In the realm of food self-sufficiency, innovative production systems, and climate resilience, there is much to learn from island nations and communities that are on the front lines of adapting food systems to and mitigating climate change. Lopez is striving to create a robust, resilient, socially just local food system, a distinct and more complex goal than merely investing in and promoting local food production. Individual farmers starting to adopt and successfully deploy regenerative practices is not the same as creating a sustainable and resilient local food system. A local food system, as outlined in the previous chapter, includes not just production, but transportation, distribution, marketing, retail, preparation, consumption, waste recycling, and education across system elements. A food system that is socially just, compensating farmers fairly for their labor while balancing affordability for the consumer across income groups, requires a change in food system economic transactions from the status quo. A food system that is environmentally sustainable and mitigates climate change, storing more carbon in the soil than it releases and minimizing emissions throughout the system elements, requires transformation of the dominant industrial food system. Lopez farmers are striving to increase and quantify their soil carbon reservoir, with less progress to date on reconfiguring the economic status quo. What can this island farming community tell us about creating and scaling alternatives to the chemical-industrial farming industry? What are the key challenges, tensions,roll bench and opportunities on Lopez for building a local food system that is socially just and environmentally sustainable? What are the next steps for Lopez, and other counties or regions, in moving towards goals and vision statements for re-localized food systems?
These questions, when answered, become relevant not just to farmers and researchers, but importantly, to policymakers, economists, and businesses that must implement new policies and economic structures effectively in partnership with farmer- and community-generated vision statements. Significant to the presentation of results and discussion is the supremacy of private property in the United States legal system. When comparing the Lopez agricultural case study to “idealized” visions of agroecological food systems, many steps towards the “ideal” are thwarted by private property “enclosures” of the agricultural commons, which is more pronounced in the United States than in other geographic contexts.Thus, progress towards visioning and establishing agroecological local food systems must reconcile with unique challenges in the U.S. land tenure system, and ultimately promulgate strategies for loosening the supremacy of private property if real power is to be restored to those growing our food. Through a compilation of fieldwork, ethnographic notes, participant-observation, and immersion into the community, this chapter presents data on the Lopez Island sustainable food system case study, and constructs analysis of food system transformation framed by the paradigm of agroecology . I draw on social science research methods including semi-structured interviews and ethnographic techniques to bring forward ideas and solutions from leaders in the agricultural community of the San Juan Islands. Research partners include the San Juan Island Agricultural Resource Committee , the San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild , the Lopez Community Land Trust , the Lopez Island Farm Education program, Washington State University San Juan County Extension, San Juan Islands Conservation District , Midnight’s Farm, Stonecrest Farm, Sweetbriar Farm, and Lopez Harvest.
I find that the Lopez food system transformation towards resilience, sustainability, and equity is a work in progress, requiring political and economic shifts in order for regenerative food production practices to spark regeneration and equity in other branches of the food system. Significantly, farmland transition barriers and land access challenges3 combined with new and beginning farmer training are areas requiring further investment, investigation, and institutional capacity in order to secure the progress made to date into subsequence generations of sustainable farmers.In the face of climate change and its accelerating impacts, solutions and strategies for adapting and mitigating climate change through island farming are clear. What is needed is governance structures and skillfully crafted policy change to fund and scale these practices democratically. So, this chapter examines Lopez governance structures, from farms to island to county and state scales, and asks: What are the strengths and barriers to realizing a truly sustainable local food system on Lopez? How do perceptions of strengths and barriers differ or align among different governance scales? What are opportunities for immediate action or next steps to move towards the county vision for a sustainable local food system? As Figure 5 illustrates, farms and farmers on Lopez are nested within island, county, and state governance scales. Farms can and do relate to each other horizontally, coming up with mutually beneficial and differentiated roles, responsibilities, and practices, where for example one farm may supply compost to others, while others provide woody debris back to that farm, and all farmers share strategies for eradicating common pests/weeds, taking care of animals in the absence of an island large animal vet, and securing inputs/supplies from both on island and off island sources . Farmers who raise meat share access to a USDA-inspected, certified organic Mobile Processing Unit for slaughtering animals on the island, the first of its kind in the nation and an example of polycentric governance involving island, county, and federal coordination.
