline alone, corroborated with growers’ survey responses , it is safe to conclude that a transition to organic has played a role in the declining use of the two pesticides. While long-term longitudinal data was not available for organic head and leaf lettuce production in Monterey County to assess whether or not organic production played a role in diazinon’s decline, a related crop, spring mix, was available.

The 2010 Draft Waiver proposed that all farms should be required to implement a 50-100-foot buffer; by November of that year the mandate was reduced to only Tier 3 farms and the buffer width was reduced to 30 feet, and by the final 2012 Waiver the buffer requirement was left largely to the discretion of the agricultural operator, stating that either a buffer or a proposed alternative must be implemented to protect adjacent polluted waterbodies. With the E. coli event still fresh on the public’s minds, water quality temporarily faded from the regulatory spotlight. But not for long: the 2004 Ag Waiver was due to expire in July 2009, forcing the Regional Board staff to launch a new stakeholder process for the updated Ag Waiver. Unfortunately, the proposed public input process was deemed “not transparent or open to the public” by a California Farm Bureau representative, and did not keep pace with the 2009 deadline. The Waiver was extended for another year. In addition to the pending deadline, mounting scientific evidence of water pollution sources and mobilization of several interest groups pushed agricultural water pollution back on the agenda. Water quality data collected over the preceding five years from the 2004 Ag Waiver Cooperative Monitoring Program clearly showed discharges from agricultural lands were a cause of pesticide toxicity as well as a contributing source of nitrate and sediment impairments in the region . Due to growing concerns about one contaminant in particular, nitrate, a 2008 Senate Bill was passed,25 liter pot plastic requiring the State Water Resource Control Board to prepare a report addressing nitrate groundwater contamination.

The Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis conducted the report, and one of the watersheds they chose to study was in the Central Coast region. Additionally, the 2010 State Water Resource Control Board Report found that the Central Coast Region had the highest percentage of toxic water sites statewide. Furthermore, several scientific reports found that pesticide use in the Central Coast was contributing to water column and sediment toxicity , as well as cause human health problems, such as developmental delays in infants and children . The Regional Board staff had the scientific evidence and momentum it needed to develop an ambitious 2010 Draft Waiver. Among the many sweeping reforms, the 2010 Draft Waiver required all dischargers to conduct individual surface water discharge monitoring, required Farm Plans to be accompanied by monitoring and site evaluation results, prohibited the use of excess fertilizer, required a comprehensive list of pesticides to be regulated, and required all farms to implement vegetative buffers. Members of the agricultural community voiced their concerns with the Draft in Regional Water Board meetings, through comment letters, on the web, and in newspapers. In a December 2009 meeting, several agricultural representatives reiterated their frustrations about the public input process, their worries regarding the mounting costs, and their opinions that the existing 2004 Ag Waiver was working well and did not need to be amended. Environmentalists, on the other hand, believed the proposed Order should be adopted without further delay. At a standstill, the Board re-issued the existing Conditional Waiver four more times: November 2010, March 2011, July 2011, and August 2011. Environmental groups, with agendas ranging from environmental justice to marine ecosystem protections to urban stormwater programs, were highly disappointed that the 2010 Draft Waiver was not adopted.

The environmental community was strongly represented by the Santa Barbara Channel keeper, The Otter Project, and Monterey Bay Keeper, providing extensive comments at Regional Board meetings up until the adoption of the 2012 Agricultural Order. In 2012, published results from the State commissioned nitrate contamination study, although controversial among the agricultural community, found that cropland was the primary source of human-generated nitrate contamination in the Tulare Lake Basin and the Salinas Valley , and that 254,000 people in the area are at risk for nitrate contamination in their drinking water. Because nitrate-contaminated drinking water is a well-known human health effects, including “blue baby syndrome” , the results of this study became a rallying-cry for the Department of Health to encourage a more stringent Agricultural Waiver. The California Department of Health shed light on nitrate groundwater contamination, echoing concerns reported from the UC Davis report. The United Farm Workers and a coalition of groups rallied behind environmental justice concerns, representing the voice of people most affected by nitrate contaminated drinking water. At a Central Coast Board meeting in February of 2012, Marcela Morales of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy explained that contaminated water is disproportionately impacting low-income populations and people of color. She strongly urged the Board to take action and not delay the updated Waiver, claiming that communities affected by drinking water contamination are in urgent need of basic protection to ensure clean drinking water. Another impetus arose from water quality regulators in urban areas. Municipalities, facing ever-stringent regulations, began to question the fairness of waiving the agricultural water quality requirements .

City managers voiced their concern about pollutants from agricultural areas being deposited into receiving waterbodies within city boundaries, which cities are required to clean up through stormwater National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. As the City Manager of Monterey, for example, suggested that agricultural industries and municipalities should be held to the same standard . On the other side, Farm Bureaus, individual growers and the Growers and Shippers Association represented the agricultural interests. California’s $43.5 billion agriculture industry comprised of 81,500 farms spread over 25.4 million acres is one of the largest and most influential interest groups in the state . Historically, the California Farm Bureau has had success at regional and national lobbying efforts. Between the two Agricultural Waivers , there were grumblings within the agricultural community that the Regional Board was not involving the growers in the deliberation process as much as during the 2004 Ag Waiver negotiations. As one farm stakeholder explained, growers felt they were not involved when figuring out solutions to water quality improvements, rather “[the Regional Board] set the rules without much input and expected growers to comply.” As a lettuce grower in the Salinas Valley stated, “the Regional Board didn’t take into account stakeholder opinion…The elephant in the room…[was] that there was no collaboration between the grower community and the regional water board staff… Discussions about the [Agricultural Waiver] and how to implement it should have been happening during the past four years, but it did not” . Several board meetings leading up to the March vote were packed with testimonies from agricultural interests assembling to delay the vote and water quality interest groups, encouraging the Board to pass a more stringent updated Agricultural Waiver. Steve Shimek , 25 litre plant pot spearheading the environmental interests, described the dualistic nature of the unfolding politics: “on one side are community activists seeking tougher pollution limits and public access to water quality data. On the other side are too many farmers trying to avoid cleaning up the waste from their operations.” At the March 15, 2012 Board meeting, the three-year long debate culminated in the passage of an updated Agricultural Waiver. But the process was not over. As mentioned earlier, five groups requested a deferral on several provisions of the 2012 Ag Waiver. In September of 2013 the State Board adopted the existing Ag Waiver, which made some modifications to the 2012 version passed by the Regional Board. A few months later, environmentalists filed a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court challenging the modified 2012 Ag Waiver as being too weak. The modified waiver and lawsuit will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Overall, the policy process leading up to the 2012 Ag Waiver was fraught with tension between a variety of stakeholders, including agriculture, cities, environmentalists, scientists and environmental justice groups. Consequently, the Waiver that ultimately passed was more robust than its 2004 predecessor, but weaker than ambitious draft orders that came to the fore during negotiations . The next part of this chapter will analyze the effectiveness of the resultant provisions embedded in both Ag Waivers.Public policy literature presents several means to assess the efficacy of a policy. The criteria chosen for policy analysis is important, as it could influence the direction of the policy as well as future budget allocations.

Cass Sunstein , former Administrator of White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for the Obama administration, asserts that determining the success or failure of a regulation depends on its goals and scope. Dowd and his colleagues echo this claim in their paper on agricultural non-point source pollution policy in the Central Coast, stressing that the success of the Agricultural Waiver largely depends on the evaluative criteria used. Six parameters were carefully selected to measure the effectiveness of the 2004 and 2012 Ag Waivers: 1) complying with mandates set in the Agricultural Waiver, 2) evaluating quantifiable water quality improvements, 3) evaluating the requirements themselves, 4) assessing the significance of monitoring data, 5) comparing costs to growers vs. broader societal and environmental benefits, and 6) evaluating the equity of compliance across growers, including the distributive consequences.A logical place to begin evaluating the success of the 2004 and 2012 Agricultural Waiver is by measuring the degree to which growers met the compliance requirements. Based on the high level of enrollment in the 2004 Agricultural Waiver the 2004 Waiver has been labeled a success by simple participation among growers. The number that completed The 2012 Ag Order boasts roughly the same enrollment numbers: 1,796 operations managing 94% of farm acreage in the region. Evaluating compliance based on specific 2012 requirements, however, is more variable. As Table 3-1 indicates, there is a high compliance rate for simply enrolling in the program, but slightly less so in regards to more complex requirements. For example, close to a quarter of all farms have not reported groundwater monitoring at the individual level for both domestic drinking water and agricultural wells. On the other hand, every farm that is required to report total nitrogen applied to their farm has done so. The Clean Water Act Section 303 list1 of Impaired Waterbodies for the Central Coast Region can be an indication, albeit a limited one, of how water quality has changed over time. Two relevant listing cycles, 2006 and 2010, indicate a dramatic increase in the number of polluted waterways in the Central Coast. Over these four years, Regional Board staff added 515 listings of impaired waterbodies, totaling 707 in the 2010 listing cycle . While these numbers are striking, trends using these data should be made with caution for at least two reasons: 1) the number of waterbodies assessed for the 303 list varies from year-to-year and 2) there may be a latency period between when a waterbody was surveyed and when it is listed. The most commonly cited monitoring databases used to assess water quality in the region also indicate degrading water quality. Reports from these two agencies suggest that many of the same waterbodies, especially in the two areas responsible for most water pollution, are more polluted than they were a decade ago . While some waters have improved—47 waterbodies were de-listed as impaired in 2010—the vast majority have not. The lower Salinas watershed and the lower Santa Maria area are responsible for most of the region’s polluted waters; these areas are also the leading agricultural producers in the Central Coast . The 303 list, CMP, CCAMP, CWC, and scientific studies from the UC Davis Marine Pollution Studies Laboratory at Granite Canyon, identify a number of water quality concerns, in particular, dissolved oxygen, elevated pH, elevated nitrate and ammonia, water and sediment toxicity, and habitat disturbances. Monitoring patterns show that these pollution parameters are variable throughout the region, and that particular watersheds are hotspots for certain pollutants. When listed together, these parameters are responsible for impairments to the beneficial uses of drinking water, recreation, aquatic life, and agricultural uses. Of these concerns, nitrate contamination is the most serious and widespread problem in the region. Regional water quality reflects a larger state and national trend of degrading and variable water conditions. California Water Boards’ Annual Performance Report found half of all surveyed streams in the state to be degraded or very degraded, as measured by the health of aquatic organism communities that live in the state’s streams.

