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This paper offers an alternative approach for engaging sociologically, ontologically, and politically with digital farming platforms. A challenge faced by any approach looking to upend intellectual conventions, especially ontological ones, lies in the question of representation, namely, how do we talk about digitization in novel theoretical ways using language rooted in more than two millennia of western human-centered thought? One way to deal with this challenge, the one adopted in this paper, involves decentering familiar terms and repurposing them. Thus, rather than organizing the argument around familiar terms like small and big data, I argue instead that we organize data-assemblages according to what they do, which makes this a political ontological project. To do this, I offer the relational predicate of weak data and strong data, suggesting that they are good to think with in this regard. The argument ultimately lands at a place for analyzing these platforms that offers the potential for critique and perhaps even a degree of optimism, as I suggest a framework for normatively evaluating these practices. The paper draws upon various empirical studies of digital agriculture conducted by the author, which include interviews with farmers, farm laborers, hacktivists, investors, and engineers from numerous countries and locales.

In this study, a cross-cultural analysis was undertaken to compare the knowledge of organic producers and agricultural experts in Iran concerning the concepts of good farming, good farmer, and orga...

How do we make agricultural practice more sustainable? One way to examine the drivers and barriers to transitions within agriculture is through the sustainability transitions framework. However, th...

This paper adopts a relational, also known as a topological, approach to food accessibility—the idea that food spaces are best understood as relational becomings rather than as voids filled exclusively with mass (immutable materiality) and address (geospatial coordinates). It is animated by an experimental spirit, in terms of the methods employed, the data collected, and by how those data are brought together, which together better enriches inductive theorizing. The project looks at the daily macro-mobilities—trips from one GPS coordinate to another—of 70 Coloradoans, triangulated with qualitative semi-structured interview data. Data collection occurred over three phases: baseline interviews, which lasted approximately 45 min; 30-day study period, which involved using a GPS tracking app. on their mobile phones; and follow-up interviews that lasted roughly two hours. The paper, through inductive theorizing and methodological experimentation, contributes to the critical food mapping scholarship in three ways: first, by looking at rural and urban food environments and livelihoods (as opposed to focusing exclusively on the latter); second, by focusing on mobilities as opposed to fixities (an example of the former: mapping projects that reduce food access to Euclidean coordinates); and, lastly, by its conceptual innovations attributed to phenomena such as life course and geographies of care.

Here, we study the dichotomy of the escaping atmosphere of the newly discovered close-in exoplanet AU Mic b. On one hand, the high EUV stellar flux is expected to cause a strong atmospheric escape in AU Mic b. On the other hand, the wind of this young star is believed to be very strong, which could reduce or even inhibit the planet's atmospheric escape. AU Mic is thought to have a wind mass-loss rate that is up to $1000$ times larger than the solar wind mass-loss rate ($\dot{M}_\odot$). To investigate this dichotomy, we perform 3D hydrodynamics simulations of the stellar wind--planetary atmosphere interactions in the AU Mic system and predict the synthetic Ly-$\alpha$ transits of AU Mic b. We systematically vary the stellar wind mass-loss rate from a `no wind' scenario to up to a stellar wind with a mass-loss rate of $1000~\dot{M}_\odot$. We find that, as the stellar wind becomes stronger, the planetary evaporation rate decreases from $6.5\times 10^{10}$ g/s to half this value. With a stronger stellar wind, the atmosphere is forced to occupy a smaller volume, affecting transit signatures. Our predicted Ly-$\alpha$ absorption drops from $\sim 20\%$, in the case of `no wind' to barely any Ly-$\alpha$ absorption in the extreme stellar wind scenario. Future Ly-$\alpha$ transits could therefore place constraints not only on the evaporation rate of AU Mic b, but also on the mass-loss rate of its host star., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication as a Letter in MNRAS

While easy to empirically document the explicit bias underlying authoritarian populism, most of the individuals animating the movement are driven by sentiments harder to detect, such as implicit bi...

This article engages with two rich but largely disparate research traditions: one looks at ethical consumption, that is, constructions and contestations around good food, while the other interrogates the equally contested space of what it means to be a good farmer. The argument is informed by qualitative data collected from, on the one hand, those engaged in shaping urban food policy and institutional procurement plans in Denver, Colorado, and, on the other hand, rural Colorado farmers and ranchers who supply out-of-state markets. Given the growing appeal of locally sourced food from smaller scale producers utilizing certain so-called ethical management practices (resulting in, e.g. cage-free chickens, organic food, and grass-fed beef), the article asks, “how are particular markers of good food,” which I show to be commonly held in urban foodscapes, “understood by rural producers?,” and “how do these constructions play into their conceptions of what it means to be a good farmer?” Conceptually, the argument is situated within a moral economy framework, which reminds us that the market is always mediated by institutions, individuals, and communities and vice versa. This framework emphasizes the point that markets are moralizing – and demoralizing – entities. The article adds to the fields of sociology of consumption and critical agrifood studies by interrogating aspects of how the two “ends” of the supply chain are interconnected. Eaters’ constructions of good food and producers’ understandings of what it means to be a good farmer are shown to be intertwined.