Each of these levels of governance are relevant to the conversation, research, and process of working towards a sustainable, equitable and resilient local food system on Lopez. Ultimately, state- and county level political reforms are needed to unlock goals and changes sought by island organizations and farmers at the grassroots level, who are already attempting to self-organize to ensure sustainability of their SES. Governing and “understanding a complex whole requires knowledge about specific variables and how their component parts are related. Thus, we must learn how to dissect and harness complexity, rather than eliminate it from such systems” . In addition to policy and governance structures, education is a key component surrounding food systems that can unlock transformative change. In this case study, a range of environmental and food systems education research are relevant, most significantly: 1) farmer to farmer education on regenerative agricultural practices and 2) climate change education for youth, farmers, and the general public. Farmer to farmer education is a cornerstone of the agroecological paradigm, which recognizes the vast knowledge stores held by experienced farmers as well as trust and value created when farmers share information with each other in horizontal knowledge transfers . Farmer to farmer, or Campesino a Campesino networks are seen as essential to scaling up and out agroecological practices that “enhance the resiliency of agroecosystems” . This educational form shares much with critical pedagogy, popularized by Paolo Freire in Brazil in the 1970s, which similarly emphasizes horizontal relationships between teacher and student, where both teachers and students are encouraged to ask and answer questions in an anti-oppression, anti-hierarchical “classroom” that aspires to higher goals of transformational social change and justice . Farmers hold unique and practical forms of knowledge that have developed historically in the United States context through both firsthand experience and institutions such as land-grant universities, Cooperative Extension,drying rack cannabis and the Farmer’s Bureau. Farmer knowledge in the United States has become centralized in the hands of institutions and corporations who exercise power over large aspects of the food system, from production to consumption. This consolidation of knowledge is related to corporate consolidation and corporate funding of agricultural sciences in research institutions including land-grant universities and Cooperative Extension offices . Corporate and institutional influence over farmer knowledge and practices intersects with the National Farm Bill policies and system of subsidies and crop insurance, policies over which corporations also exercise influence, thereby dictating a pattern of mechanized, chemical intensive farming that is practiced on a large scale in the United States, a pattern that is self reinforcing. Unsurprisingly, as part of this top-down knowledge transfer funded by fossil fuel interests, farmers as a population demographic in the United States have been skeptical about human-caused climate change and expressed reluctance to take mitigative action . However, there has been a notable shift recently due to extreme weather impacts on the Midwest and California that are making climate change a harder reality to ignore, and leading some farmers to declare that “farmers and rural Americans, that’s who’s going to solve this; We have the land for renewable energy, and we have the farming systems to sequester carbon” .
A farmer in Missouri informed The Guardian that “as climate change bites, farmers are increasingly accepting of the science as they are forced to spend more money on equipment and seeds to maintain current crop yields” . Importantly, research indicates that “farmers who were concerned about the impacts of climate change on agriculture were more supportive of adaptive and mitigative action and those who attributed climate change to human activities were more likely to support government action on mitigation” . Experiential education in climate resilient agriculture for farmers will be important to translating research into action, enabling sustainable local food systems transformation. Improving farmer and future farmer climate literacy is a crucial component of scaling and handing off climate friendly practices such as those identified in the literature , yet remains an area that has been under explored in food systems research. There is little mention of training or educating farmers about climate change, and minimal mention in the K-12 educational arena of incorporating climate change into school food programs like Farm to School. Farm to School programs refer broadly to environmental literacy in their education program element, but there is much room to grow for both FTS and adult beginning farmer training programs to incorporate coherent standards and curricula around climate literacy. Like all forms of environmental literacy, it comprises knowledge, attitude, and engagement/action dimensions . Concepts like environmental and climate literacy are notoriously difficult to measure and quantify but are nevertheless important educational objectives to build into both K-12 and farmer education spaces coherently through content and activities aligned with the best available science. While the Lopez farmer population is already largely climate-engaged and active, the development of climate and environmental literacy among young people and aspiring farmers is important and in need of development, outlined further below and in Chapter 4, which focuses on education. The following sections apply literature on agroecology, agriculture and climate change, SES, and climate education to the past, present, and potential futures for the Lopez Island farming community.Development pressures building up in the 1990s and 2000s began to adversely impact farmland and housing access. In 1989, the Lopez Community Land Trust formed in response to a rapidly emerging affordable housing crisis on the island, as home prices rose 190% in one year. The Land Trust immediately focused energies on fundraising and building affordable housing communities, breaking ground on the first set of homes in 1990, and eventually completing the award-winning net zero Common Ground community in 2006, recognized for its innovative integration of straw bale construction, local materials, rainwater catchment system, solar hot water heating, and community solar array. The Land Trust adopted sustainable agriculture as core to its mission from the outset, recognizing the need to “provide permanently affordable access to land for such purposes as quality housing, sustainable agriculture and forestry, cottage industries and co-operatives by forever removing the land from the speculative market” . In 1996 LCLT collaborated to bring the nation’s first mobile meat processing unit to the islands to humanely slaughter animals, managed by the newly formed Island Grown Farmers Cooperative . The mobile processing unit is USDA-inspected and greatly reduces costs from transporting animals off island for slaughter. LCLT helped establish the Lopez Island Farm Education program in 2006, as well as a sustainable agriculture internship program that has funded and placed over 65 interns on island farms to learn regenerative practices for farmer-educators. LCLT initiated the Lopez Island Farm Trust in 2018 to preserve parcels of farmland in perpetuity, starting with the purchase of the historic Stonecrest Farm property for $1,000,000. LCLT’s accomplishments are summarized in Figure 6. Today, farmers specialize in crops such as grass-fed meats, berries, tree fruits, diverse vegetables, grains, fiber, lavender and herbs, as well as value-added products including preserves, cheeses, ciders, and wines .