Citing passages where one of the characters compares planting and harvesting to death and rebirth, he concludes that “Norris’s utterly idealized account of the production of wheat as the emergence of a spiritual body out of a natural one can coexist peacefully with an utterly materialist account of the growing wheat as a mechanical force” . Thus the more important binary in the novel for Michaels is not between nature and machine but between the ideal and the material. Conlogue helpfully cuts through the binaries that accompany the idea of the pastoral, whether they are conceived of as country and city, nature and machine, or ideal and material. He focuses instead on labor and management, arguing that the novel is part of a minor tradition of “American georgic” concerned with historical shifts in agricultural practice. In support of this he advances a more robust definition of industrialization as a confluence of technologies: not only machines, the focus of so much criticism on The Octopus, but also management technologies such as record-keeping, mapping, and other quantifications together make up what he calls “the new agriculture.” In redirecting the discussion to industrialization as a whole, Conlogue emphasizes that what Norris is describing is itself an emergent phenomenon. Many critics treat the mechanical and managerial technologies depicted in the novel as typical of the time period— indeed taking them as the hallmarks of this era—reserving their detailed analysis for how Norris, as a naturalist writer, makes sense of them.

Conlogue, on the other hand,30 plant pot gives significant attention to the history of farming practices to argue that these technologies of industrial agriculture were largely unknown to the American public at the time. Thus the book should be read as playing a role in reporting, popularizing, and celebrating them. The novel is not a reflection of historical changes in agricultural labor practices, but can be seen as itself a part of that history. It promotes new forms of labor organization by, among other things, celebrating new farm equipment in ecstatic sexual terms. In this way, The Octopus advocates for the future development of both the China trade and agricultural industrialization, suggesting that neither can exist without the other. Norris pays special attention to the record-keeping and communications technologies as new forms of writing necessary for the new agriculture, and we can add these to the several modes of representing the land that saw Presley and the narrator experiment with. We have already quoted some of the description of the Los Muertos ranch office whose, “appearance and furnishings were not in the least suggestive of a farm” but rather of the headquarters of an international farm . In this book about the mechanization of agriculture, moreover, the first machine we encounter on the ranch is the “typewriting machine,” and the most significant object, again, is the stock-ticker, which makes the farmers feel themselves part of a global whole as they watch updates being printed before their eyes . Writing as record-keeping does not passively reflect an external reality but by identifying imbalances and inefficiencies will spur on new enterprises. Between the scales of the typewriter to keep accounts and the stock-ticker to know the world, the text features a map as a medium-scale technology of representing the farm as a whole. Because the ranch is a business enterprise, every feature of the landscape needs to be measured and recorded, accessible at any time.

But the reader, like the farmer, can also refer to this information at any time: at Norris’s request, the first printed edition contained a “map of the locality” in the “frontmatter,” and this map has generally been read as part of the overall reality effect of the book.And just as the printed novel incorporates the map, so this textual description of a map is curiously suggestive of narrative: “A great map of Los Muertos with every watercourse, depression, and elevation, together with indications of the varying depths of the clays and loams in the soil, accurately plotted, hung against the wall between the windows” . Here, plotting is the process of spatially representing the exact conditions of the soil so that it can be best utilized. But surprisingly, every description of a map in the novel contains this same phrase; later, in the local railroad office we see “a vast map of the railroad holdings… the alternate sections belonging to the Corporation accurately plotted,” and in the San Francisco office of Lyman Derrick, again on the wall “the different railways of the State were accurately plotted in various colours, blue, green, yellow” . Here we can note that the word “plot” condenses three central elements of The Octopus: the graded plots of land under dispute, the conspiracy plot to gain their ownership, and the narrative plot which decides the outcome. A final form of writing that The Octopus highlights as playing a decisive role in the development of the West is advertising, and this is in fact the most central to the plot. Conlogue has shown that The Octopus reproduces almost verbatim many sentences from the actual pamphlets that the Southern Pacific Railroad circulated to encourage ranchers to begin leasing the land. He interprets these circulars within a contrast between the “paper value” of abstract legal content, on the side of the railroad, and the “work values” of those actually improving the land, on the side of the ranchers.

I would argue, however, that such a contrast does not hold in the novel, as the ranchers both approach farming as an industry like any other and also make their case in terms of this “paper value” of the written text. Instead, we should see the competing interpretations of the advertisements as different ways of valuing the land before and after the close of the frontier. The exaggerated and even confusing syntax in which these “circulars” are introduced in the novel foreshadows their grand role at the center of the legal case: “Long before this the railroad had thrown open these lands, and, by means of circulars, distributed broadcast throughout the State,grow raspberries in a pot had expressly invited settlement thereon” . Like the newspaper and the stock ticker, this early broadcasting medium disseminates business information throughout the country. The term circular links writing to the theme of circulation epitomized by the railroad itself, and to empire circling back to China where it began, by way of America. The legal question of ownership, and so the outcome of the plot, hangs on the interpretation of these texts. It is the newspaperman Genslinger—his Wild West name juxtaposed to his profession as a writer—who first suggests that the railroad will sell at a higher price than the ranchers anticipated. To this, the rancher Annixter responds that their writing is their bond: “Haven’t we got their terms printed in black and white in their circulars? There’s their pledge” . But a closer reading of the black text on the white sheet reveals an ambiguity: “‘When you come to read that carefully,’ hazarded old Broderson, ‘it—it’s not so very reassuring. ‘Most is for sale at two-fifty an acre,’ it says. That don’t mean ‘all,’ that only means some’” . Here the entire Mussell Slough incident, indeed the entire plot of the novel and the future of California wheat farming, comes down to textual interpretation. The importance of reading for this narrative arc is brought home when the ranchers learn the outcome of their court case, the authoritative interpretation of the circular’s text. Tellingly, this comes at the conclusion of Cedarquist’s speech, when Magnus in the midst of imagining his son in Hong Kong, having marched with the course of empire full circle back to its origin in China. At this point he overhears a stranger reading aloud the afternoon newspaper: “It was in the course of this reading that Magnus caught the sound of his name,” . Called by name by the text, he listens on to the full reading of the verdict: the League’s plot has failed to secure the plots of land, and his ultimate fate will be to lose the ranch. By quoting these circulars verbatim, then, Norris enfolds authentic material from the historical incident into the text of the novel, to tell the true story of the West. Furthermore, by announcing the verdict at the moment that Magnus is listening to Cedarquist’s speech, Norris suggests the link between the land dispute and the China market, which is the close of the frontier.

As we saw above, in “The Frontier Gone at Last” Norris dated the decisive end of the frontier to the arrival of U.S. marines in China in 1900, the year before The Octopus was published. This was the moment America finally reached and bordered on another civilization to the west, with no wilderness separating them. The railroad’s case in the novel is not the victory of paper values over work values, but rather the historical transformation of the land from an open space of prospecting into a closed loop of industrial production. Indeed, Magnus and the others are already operating their farms as businesses, and Norris portrays this economic contradiction as moral hypocrisy, which weakens Presley’s identification with them. In understanding The Octopus’s representation of the new agriculture, then, Conlogue corrects earlier scholars’ focus on the machines themselves and redirects attention to changes in the organization of agricultural labor. Namely, he points to the technical management of large scale wage labor. Still we can connect this insight to larger economic changes by employing the more precise vocabulary of Marxist analysis, as well as examining the role of racialization in U.S. labor history. Palumbo-Liu, for example, has argued that Americans have long understood their own modernization through reference to Asia. In the case of The Octopus, Lye has given perhaps the fullest account of the importance of racialization for the novel, in which all of the cooks working on the ranch appear to be Chinese. These men are represented as docile workers, feminized by their labor in food production. Chinese prepare the food for both the owners of the ranch, these minor capitalists, and also for the workers planting in the fields. Their presence working at the Derricks’ ranch underscores the modernity of industrial production, its post frontier character. While Norris is notorious as one of the most unrelentingly racist “major” writers in the history of American literature, Lye’s work illuminates the importance of food in anti-Chinese racism of the time and how Norris engages with it. In particular she points to the American Federation of Labor pamphlet Meat vs. Rice, Anglo-Saxon Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism, authored chiefly by Samuel Gompers, which explicitly links Chinese labor to modernization and industrialization. It does so, moreover, by asserting a biological connection between body and food. The original Exclusion Act, issued in 1882, prohibited immigration for ten years, and was renewed in 1892 for another ten. During this period anti-immigrant writers presented the “Asiatic” and the “Anglo-Saxon” as separate biological types. In fact one of the words that Turner himself used when speaking of the frontier was the Anglo-Saxon “organism.” Turner’s form of white supremacy was slightly different, however, as he used this term metaphorically, with Anglo-Saxon cultural spirit moving through history as an organism. The anti-immigrant writers, on the other hand, use organism in a direct physical sense: the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese are separate biological entities in Darwinist competition for resources. The root of the problem was that Chinese supposedly ate less food, which indicated a superior, more efficient body. This is not yet a quantitative discourse of calories, but the qualitative differences among foods are seen to give different levels of sustenance.It is not just that there is no question of labor solidarity, but this lack of solidarity is blamed on the Chinese themselves. The rice standard is a kind of bare human subsistence, on which “the beef-and-bread man” cannot survive, an instance of what Eric Hayot has identified as a tradition of Western views of the Chinese as the limit case of humanity.

Cotton species was modeled as a fixed effect, since there are only two possible categories – not enough to meaningfully estimate a random effects distribution. We also included 15 real-valued fixed effect predictor variables that indicate the number of fields, out of the 8 surrounding fields, planted with each of the 15 crops we analyzed. The goal was to control for effects of the surrounding landscape, and thereby avoid spurious correlations between rotational history and yield. Our Bayesian modeling approach required the specification of priors for all parameters whose posteriors were estimated using MCMC. Non-informative priors were used for all fixed effects. The random effects for both field and year were assumed to follow a normal distribution with mean 0 and variance hyperparameters estimated from the data. Since the support of variance parameters is constrained to positive realnumbers, non-informative inverse gamma distributions with shape and scale parameters set to 0.001 were used as the prior for the variance parameter of the top-level stochastic node, and as the priors for the variance hyperparameters of the field and year random effects distributions. Model 2. To help us understand whether any effects of the crop grown in the field the previous year on cotton yield could be due to effects on L. hesperus, we fit the same model as Model 1, but with average June L. hesperus abundance as the response variable. Model 3. Next, to formally assess whether there was an association between the effects of crop rotation on yield and the effects of crop rotation on L. hesperus abundance, we performed a linear regression of the estimated effects on yield against the estimated effects on L. hesperus abundance .

Noninformative N priors were used for the mean and intercept,container raspberries and a noninformative inverse gamma distribution with shape and scale parameters set to 0.001 was used as the prior for the variance. Model 4. A great deal of experimental evidence has demonstrated that crop rotation leads to increased yield compared to successive plantings of a single crop; therefore, we explored whether or not a yield loss was incurred by cotton crops grown in fields where cotton was grown in previous years. For the 782 fields that had complete crop rotational records for the previous 4 years, we calculated the number of consecutive cotton plantings in the 4 years preceding the focal cotton crop. We then fit a model, with yield as the response variable, using the number of consecutive prior cotton plantings as a predictor. Field, year, and cotton type were included as they were in Models 1 and 2. Since the number of prior consecutive cotton plantings could be correlated with the number of cotton fields in the surrounding landscape during the focal year, we avoided a possible spurious correlation between consecutive cotton plantings and yield by also including a fixed effect for the number of cotton fields in the 8 fields adjacent to the focal field. We chose not to explore rotational histories of specific crops for longer than one previous year, since the number of possible rotational histories becomes very large and the number of records for each possible history becomes too small to allow for robust statistical analysis. Model 5. To see if the number of consecutive years of cotton cultivation preceding the focal year was associated with June L. hesperus densities, we fit the same model as Model 4, but with June L. hesperus as the response variable.

Capitalizing on a large existing set of crop records from commercial cotton fields in California, we employed an ecoinformatics approach to explore the effects of crop rotational histories on cotton yield. Our hierarchical Bayesian analyses revealed evidence that several crops, when grown in the same field the year before the focal cotton planting, were associated with either decreased or increased cotton yield , and either increased or decreased early season densities of the pest L. hesperus . Furthermore, crops associated with decreased yield were generally also associated with increased L. hesperus densities, while those associated with increased yield were also associated with decreased L. hesperus densities . These results suggest a possible mechanism for the observed yield effects of these rotational histories. Since L. hesperus preferentially attacks certain crops, a field cultivated with a crop that is heavily attacked by L. hesperus may, if L. hesperus disperse from the focal field, increase the abundance of L. hesperus in nearby fields. These populations may subsequently attack the crop planted in the focal field the following year, explaining the increase in early-season L. hesperus densities that we detected following certain crops. In turn, these increased L. hesperus populations may exert strong herbivorous pressure on focal cotton crops, possibly explaining the corresponding decrease in yield. We believe that the effect of rotational history on early-season L. hesperus likely operates at a landscape scale that is larger than the within-field scale. If cotton was grown in a field the previous year, then farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are required to maintain a 90-day plant-free period prior to 10 March of the following year. This prevents L. hesperus, which overwinter as adults on live host plants, from overwintering in a focal field where cotton was grown the year before.

If a crop other than cotton was grown the previous year, then it could be possible for L. hesperus to overwinter in the focal field on residual plant or weed populations; however,since fields are completely plowed prior to planting cotton in the spring, L. hesperus adults would still need to temporarily leave the focal field. Therefore, we believe that the preferred host crops for L. hesperus increase L. hesperus populations at a landscape scale. Then, when cotton, another target of L. hesperus, is planted in the same field the following year, the cotton field is attacked by this regional population. If regional populations are already large due to lingering effects from crops grown the previous year, L. hesperus populations may move into cotton early in the growing season; this could be particularly damaging given research suggesting that cotton yield is particularly sensitive to L. hesperus densities early in the growing season. Using our data, we were not able to determine at exactly what scale the effects of rotation on L. hesperus likely operate. We do not believe a within-field scale is plausible, but determining a more precise spatial scale for these effects could be an interesting topic for future research. Our findings match expectations of crop yield effects based on previous research on L. hesperus host crop preferences, lending support to our hypothesis that yield effects of crop rotational histories are, at least partially, mediated by effects on L. hesperus. Alfalfa and sugarbeets, both crops for which we found negative effects on yield and positive effects on L. hesperus when grown in a field the previous growing season, are all considered preferred hosts for L. hesperus , and have been shown to also increase L. hesperus populations in nearby cotton fields during an individual growing season. Presumably,draining pots this effect is due to these crops supporting large L. hesperus populations. Large L. hesperus populations are known to build up in alfalfa, and their dispersal following alfalfa harvesting can threaten nearby cotton crops. L. hesperus is also known to emigrate to nearby cotton fields when safflower begins to dry in mid-summer. While the potential for nearby alfalfa and safflower fields to increase L. hesperus populations in cotton fields in a given year has been recognized, our results are the first indication that these landscape effects may extend temporally, affecting L. hesperus populations, and yield, in the next growing season. Tomatoes, associated with increased yield and decreased pest abundance in our data, have likewise been shown to decrease L. hesperus abundances in nearby cotton fields within a given year. While previous experimental work has examined the effects of crop rotations on cotton yield, our work expands on these studies in several ways. First, we explore a much wider diversity of possible crop rotational histories, providing quantitative estimates of the cotton yield effects of cultivating 14 different crops the previous year. Second, since we analyze records from commercial cotton fields, our data have the potential to capture yield effects that could only be detected at this realistic spatial scale. Third, since we have collected data on pest abundances, not only yield, we have also been able to use our data to generate and build evidence for a hypothesized mechanistic explanation of the yield effects we identify. We also found that farmers incurred a decline in cotton yield of about 2.4% for every additional year cotton was grown consecutively in a field preceding the focal season . This is consistent with previous research suggesting that continuous cultivation of cotton in the same location can reduce yield compared to interspersing cotton with other crops.

We also found some evidence that the number of years cotton was grown consecutively in a field was associated with higher June L. hesperus densities: the posterior probability of there being a positive association was about 95%. Identifying the actual mechanism underlying this yield effect is beyond the scope of this study, but would be an interesting avenue for future research. It is possible that the yield decline is not caused by changes in L. hesperus densities, and instead results from the buildup of soil pathogens, especially in light of previous research showing that continuous cotton cultivation increases the densities of fungal pathogens in the soil When interpreting our results, it is important to remain cognizant of the challenges of drawing causal inferences from observational data. The key assumption required to make causal inferences from regression coefficients is that all variables that affect both the treatment assignment and the response variable are included in the model; this ensures that the probability of receiving each treatment becomes, conditional on the predictor variables included in the model, conditionally independent of the response variable. In experimental studies, the treatment assignment is typically controlled by the experimenter, so one can be confident that the only difference between treatment and control groups is in fact the treatment. However, in observational studies, it is impossible to prove definitively that there was no other factor that affected both the treatment assignment and the response variable . As such, we want to be very clear that our hypothesis that the effects of rotation on yield are mediated by effects on L. hesperus densities is exactly that – a hypothesis. While our data do support a negative association between effects on L. hesperus and effects on yield, we cannot prove with observational data that the varying effects on yield are caused by the varying effects on L. hesperus. This could be a fruitful topic for future experimental work. Although causality is impossible to prove using observational data, ecoinformatics paves the way for implementing data-driven agricultural strategies and allows us to mine large datasets to explore important questions that are difficult to address experimentally. While by no means a replacement for experimentation, ecoinformatics can be a cost-effective and realistic complementary approach. In particular, our result identifying the effects of crop rotation on L. hesperus density would have been extremely difficult to reach experimentally. Since L. hesperus readily disperse across spatial scales of more than 1000 meters, an experimental study would have required massive plots comparable to the size of commercial fields in order to adequately capture their spatial dynamics. Growers with knowledge of the crop rotations associated with depressed cotton yield could make more informed decisions, selecting the sequence of crop cultivations that lead to maximized yield. When feasible, cotton plantings could be avoided following crops that decrease cotton yield, and instead limited to fields where crops that increase cotton yield were previously planted. In some cases, market conditions may lead a grower to plant cotton following a yield-depressing crop, even given the knowledge of likely yield loss. In those situations, our results may still be helpful, as an early warning sign of a potential pest problem in a particular field could allow the grower and PCA to focus pest detection efforts on that field and provide time to eliminate the problem before severe yield loss was incurred.

Although there are extensive resources in the state, most urban population reside in the water-scare coastal and southern region and most agricultural activities are in semi-arid lands. To accommodate the growth in population, California and the federal government, built a complex and expansive network of dams, aqueducts, and pumping facilities to harness California’s water supplies and deliver them to its cities and agricultural areas . Today, California’s water resources support over 38.3 million people , a $2.2 trillion economy , and the largest agricultural sector in the country . California’s rivers, streams, lakes, and estuaries are also home to a vast array of aquatic species and habitats, and support substantial aquatic recreation. The state’s water system has a total storage capacity of about 43 million acre-feet and includes hundreds of miles of aqueducts to deliver supplies to places of need and hundreds of thousands of wells to tap the state’s vast groundwater resources . The system is comprised of federal, state and local projects and it’s operated by federal, state, regional, and local organizations as shown in Figure 2-1. The Central Valley Project was authorized in 1935 by the federal government to increase the Central Valley’s resilience to drought and protect it from flooding. Shasta Dam was the first dam to be built as part of the CVP and was initiated in 1938. In 1979, the last dam, New Melones, was completed. The CVP system includes 18 other dams and reservoirs, 11 power plants, and 500 miles of conveyance and related facilities .

The CVP has facilities on the Trinity, Sacramento, American, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin Rivers,blueberry plant size and it serves over 250 long-term water contractors in the Central Valley, Santa Clara Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area . The total annual contract exceeds 9 MAF . Historically, 90% of CVP deliveries serve agricultural users. In 2000, the CVP and other smaller federal projects delivered about 7.5 MAF to users. About 35% went to the Sacramento River region, 31% went to the Tulare Lake region, and 24% went to the San Joaquin region. Smaller shares went to the North Coast, San Francisco and Central Coast regions . Agricultural users served by the CVP will likely experience additional price increases . CVP contractors are currently behind on repaying the project costs. Under the original contracts, which were negotiated and signed in the late 1940s, the project was to be paid off 50 years after its construction . By 2002, however, irrigators had repaid only 11 percent of the project cost . Based on an analysis of 120 CVP irrigation contracts and a review of full cost rates, which include cost of service and interest on unpaid capital costs since1982 , water contractors will need to pay on average an additional 196 percent to be brought up to full cost rates. Combining the estimated price increases for CVP contractors with rising cost of service rates for the remainder of agricultural water users, Gleick et al 2005 projected that overall agricultural water price will increase by 68 percent statewide between 2000 and 2030. The State Water Project was the first stage of an ambitious strategy outlined in 1957 State Water Plan to improve the reliability and capacity of water delivery throughout California. The SWP captures large amounts of water behind 28 different dams in the Western Sierra Nevada. The Oroville Dam, the largest in the system with a capacity of 3.5 MAF, began construction in 1961 and was completed in 1967.

The dams control the flow of water through the Sacramento River system, in order to maximize the amount of fresh water that can be pumped out of the Bay-Delta into the California Aqueduct. The California Aqueduct then transports the supply south through the San Joaquin Valley to Southern California and the Central Coast. The transport of water is facilitated by 26 pumping and generating plants and about 660 miles of aqueducts. The last major component of the system – the Coastal Branch, which delivers supply to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, was completed in 1997. Prior to the commencement of construction of the SWP, contracts were signed between the DWR, the managers of SWP, and urban and agricultural water districts. Since the signing of the contracts in the 1960s, the capabilities of the system have not fully developed, and the SWP regularly does not meet all of its obligations. In 1998, existing long-term SWP water supply contracts totaled about 4.1 MAF , and these contracts are scheduled to increase to about 4.2 MAF by 2020 . In the year 2000 , however, the SWP delivered only 2.9 MAF of Table A water . DWR’s State of Water Project Delivery Reliability Report confirms that without additional facilities, the SWP will consistently be unable to meet its obligations to Table-A contractors. The Department of Water Resources administers long-term water supply contracts to 29 local water agencies for water service from the State Water Project. These water supply contracts are central to the SWP construction and operation. In return for State financing, construction, operation, and maintenance of Project facilities, the agencies contractually agree to repay all associated SWP capital and operating costs. To provide a convenient reference, SWP Analysis Office has prepared consolidated contracts for several contracting agencies.

These contracts contain the amendments integrated into the language of the original contract. Listed below, under the names of the contracting agencies, are the consolidated contracts and original contracts. DWR plans to add more consolidated long-term water supply contracts as they are completed. The 29 State Water Project contractors are shown in Table 2-1.The Bay-Delta ecosystem is a major hub of the state’s water re-distribution system. In order for the large freshwater of the Sacramento River and its tributaries to be made available to users in the southern half of the state, they must flow from north through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and then be pumped out of the Delta in South into the aqueducts of the State Water Project. An extensive system of levees has also developed over the years to protect agricultural and urban land holdings within the delta from water intrusion and flooding. Together, the pumping of freshwater from the south to the delta and the artificial support of the Delta’s numerous islands has dramatically altered the natural hydrology and ecosystem function of the Bay-Delta system. In response to dramatic declines in Delta ecosystem quality during the 1987-1992 drought, a Federal and State partnership was established in 1994. The purpose of the multibillion dollar restoration and management effort, now managed by the California Bay-Delta Authority is to restore ecosystems within the Delta, improve the quality and reliability of water supplies from the Delta, and stabilize the Delta’s levee systems . The challenge of this mandate is immense, particularly when considered along with potential climate change . The incongruent nature of the program’s objectives has arguably hampered its effectiveness to date,plant raspberry in container yet the effort continues and will remain a significant consideration in future California water management and planning. Prior to extensive human development, the San Francisco Bay-Delta was largely marsh, river channels, and islands, bounded in the west by the Golden Gate Strait and Pacific Ocean and in the East by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers which drain the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The Bay-Delta in its natural state was an enormous estuary and supported extensive habitat for fish, birds, and other terrestrial animals. Water flowing through the Delta is the main source of supply for two major California water delivery projects, the SWP and the Federal CVP. From these projects, a majority of Californian relies on water flowing through the Delta for all or part of their drinking water. In addition, approximately one third of the state’s cropland uses water flowing through the Delta . Figure 2-2 shows the Bay Delta water distribution during a typical hydrological year. The Colorado River supplies Southern California with more than 4 MAF a year of water via the Colorado River Aqueduct and the Coachella and All American Canals.

The Colorado River Compact, signed six states bordering the Colorado River in 1922, established California’s base water entitlement to be 4.4 MAF a year. In recent years, however, California has relied upon the unused allocation of upstream states, importing more than 0.8 MAF a year of additional supply some years . Due to growing water use by other states, California was forced to reach an agreement to gradually eliminate its use of surplus water. The Colorado River Quantification Settlement Agreement resolves much of the uncertainty over Colorado River allocations, but an on-going drought in the Colorado River basin still threatens future Colorado River water availability to California. The iconic Colorado River supplies water to millions of people in fast-growing cities in Colorado River’s watershed, such as Las Vegas, Mexicali, Phoenix, and St. George, Utah. Tens of millions of people outside the watershed, from Denver to Albuquerque and from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana, also receive water exported from the basin to meet at least some of their residential and commercial water needs. More than half of the people receiving water from the basin live in Southern California . Figure 2-3 shows historical water supply and usage for the Colorado River Basin from 1914 to 2007. Local cities in California have also taken initiative to develop water supplies. The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and several in the East Bay region have all financed and constructed infrastructure to capture, store, and transport water from sources far away from the municipalities. Specifically, the Los Angeles Aqueduct transports water over 200 miles from the Owens Valley to the Los Angeles area; the O’Shaughnessy Dam captures and stores water in the Hetch Hetchy Valley for delivery to San Francisco and surrounding cities; and the PardeeReservoir and Mokelumne Aqueducts supply the East Bay Municipal Water District service area with supplies from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada . Groundwater is a major source of water for California’s agricultural industry and municipalities. During an average year a third of the state’s water supply comes from groundwater. Some regions are entirely dependent on groundwater, and 40-50% of Californians use some amount of groundwater . Much of the state’s groundwater resources have been developed locally by individual landowners or municipalities. Such decentralized management has led to unsustainable groundwater use in California. Estimates by DWR in 1980 suggest that use of groundwater exceeds recharge by between 1 and 2 MAF per year . Such overuse has led and will continue to lead to many serious problems including land subsidence, sea water intrusion, and degradation of groundwater quality. Groundwater is currently managed through local water agencies, local groundwater management ordinances, and court adjudication. Importantly, state and regional planning agencies have little influence or control over the management of groundwater, making it difficult to implement integrated surface and groundwater management plans. The total groundwater storage in California is estimated to be about 1.3 billion acre-feet and about 140 MAF of precipitation percolates into the state’s aquifer annually . These estimates however, do not characterize the potential water supply for the region – many other factors limit the development potential of an aquifer . Most of the state’s groundwater is located in the aquifers beneath the Central Valley, although Southern California also has considerable amount of groundwater. Groundwater is a major contributor to the state’s water supply and even more so in dry years. As shown in Figure 2-4, groundwater supplies on average 30 percent of California’s overall demand and up to 40 percent in dry years . In some areas where surface water supplies are not accessible or economically feasible, groundwater provides 100 percent of a community’s public water . During years where surface water deliveries are not available, groundwater may also provide up to100 percent of irrigation water for certain areas. About 43 percent of Californians obtain at least some of their drinking water from groundwater sources. Local municipalities and regional water agencies are increasingly turning to alternative sources of water supply. Treated urban wastewater is becoming an important source of water for agriculture, industry, landscaping, and some non-potable uses in commercial and institutional buildings. In many regions it is discharged into rivers and streams and thus used by downstream users. In some regions it is also blended with conventional sources and is injected or allowed to percolate into groundwater basins.

Despite the emergence of tariffs throughout the world before World War I, the degree of agricultural protection in European countries was in the modest range of 20 percent to 30 percent. These tariff duties did not prevent the expansion of agricultural trade. At the end of World War I, a substantial international division of labor continued in the production of agricultural goods. The second wave of expansion of government intervention in agriculture took place during the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. The pattern of a particular nation’s response to the crises followed lines associated with its net position in international trade.For example, in France,Germany, and Italy rates of protection on foodstuffs more than doubled between 1927 and 1931. Even Britain converted to protectionism in 1931, although the free entry of produce from its empire meant that tariff protection was of limited importance to domestic agriculture. In more recent U. S. history, the recession of the early 1980s, the associated high real rates of interest, high exchange values of the dollar, and slow world economic growth put enormous pressure on agriculture. The macroeconomic environment combined with intervention designed in the 1981 Farm Bill to create embarrassing surpluses and unacceptable levels of resource misallocation. The 1981 U. S. Farm Bill set support and target prices at levels designed for a strong export and price performance in the grain sectors. Due to macroeconomic conditions, however, this scenario failed to materialize. More importantly, the 1981 Bill did not allow for flexibility and, as a result,blackberry container programs sustained high production which led to accUmulations of government owned stocks and agricultural expenditures of crisis proportions.

This mess can be referred to as a ‘~olicy disequilibrium.” Response to this specific policy disequilibrium was the Payment-In-Kind Program of 1983. PIK led to even greater expenditures and failed to alleviate the serious problem of surplus stocks. The path followed by agricultural commodity markets over much of the last two decades closely resembles other markets for freely traded commodities such as gold, silver, platinum, copper, and lumber. Stocks also accumulated for these commodities during the 1970s and early 1980s, suggesting that sectoral conditions and government policies are only a part of the explanation for the behavior of agricultural commodity markets. The search for a complete explanation leads to a multi-market perspective and an investigation of external linkages with other markets. Since 1972, conventional wisdom has placed increasingly less emphasis on the inherent instability in commodity markets and more emphasis on external linkages with other markets. Deregulated credit and banking has resulted in greater exposure of agriculture to conditions in the domestic money markets. Also, the shift from fixed exchange rates to flexible rates, in much of the Western world, exposed commodity markets to international money and real trade flows. The emergence of well-integrated, international capital markets meant that agriculture, through domestic money and exchange rate markets, became more dependent on capital flows among countries. The linkages between commodity and money markets are indeed pervasive. In the United States, farming is extremely capital intensive and debt-to-asset ratios have risen dramatically over the last 10 years. As a result, movements in real interest rates have a significant effect on the cost structure facing agricultural production. Storage and breeding stocks especially are sensitive to interest rates. On the other hand, the influence of interest rates on the value of the dollar affects the demand side for farm goods. The close connection between agriculture’s health and interest rates suggests that this sector is vulnerable to monetary and fiscal policy changes.

It has been argued, with much justification particularly since 1980, that the instability in monetary and fiscal policy has contributed greatly to the instability of agriculture markets.Unstable macroeconomic policies are thought to impose sizable shocks on commodity markets. This would be especially true if agricultural commodity markets have flexible prices while other markets have stickier prices. And, indeed, without governmental price supports, agricultural prices are generally more flexible than non-agricultural prices. This is true in part because contracts for agricultural commodities tend to be written for shorter duration and because biological lags tend to cause agricultural supply to be unresponsive to price changes in the short run. This fixed/flex price model of markets is necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for money non-neutrality to imply overshooting agricultural prices . Overshooting in this context is defined as a price path which exceeds the new eventual price equilibrium. Flex-price commodity markets and fixed-price non-agricultural output markets combined with “small” output responses mean that overshooting in agricultural sector markets will occur even if expectations are formed rationally. Such overshooting results from the spillover effects of monetary and fiscal policy on commodity markets. Given a world of fixed- and flex-price markets, the driving force behind overshooting is the real rate of interest and the ability to arbitrage across markets. When in the short run real interest rates rise above long-run equilibrium rates, immediate pressure arises to drive flexible commodity prices downward . In much of the 1970s, real interest rates were below their long-run equilibrium levels and, for some periods in the 1980s, real interest rates were above. Overshooting combined with ‘myopic” expectations means that ”macro externalities” will be imposed upon the agricultural sector .

In the case of interest rates facing U. S. agriculture, interest rate disequilibrium was even more pronounced due primarily to the relative importance of the Farm Credit System. The System’s organizational structure amplifies the disequilibrium and generates more overshooting than would otherwise result. Within the Farm Credit System, borrowers are, in fact, owners and no dividends are paid to stockholders. As a result, during favorable economic periods, the only way owners might extract benefits generated by the system is by increasing borrowing levels at interest rates below those for the rest of the economy. Indeed, through much of the 1970s, interest rates to farmers were dramatically below general market rates while, during the 1980s, the opposite result was true.Empirical evidence supports the view that agricultural output responses are not sufficiently flexible to counter the tendency for prices to overshoot, and that expectations are, at best, only ”myopicany” rational. Bordo has shown empirically that prices of raw goods respo~d more quickly to changes in money supply than do prices of manufactured goods. Andrews and Rausser have shown that, during the large cyclical downturns of the early 1930s and the early 1980s, prices fell more and quantities less in the agricultural sector than in any of nine other sectors of the U. S. economy. In the case of interest rates, numerous studies have shown that real rates vary significantly across countries,planting blueberries in a pot refuting the old view that they remain constant. These results also suggest that the purchasing power parity assumption does not hold, even approximately. In other words, exchange rate changes do not offset changes in relative price levels across nations. Frankel and Hardouvelis’ study on monetary surprises rejects the flex/flex specification in favor of the fixed/flex specification. Their empirical results show that, when announced money supply turns out to be greater than the public expected, nominal interest rates tend to rise and the prices of basic commodities tend to fall. If the flex/flex specification were correct, then interest rates and commodity markets would either both rise or both fall . The only hypothesis that explains the reactions in both interest rate and commodity markets is that increases in nominal interest rates are also increases in real rates. The public anticipates that the Federal Reserve will reverse any recent fluctuation in money stock, thus increasing interest rates and depressing the real prices of commodities. The aggregate effects of money supply on raw agricultural product prices, retail prices of food products, and the nonfood Consumer Price Index also support empirically the idea of overshooting. Consistent with money nonneutrality and raw agricultural prices being generated by flex-price markets, Stamoulis et al. found the money supply to be a more important determinant in explaining raw product prices than in explaining the nonfood CPI or the index of retail food prices.The linkages discussed above run from the macroeconomic sector to the agricultural food sector. These causal influences may be defined as forward linkages. The most important forward linkages include those observed in the cost structure of production , in general economic conditions and food demand, in inventory behavior and the demand for storage,and in animal breeding stocks.

The macroeconomic variables included in these linkages are interest ratest personal income t and nonfood and general inflation rates. There are effects that run from agriculture to the general economy. These linkages may be defined as backward linkages. There are three main influences on macroeconomy reflected backward from agriculture: on the general inflation rate t on governmental deficits or surplusest and on the balance of trade. These three components cant in turn t have dramatic effects on employment real interest rates, investment t economic growth t and so on. Food prices are a major component of any general price index, and this linkage is important everywhere that the general rate of inflation influences macroeconomic conditions. This is true not only in the demand for money balances, and the willingness of individuals to hold productive and speculative assetst but also in the determination of real wagest real income t and the demand for exports. The linkage through government deficit arises because the outcome for prices, production, private storage, and other variables endogenous to agriculture t determine in part the level of federal spending. As government deficits and expenditures rise, there is a positive effect on consumption and investment. Over the short runt there are multiplier effects leading to further increases in economic activity and in tax revenues, which are a positive function of economic growth. InterestinglYt the operation of government storage and deficiency payments are examples of expenditures that are endogenously determined. This feature is in contrast to much of the non-farm components of the federal budget that are fixed in dollar terms.In addition to these more direct forward and backward linkages within the domestic economy, there are important inter dependencies between the monetary policies of different countries. These also represent indirect linkages between a domestic macroeconomy and agriculture. Monetary linkages between nations have important implications for exchange rates and worldwide recessions. For example, as U. S. monetary policy change? responses in the rest of the world affect to some degree foreign economies, exchange rates, and prices which, in turn, translate into shifts in the export demand facing domestic farmers. Under fixed exchange rate regimes, such as the monetary system set up by the Bretton Woods agreement, central banks are compelled to intervene to maintain a fixed value of their domestic currency vis-a-vis foreign currencies. With flexible rates, no such intervention is necessary. fuile monetary authorities may still intervene from time to time in foreign exchange markets, such actions have become discretionary. Under fixed exchange rates, expansionary monetary policies in one country cause similar expansionary policies in others as they observe their currencies appreciating. The country beginning the expansionary process is said to have “exported” its inflation. When exchange rates are flexible, no obligation exists to maintain exchange rates by domestic inflation. Only if nations keep rates within a certain range in a ”managed float” can inflation be exported. MCKinnon and others have emphasized in recent years that the argument for monetary independence between nations under flexible exchange rates involves an untested assumption about the portfolios of money holders. A monetarily independent country must be an “insular” economy, at least as far as money demand is concerned. Money holders must not substitute for foreign currency holdings’ when the domestic currency becomes less desirable, nor vice versa. If this is not true, currency substitution implies that the effects of domestic monetary policy are exported even under perfectly flexible rates. This exporting of monetary policy and the resulting loss of independence can occur in two ways. First, when there is substitution between currencies, money growth rates are conditional on expected money’ growth abroad. For example, suppose the United States engages in some unanticipated monetary policy, say, expansion. There will be an increase in the demand for the foreign currency, if domestic expansionary policies are expected to depreciate the value of the dollar.

There are several methodologies developed in the last few years that can provide more accurate estimates of GHG emissions in California . These methods incorporate the impact of diet, accounting for, as an example, the fact that fiber content is positively associated with methane emissions while lipid content is negatively correlated. About half of California’s livestock GHG emissions comes from enteric fermentation and half from manure in concentrated beef cattle and dairy operations. The largest opportunities for changes in livestock practices center on feed and manure management. California offers a uniquely diverse range of crop byproducts for use as dairy cow feeds, and research has improved our understanding of the impacts of different feeds on productivity, economics and GHG emissions . For example, grape pomace, a byproduct of the wine industry, has been shown to reduce methane emissions when fed to dairy cattle in pelleted form without reducing milk production . A shift towards solid manure management practices may result in reduced GHG emissions by reducing the anaerobic digestion that occurs when water is used to flush manure into storage lagoons. However, Owen and Silver indicated solid manure management can produce substantial GHG emissions; thus, minimizing manure storage time is important to mitigating emissions. One caution: there is a risk that focusing on one climate pollutant, such as methane,large plastic pots for plants could lead to practices that have negative trade-offs, such as increased N2O emissions , and nutrient loading in soil and water .

A recent report submitted to the California Air Resources Board suggests it may be technically feasible for California to achieve a 50% reduction in methane emissions from dairy manure management by 2030 if supportive policies are created . This would require capturing or avoiding methane generated from manure storage on dairies from an estimated 60% of dairy cows in California, particularly the largest dairy operations where cost-benefit considerations are most favorable . If successful, a gallon of California milk may be the least GHG intensive in the world. The report outlines several alternative manure management practices and technologies. A diversity of practices is needed to reflect the range of dairy sizes and layouts in California. For example, lagoon storage systems, which can emit large amounts of methane, lend themselves to the use of covers or engineered anaerobic digestion systems for bio-methane collection. Potential trade-offs of these practices with respect to air quality, crop management, nutrient use efficiency and cost, however, require further analysis. Pasture systems are used in coastal areas where farms have less crop land available than in the Central Valley; pasture requires significantly more land and water for feed production compared to current dairy systems that rely on corn silage, grass silage and alfalfa . Comprising more than two-thirds of California’s agricultural acreage , these working lands provide ecosystem services in addition to supporting production of livestock. Grasslands have higher levels of total soil carbon compared to cultivated lands , and similar amounts to California forests. There are numerous options for increasing carbon storage in rangelands. Modeling analyses project that restoration of native oaks could increase carbon storage in wood biomass and litter . In a study of riparian revegetation in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties, modeled soil carbon sequestration rates averaged 0.8 tons C per acre per year, while modeled results of restored woody riparian areas demonstrated ecosystem carbon storage potential of 16.4 tons C per acre per year over a 45-year period . Cultivation and re-seeding to restore native perennial grasses also shows promise.

Native grasses may sequester carbon in slightly deeper soil levels due to perennial root systems . Rangelands with native grasses and oaks have lower soil carbon losses and higher nitrogen cycling rates . Approaches to verifying carbon sequestration on rangelands requires a long-term approach. Soil carbon can take decades to build to a measurable level: rangelands rarely receive intensive management and these systems are much more exposed than irrigated agriculture to annual variations in moisture. On average, California’s grasslands lose carbon, but the net C gain or loss depends on precipitation, with net losses of carbon in years when the timing of precipitation causes a short growing season, and gains when the timing of rains lead to a longer growing season . The use of composted materials in rangelands may reduce N2O emissions in comparison to those materials entering waste streams and being subject to the standard manure and green waste management practices . One study on California’s coastal and valley grasslands showed that use of compost above standard application rates could boost net ecosystem carbon by 25% to 70%, sequestering carbon at a rate of 0.2063 tons C to 0.2104 tons C per acre over the 3-year study or a rate of 0.0688 tons C to 0.0701 tons C per acre per year, largely by decreasing the amount of C that is being lost from these grasslands . Researchers using the DAYCENT model to look at different compost amendments and project over longer time frames found that the net climate mitigation potential ranges from 0.5261 to 0.6394 tons CO2 equivalent per acre per year in the first 10 years , and declines by approximately half of that by year 30. Applying organic materials to rangelands in Southern California demonstrated co-benefits: stabilizing soil nitrogen stocks, improved plant community resilience and productivity, and increased soil organic matter after 1 year of application . However, due to the very limited number of studies and the need to demonstrate sustained carbon sequestration, long-term studies that span California rangelands are needed to validate these results and provide long term policy recommendations. Climatic variation across the state may enhance or diminish observable carbon sequestration benefits.

Further, it will be important to ensure that rangeland compost application practices do not lead to undesired plant species shifts and do not create negative trade-offs for water quality through nutrient run-off or leaching; it will also be important to track emissions associated with fossil fuel use for transportation and distribution of compost across rangeland sites. Additional practices that have shown benefit elsewhere and should be examined in California include planting of legumes, fertilization, irrigation and grazing management. In particular, grazing management may significantly impact rangeland carbon sequestration. While heavy grazing that leads to erosion can degrade carbon storage, there is conflicting evidence in California and elsewhere on specific grazing practices that can benefit soil carbon . Most studies in California that have assessed the effects of grazing on soil carbon compared only grazed versus ungrazed , without assessing the effects of grazing duration, intensity, frequency and rest periods. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service provides cost-share programs for range managers to split the cost of implementing improved management techniques. Currently, only 30% to 40% of California ranchers participate in these programs . The research above points to the magnitude of opportunity from alternative rangeland practices and the need to identify socioeconomic opportunities and barriers to greater participation in range management incentive programs.The most recent assessment of biomass in California details the availability of resources, including agricultural biomass, among others,plant pots with drainage that could support generation of three to four times the current biomass-based renewable energy being produced, depending on policies and regulations affecting biomass use . Biomass use for energy, however, has declined in recent years, as it is generally more expensive than alternative fuels. In addition, interconnection issues between biomass facilities, such as anaerobic digesters, and utilities complicate and increase the cost of new facilities. Research and policy actions to reduce barriers and incentivize co-benefits from the use of biomass for power and fuel will be required to expand this sector sustainably. Current biomass energy production from agricultural residues in California is largely based on combustion of nut shells and woody biomass from orchards and vineyards. While one grower has installed a successful on-farm small-scale gasification systems for nut shells and wood chips, larger scale facilities that convert woody biomass to electricity are typically more than 40 years old, and the power produced is more expensive than other forms of alternative energy. Many plants are now idle or closed, leaving tree and vine producers with few or more expensive options for disposal of biomass. Other underutilized agricultural biomass includes rice straw and livestock manures suitable for anaerobic digestion technology . Manure alone is not a high biogas-yielding feed stock.

Supplementing manure with fermentable feed stocks such as crop or food processing residues can improve the energy and economic return from anaerobic digesters , but this practice currently faces regulatory and practical obstacles, like managing an additional source of organic materials and additional nutrients and salts. Nonetheless, there is limited, but real potential for some crop-based bio-fuels and bio-energy in California based on locally optimal feed stocks and bio-refineries .Twenty-five years after the publication of the first IPCC Assessment Report, it is instructive to step back and ask what we have learned about the economic impacts of climate change to the agricultural sector, not just from a technical standpoint, but from a conceptual one. California is an ideal focus for such an analysis both because of its strong agricultural sector and proactive climate policy. After passing the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, the state has sponsored research to complete three climate change assessments, with the fourth assessment report in progress at the time of submitting this paper. This effort to study adaptation appears to be relatively more prolific than in many other global sub-regions, particularly over the past decade . Assessing adaptation potential — the institutional, technological, and management instruments for adjusting to actual or expected climatic change and its effects — represents an important turning point in the climate impacts literature. The important role of responsive decision-making by farmers and institutions is recognized for the first time as the key ingredient to dampening the effects of climate change . Adaptation was simply mentioned as an optimistic afterthought in earlier studies, which suggested that agriculture would fully or mostly adjust in the long term — although there was sparse detail on how it would do so . When adaptation was directly included in the modeling framework, economists found that the estimated welfare damages from climate change documented in previous studies declined . In colloquial terms, this is a shift from modeling the “dumb” farmer to modeling one with reasonable economic agency. There are four key concepts linked to the idea of adaptation: vulnerability, adaptive capacity, economic welfare, and economic efficiency. In the IPCC literature, adaptation is connected to the foundational concept of vulnerability, defined as the propensity for agricultural systems to be affected by future climatic changes . Vulnerability can also be defined endogenously as the ability of farmers and institutions to respond and adapt to, and recover from such changes . This latter definition is synonymous with the concept of adaptive capacity, or the ability of a system to moderate potential damages and take advantage of adaptation and mitigation opportunities to reduce vulnerability of the system to climatic changes .Adaptation dampens welfare losses caused by climate change. The relationship of adaptation with vulnerability is more complex, and better represented as that of trade-offs. For example, changing the crop mix in favor of high value crops may reduce vulnerability to water scarcity, but it may increase vulnerability to heat tolerance. Finally, the concept of efficient adaptation has been defined as a situation where the costs of effort to reduce climate-induced damages is less than the resulting benefits from adapting . Given the central role of farmer and institutional responsiveness, how do recent agro-economic assessments suggest that specific adaptations may improve economic welfare and reduce vulnerability? What is economically efficient adaptation in the short and long-run? What are the limits to the agricultural sector’s adaptive capacity? This is certainly not the first review of climate impact assessments to California agriculture. Smith and Mendelsohn highlighted the importance of regional climatic impacts to several economic sectors in California , integrating across range of modeling approaches . The agricultural impacts are calculated by the Statewide Agricultural Production model under wet and dry scenarios. The results echo those of more recent SWAP studies, suggesting that field crop usage will decline by the end of the century under a dry scenario, though the decline in revenues will be partially offset by increased production of high-value crops.

A subset selection strategy was unable to consistently improve on the regular NNGA-DYCORS performance by focusing the coordinate search on the most sensitive sets of parameters. This may be because the RBF does not adequately model a given test function, so it does not correctly identify the most important parameters in the database, or the coordinate search method does not properly exploit the narrowed parameter space. Generically, it may be useful to reduce the dimensionality of the parameter space, but the strategy of doing so using model adherence ‘drop-out’ experiments was not uniformly successful. This article demonstrates that the NNGA-DYCORS hybrid learning algorithm outperforms its constituent algorithms in the important criteria of robustness and generalizability to different kinds of problems. Thus, this algorithm can be applied to a wide variety of physical and biological design optimization problems with a degree of assurance that parameter estimates will be optimal while minimizing necessary resources. In addition, as this hybrid is both robust and highly generalizable to many types of design problems, it should be useful for practitioners who are not experts in surrogate optimization methods, and work on a variety of problems of diverse complexity. Optimizing media for biological processes, such as those used in tissue engineering and cultivated meat production, is difficult due to the extensive experimentation required, number of media components,grow raspberries in pots nonlinear and interactive responses, and the number of conflicting design objectives.

Here we demonstrate the capacity of a nonlinear design- of-experiments method to predict optimal media conditions in fewer experiments than a traditional DOE. The approach is based on a hybridization of a coordinate search for local optimization with dynamically adjusted search spaces and a global search method utilizing a truncated genetic algorithm using radial basis functions to store and model prior knowledge. Using this method, we were able to reduce the cost of muscle cell proliferation media while maintaining cell growth 48 h after seeding using 30 common components of typical commercial growth medium in fewer experiments than a traditional DOE . While we clearly demonstrated that the experimental optimization algorithm significantly outperforms conventional DOE, due to the choice of a 48 h growth assay weighted by medium cost as an objective function, these findings were limited to performance at a single passage, and did not generalize to growth over multiple passages. This underscores the importance of choosing objective functions that align well with process goals. Cell culture media is a critical component of bio-processes such as pharmaceutical manufacturing and the emerging field of cultivated meat products. Optimizing culture media is a difficult task due to the extensive experiments required, number of media components, nonlinear and interactive responses from each component, and conflicting design objectives. Additionally, for cultured meat products, media needs to be less expensive than those currently deployed for other cell culture processes , food-grade, consider safety, component stability, and effects on sensory characteristics of final products. Without much in the way of first principles models for these objectives, especially for adherent mammalian muscle cells used for cultivated meat production , media optimization must be done experimentally with constraints on inputs, outputs, and number of experiments.

Optimizing one factor at a time or with random experiments is still the most common way of exploring design space. This strategy is very inefficient for large systems and is unable to consider interactions among media components. Design-of-Experiments methods are better able to manage large numbers of components in fewer experiments using Factorial, Fractional Factorial, Plackett-Burman, and Central Composite Designs where linear and polynomial models can correlate first order and interactive effects of media components. In general, DOE methods are able to optimize < 10 variables and with the help of screening designs can solve problems > 25 variables , though at the expense of ignoring interactions, screened variables, and easily costing > 100 experiments . Experimental optimization of media has also been done using stochastic methods such as genetic algorithms and this approach is generally suited to optimizing systems of dimensionality > 15 where DOE methods can become experimentally cumbersome, but also take ∼ 200 experiments. Because the size of the design space increases exponentially with the number of design variables, a natural advance was to use response surface models to capture information about interactions and nonlinearity. These techniques can then be used to sequentially identify optimal culture conditions while simultaneously improving modeling accuracy. Oftentimes experimenters will employ polynomial models to find optimal culture conditions but only after extensive DOE to reduce the dimensionality of the problem space to < 5. More advanced modeling techniques are neural networks, decision trees and Gaussian processes which are often better at generalizing noisy, nonlinear, and multi-modal data. When combined with global optimization methods.

Zhang and Block demonstrated that these response surface methods can optimize problems with > 20 variables in less than half the number of experiments as traditional DOE. In the previous chapter, this author further improved the robustness of this algorithm by using a hybrid optimization scheme validated on simulated design problems . Here we employ this novel nonlinear experimental design algorithm to optimize the proliferation of C2C12 cells while simultaneously reducing media cost by modeling the response surface of culture conditions using an RBF with a hybridized global/local optimization scheme. We then compare this approach to a more traditional DOE method. The organization of this article is as follows: Section 3.2 includes an outline of the experimental and computational methods use in media optimization, Section 3.3 goes over the results and Section 3.4 details a discussion of the results and current challenges.Using the trained RBF model, the two arms of our algorithm, TGA and DYCORS, each suggest five experimental conditions for a total of 10 experiments per batch within the design space [×1/2, ×2] of the GM that optimize α. Because the model is based on a small amount of noisy data, the genetic algorithm is stopped before it can converge to implicitly consider model and experimental uncertainty. The DYCORS arm of the algorithm searches in the region around the best design and picks the best predicted set of designs in that region,plant pot with drainage which expands and contracts based on the quality of previous experiments. The new experiments are conducted and the resulting data is used to correct and retrain the RBF model. To allow the RBF model to generalize better during early periods of optimization, 30 randomly selected experimental conditions were taken initially. The optimization loop was stopped when the α quality of the media showed a lack of improvement. The general framework for the HND is shown in Figure 3.1. As a control method, a traditional DOE was used to optimize the same media design problem in three steps. 

A ’Leave-One-Out’ experiment was conducted where a media composed of all components at their GM concentrations, excluding each individual component,were tested for their proliferation capacity using the %AB metric , similar to what was done in previous work. The lowest performing components had their concentrations fixed at their respective GM concentrations. Next a Folded/Un-Folded Plackett-Burman design was implemented with the remaining components at the upper and lower bounds of the design problem. This was done to determine the first order linear effects of each component on the objective function α. A linear model to predict α was used in conjunction with a LASSO algorithm to rank the most important first order effects, and all but the highest impact components were kept at their GM concentrations. Finally, the remaining components were used to design a Central Composite Design where experiments are spread out across the design space to more thoroughly explore potential optimal designs.The best α design from this DOE method was considered the optimal DOE design. The DOE-LOO step identified Ferric Nitrate, MgSO4, Glycine, L-Isoleucine, Choline Chloride, Riboflavin, and Thiamine HCl as components that, when left out of GM, had no statistical effect on %AB after 48 hr post-seeding . These components were set to their respective GM concentration for all subsequent DOE experiments. Next, the DOE-PB with LASSO identified the six most α-important components of the remaining 23 components . To reduce the number of experiments for the DOE-CCD design, LCystine and L-Serine were kept constant at × 1/2 normalized units above and below their GM midpoint concentrations respectively based on the sign of their coefficients . The remaining four components in the CCD had their upper/lower bounds changed to × 1/2 normalized units above and below their GM midpoints. The remaining components were varied in a CCD design, with the best medium being 200 mg/L KCl, 388 mg/L L-Glutamine, 9000 mg/L Glucose, 5% FBS shown in detail in Table 3.1. An 80% increase in α at 48 hr post-seeding over GM was measured using 50% less FBS than GM. For the HND optimization loop, α was used as the objective function and calculated using %AB measured at 48 hr post-seeding at 96 well plate scale . The RBF was initially trained with 30 randomly selected experiments. Figure 3.2 shows that the average HND designs improved in both α and %AB metric over time quickly overcoming standard GM and achieving similar results to the best DOE design with 70 experiments. We have included the proliferation metric in Figure 3.2 for completeness even though it was not used as the objective function α in this work. The HND was stopped at 70 experiments because both %AB and α stopped improving. The best medium found had an α measured to be 56% better than GM during the optimization loop using 32.5% less FBS than GM. Figure 3.3 shows the differences between the optimal media. For the most part the HND identified optimal concentrations that were slightly elevated compared to DOE, except for KCl, FBS, and Glucose. It is also notable that both HND and DOE determined that Glucose and FBS should be elevated and reduced in relative to GM. Figure 3.4 shows the media efficiency metric α plotted against the component concentrations for all experiments, demonstrating the nonlinear, interactive, and ultimately non-trivial nature of this experimental design optimization problem. These α-optimal HND and DOE designs were then tested against GM using %AB at 24, 48, and 72 h post-seeding , where the designed media have high %AB relative to GM but that advantage is reduced over time. As a further check, α was calculated using raw cell number normalized by the volume of FBS in each experiment where it was found HND and DOE again outperformed GM in terms of the objective function α due to their lower cost. However, both HND and DOE produced 8% and 9% fewer cells respectively, using 70 and 103 total experiments respectively. It is notable that, despite 30 components used, the HND was able to design a similar media to DOE with a similar degree of proliferation %AB and α in fewer experiments. Additionally, this DOE was more efficient than any single DOE, suggesting that the HND is much more efficient and simpler to use than the typical approach to high dimensional optimization. This is valuable in optimizing media due to the difficulty in collecting large amounts of data with many components. The reasons for the success of this method are likely the balance between global and local optimization, and the ability of the HBD to accumulate information using the RBF, which can regress on nonlinear, noisy, and interaction-heavy problems, reducing the need for cumbersome dimensionality-reduction experiments used in the traditional DOE. For the most part HND suggested higher concentrations of most media components than GM or DOE, except for KCl, FBS, and Glucose. This is likely because the DOE method utilized dimensionality reduction. That is, factors that demonstrated insignificant effects were fixed at their GM level and no longer included in the optimization. On the other hand, HND could vary components throughout the optimization process, including increasing component concentrations when they had even a small positive effect. Inclusion of a per component cost might dampen this effect. While the RBF can model nonlinear and interactive processes, the effect of each component on α is unclear without further experiments or model validation, a disadvantage of the HND approach. Nonetheless, sensitivity analysis using VARS was conducted and indicates FBS, Glucose, and MgSO4 likely have a significant effect on α, while other effects are more difficult to determine with the limited data available.

Although new facility construction or repurposing/ re-qualification may not immediately help with the current pandemic, given that only existing and qualified facilities will be used in the near term, it will position the industry for the rapid scale-up of countermeasures that may be applied over the next several years. An example is the April 2020 announcement by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of its intention to fund “at-risk” development of vaccine manufacturing facilities to accommodate pandemic-relevant volumes of vaccines, before knowing which vaccines will succeed in clinical trials. Manufacturing at-risk with existing facilities is also being implemented on a global scale. The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is producing at-risk hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford University COVID-19 vaccine, while the product is still undergoing clinical studies.12 Operation Warp Speed 13 in the United States is also an at-risk multi-agency program that aims to expand resources to deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective but “yet-to be-identified” vaccines for COVID-19 by January 2021, as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development, manufacturing,pot with drainage holes and distribution of COVID-19 countermeasures, including vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. The program had access to US$10 billion initially and can be readily expanded. As of August 2020, OWS had invested more than US$8 billion in various companies to accelerate manufacturing, clinical evaluation, and enhanced distribution channels for critical products.

For example, over a period of approximately 6 months, OWS helped to accelerate development, clinical evaluation , and at-risk manufacturing of two mRNA based COVID-19 vaccines, with at least three more vaccines heading into advanced clinical development and large-scale manufacturing by September/October 2020.At the time of writing, no PMP companies had received support from OWS. However, in March 2020, Medicago received CAD$7 million from the Government of Quebec and part of the Government of Canada CAD$192 million investment in expansion programs , both of which were applied to PMP vaccine and antibody programs within the company.15Once manufactured, PMP products must pass quality criteria meeting a defined specification before they reach the clinic. These criteria apply to properties such as identity, uniformity, batch-to-batch consistency, potency, purity, stability , residual DNA, absence of vector, low levels of plant metabolites such as pyridine alkaloids, and other criteria as specified in guidance documents . Host and process-related impurities in PMPs, such as residual HCP, residual vector, pyridine alkaloids from solanaceous hosts , phenolics, heavy metals , and other impurities that could introduce a health risk to consumers, have been successfully managed by upstream process controls and/or state-of-the-art purification methods and have not impeded the development of PMP products . The theoretical risk posed by non-mammalian glycans, once seen as the Achilles heel of PMPs, has not materialized in practice. Plant-derived vaccine antigens carrying plant-type glycans have not induced adverse events in clinical studies, where immune responses were directed primarily to the polypeptide portion of glycoproteins . One solution for products intended for systemic administration, where glycan differences could introduce a pharmacokinetic and/or safety risk , is the engineering of plant hosts to express glycoproteins with mammalian-compatible glycan structures .

For example, ZMapp was manufactured using the transgenic N. benthamiana line ΔXT/FT, expressing RNA interference constructs to knock down the expression of the enzymes XylT and FucT responsible for plant-specific glycans, as a chassis for transient expression of the mAbs . In addition to meeting molecular identity and physicochemical quality attributes, PMP products must also be safe for use at the doses intended and efficacious in model systems in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo, following the guidance documents listed above. Once proven efficacious and safe in clinical studies, successful biologic candidates can be approved via a BLA in the United States and a new marketing authorization in the EU.In emergency situations, diagnostic reagents, vaccine antigens, and prophylactic and therapeutic proteins may be deployed prior to normal marketing authorization via fast-track procedures such as the FDA’s emergency use authorization .16 This applies to products approved for marketing in other indications that may be effective in a new emergency indication , and new products that may have preclinical data but little or no clinical safety and efficacy data. Such pathways enable controlled emergency administration of a novel product to patients simultaneously with traditional regulatory procedures required for subsequent marketing approval. In the United States, the FDA has granted EUAs for several diagnostic devices, personal protective devices, and certain other medical devices, and continuously monitors EUAs for drugs. For example, the EUA for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients was short-lived, whereas remdesivir remains under EUA evaluation for severe COVID-19 cases. The mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently undergoing Phase III clinical evaluation by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna/ NIAID, and other vaccines reaching advanced stages of development, are prime candidates for rapid deployment via the EUA process. No PMPs have yet been granted EUA, but plant-made antibodies and other prophylactic and therapeutic APIs may be evaluated and deployed via this route. One example of such a PMP candidate is griffithsin, a broad-spectrum antiviral lectin that could be administered as a prophylactic and/or therapeutic for viral infections, as discussed later.

The FDA’s EUA is a temporary authorization subject to constant review and can be rescinded or extended at any time based on empirical results and the overall emergency environment. Similarly, the EU has granted conditional marketing authorisation to rapidly deploy drugs such as remdesivir for COVID-19 in parallel with the standard marketing approval process for the new indication.The regulations commonly known as the animal rule 17 allow for the approval of drugs and licensure of biologic products when human efficacy studies are not ethical and field trials to study the effectiveness of drugs or biologic products are not feasible. The animal rule is intended for drugs and biologics developed to reduce or prevent serious or life-threatening conditions caused by exposure to lethal or permanently disabling toxic chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear substances. Under the animal rule, efficacy is established based on adequate and well-controlled studies in animal models of the human disease or condition of interest,large pot with drainage and safety is evaluated under the pre-existing requirements for drugs and biologic products.As an example, the plant-derived mAb cocktail ZMapp for Ebola virus disease, manufactured by Kentucky Bioprocessing for Mapp Biopharmaceutical 18 and other partners, and deployed during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, was evaluated only in primates infected with the Congolese variant of the virus , with no randomized controlled clinical trial before administration to infected patients under a compassionate use protocol . Although the fast-track and streamlined review and authorization procedures described above can reduce time-to-deployment and time-to-approval for new or repurposed products, current clinical studies to demonstrate safety and efficacy generally follow traditional sequential designs. Products are licensed or approved for marketing based on statistically significant performance differences compared to controls, including placebo or standards of care, typically generated in large Phase III pivotal trials. One controversial proposal, described in a draft WHO report , is to accelerate the assessment of safety and efficacy for emergency vaccines by administering the medical intervention with deliberate exposure of subjects to the threat agent in a challenge study.

Although the focus of the WHO draft report was on vaccines, the concept could conceivably be extended to non-vaccine prophylactics and therapeutics. Results could be generated quickly as the proportion of treated and control subjects would be known, as would the times of infection and challenge. Challenge studies in humans, also known as controlled human infection models or controlled human infection studies , are fraught with ethical challenges but have already been used to assess vaccines for cholera, malaria, and typhoid . The dilemma for a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 is that there is no rescue medication yet available for those who might contract the disease during the challenge, as there was for the other diseases, putting either study participants or emergency staff at risk .In the EU, the current regulatory environment is a substantial barrier to the rapid expansion of PMP resources to accelerate the approval and deployment of products and reagents at relevant scales in emergency situations. A recent survey of the opinions of key stakeholders in two EU Horizon 2020 programs , discussing the barriers and facilitators of PMPs and new plant breeding techniques in Europe, indicated that the current regulatory environment was seen as one of the main barriers to the further development and scale-up of PMP programs . In contrast, regulations have not presented a major barrier to PMP development in the United States or Canada, other than the lengthy timescales required for regulatory review and product approval in normal times. Realizing current national and global needs, regulatory agencies in the United States, Canada, the EU, and the United Kingdom have drastically reduced the timelines for product review, conditional approval, and deployment. In turn, the multiple unmet needs for rapidly available medical interventions have created opportunities for PMP companies to address such needs with gene expression tools and manufacturing resources that they already possess. This has enabled the ultra-rapid translation of product concepts to clinical development in record times – weeks to months instead of months to years – in keeping with other high-performance bio-manufacturing platforms. The current pandemic situation, plus the tangible possibility of global recurrences of similar threats, may provide an impetus for new investments in PMPs for the development and deployment of products that are urgently needed.An effective vaccine is the best long-term solution to COVID-19 and other pandemics. Worldwide, governments are trying to expedite the process of vaccine development by investing in research, testing, production, and distribution programs, and streamlining regulatory requirements to facilitate product approval and deployment and are doing so with highly aggressive timelines . A key question that has societal implications beyond vaccine development is whether the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 will confer immunity against re-infection and, if so, for how long? Will humans who recover from this infection be protected against a future exposure to the same virus months or years later? Knowing the duration of the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will also help to determine whether, and how often, booster immunizations will be needed if the initial response exceeds the protection threshold . It is clear that some candidate vaccines will have low efficacy , some vaccines will have high efficacy , and some will decline over time and will need booster doses. An updated list of the vaccines in development can be found in the WHO draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.As of August 2020, among the ~25 COVID vaccines in advanced development, five had entered Phase III clinical studies, led by Moderna/NIAID, Oxford University/Astra Zeneca, Pfizer/ BioNTech, Sinopharm, and Sinova Biotech.20 Most of these candidates are intended to induce antibody responses that neutralize SARS-CoV-2, thereby preventing the virus from entering target cells and infecting the host. In some cases, the vaccines may also induce antibody and/or cellular immune responses that eliminate infected cells, thereby limiting the replication of the virus within the infected host . The induction of neutralizing antibodies directed against the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein is considered a priority. The immunogens used to elicit neutralizing antibodies are various forms of the S protein, including the isolated receptor-binding domain . The S protein variants can be expressed in vivo from DNA or mRNA constructs or recombinant adenovirus or vaccinia virus vectors, among others. Alternatively, they can be delivered directly as recombinant proteins with or without an adjuvant or as a constituent of a killed virus vaccine . Many of these approaches are included among the hundreds of vaccine candidates now at the pre-clinical and animal model stages of development. Antibody responses in COVID-19 patients vary greatly. Nearly all infected people develop IgM, IgG, and IgA antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid and S proteins 1–2 weeks after symptoms become apparent, and the antibody titers remain elevated for at least several weeks after the virus is no longer detected in the convalescent patient . The nature and longevity of the antibody response to coronaviruses are relevant to the potency and duration of vaccine-induced immunity. By far the most immunogenic vaccine candidates for antibody responses are recombinant proteins .

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 dry land 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,round plastic plant pot and there is debate on the extent to which simulating CO2 effects actually reproduces the results in free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments .

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, 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 multi-nomial 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,25 liter round pot 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 includechanging 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.

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 . Harou et al. construct a synthetic drought in 2020 based on the paleo-record, rather than GCM projections. Their results regarding agricultural water scarcity and environmental flows are consistent with other CALVIN-SWAP studies. Environmental flows are also extremely restricted. Marginal opportunity costs of environmental flows rise by one or more orders of magnitude with extreme drought as compared to the historic baseline, with the Trinity, Clear Creek, and Sacramento Rivers experiencing the highest increase. Average agricultural water scarcity increases 3900% across the entire state under extreme drought even under well-functioning water markets, which seems somewhat implausible and may result from an overly restrictive model. Although Dale et al. do not calculate scarcity costs, they find that a 60-year drought with 70% reduction in surface flows only moderately impacts the total amount of irrigated acreage in the Central Valley, which declines from 2.4 million hectares to 2.1 million. This suggests that Central Valley farmers tend to have a relatively inelastic groundwater demand, compensating for the loss in surface water with groundwater rather than fallowing. Within the Valley, they find that Tulare Basin has a greater increase in fallowing than the San Joaquin Basin since the former is historically more dependent on groundwater. Dale et al. are also able to capture the increase in aquifer subsidence due to increased withdrawals during the prolonged drought, suggesting that the quality of the aquifer will decline through time with excessive pumping. Joyce et al. use WEAP-CVPM to model climatic changes with 6 GCMs under B1 and A2 scenarios for 2006–2099. Unlike the CALVIN-SWAP studies, they model irrigation efficiency by assuming that vegetable and fruit and nut crops in the Central Valley will be entirely converted to drip irrigation, and half of field crops will be converted by mid-century. They find that these adaptations tend to offset increasing water demands caused by increasing temperatures and periods of drought.