Though a small fraction of the US citizenry, agricultural producers are directly responsible for the stewardship of almost half of the country’s land. This group is therefore an especially important one to understand from the standpoint of how they process and respond to science as it relates to agroecological phenomena. Data from a sample (n = 111) of farmers and ranchers located in the US state of Colorado are used to expand our understanding of how food producers process scientific claims. These insights, I argue, help us think through public understandings of science more generally. Using semi-structured interviews, the paper unpacks an identified asymmetry in how respondents perceive climate science and the science associated with genetically modified food and seed. These tensions are interrogated with the help of a novel methodological design that generated data converted to shading matrices—also known as heat maps. The heat maps illuminate certain cultural values among respondents, which were reinforced by motivated reasoning. This allows for an interrogation of tensions and inconsistencies in respondents’ remarks about a variety of scientific claims. The heat maps, coupled with the qualitative data, allow for an exploration into how respondents perceive certain salient socio-technical issues.

Potatoes are the most consumed vegetable worldwide and play an important role in the U.S. economy. Growers make critical decisions each year in choosing which cultivar to grow, based on factors such as yield, resilience to the growing environment, and utility in the food industry. Current research supports the finding that less-common specialty cultivars (SCs) have benefits for human health. However, growers have been slow to adopt SCs into mainstream operations. Here, we identify major factors in the decision-making process that determine whether a population of growers in the San Luis Valley, Colorado, a major potato-growing region, adopt SC potatoes. We used a combination of ethnographic techniques and quantitative methods to examine drivers of adoption. The data demonstrate grower perceptions within potato farming and the complexity of interacting factors in decision-making. An integration of the Theory of Planned Behavior, Rational Expectation Hypothesis, and Diffusion of Innovation models identifies economic and social factors that influence grower decision-making. Growers that were more aware of specialty cultivar innovation and associated consumer demand were more open to SCs adoption. Other influencing factors include a grower’s experience selling a SC in the previous year and access to diverse markets. Based on these data, we developed a new model to explain grower decision-making processes in adopting SCs. The model demonstrates that one current barrier to adoption is access to buyers, including warehouses, retailers, and households. Taken together, this research demonstrates how rational expectations stem from economic outcomes, knowledge, and experience in the potato industry. These results are important in helping to consider opportunities for growers to access new, higher value markets, while also improving consumer access to nutritious cultivars.

High-energy stellar irradiation can photoevaporate planetary atmospheres, which can be observed in spectroscopic transits of hydrogen lines. For the exoplanet HD189733b, multiple observations in the Ly-$\alpha$ line have shown that atmospheric evaporation is variable, going from undetected to enhanced evaporation in a $1.5$-year interval. Coincidentally or not, when HD189733b was observed to be evaporating, a stellar flare had just occurred 8h prior to the observation. This led to the question of whether this temporal variation in evaporation occurred due to the flare, an unseen associated coronal mass ejection (CME), or even the effect of both simultaneously. In this work, we investigate the impact of flares (radiation), winds, and CMEs (particles) on the atmosphere of HD189733b using 3D radiation hydrodynamic simulations of atmospheric evaporation that self-consistently include stellar photon heating. We study four cases: first- the quiescent phase of the star including stellar wind, second- a flare, third- a CME, and fourth- a flare that is followed by a CME. Compared to the quiescent case, we find that the flare alone increases the evaporation rate by only 25%, while the CME leads to a factor of 4 increase in escape rate. We calculate Ly-$\alpha$ synthetic transits and find that the flare alone cannot explain the observed high blueshifted velocities seen in the Ly-$\alpha$ observation. The CME, however, leads to an increase in the velocity of the escaping atmosphere, enhancing the transit depth at high blueshifted velocities. While the effects of CMEs show a promising potential to explain the blueshifted line feature, our models are not able to fully explain the blueshifted transit depths, indicating that they might require additional physical mechanisms., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 14 pages, 9 figures

Organic nutrient sources (ONS) are managed as a key resource by smallholder farmers to maintain the productivity of soils. Recycling of ONS by applying them to soils is a globally dominant strategy of ecological nutrient management. Understanding how ONS produced on-farm are allocated and what drives farmer decision making around their use is critical for sustainable nutrient management in smallholder agroecosystems. Using focus group discussions and a survey of 184 farming households, we studied socio-economic, socio-cultural, and environmental drivers of ONS allocation and use at the farm scale in three contrasting agroecological zones of western Kenya. Farm typologies of ONS management were also developed using cluster analysis based on resource endowment and the connectedness of farmers, management norms, and interaction with extension. Our findings suggest that the more resource endowed a farmer is, the more ONS are allocated to the main plot within the farm. We also observed that farmers preferred allocating more resources to plots that were considered more fertile. Land tenure had an important influence, in that main plots not owned by farmers were more likely to retain ONS such as crop residues. Management of residues is dependent on farmer gender, for instance, female farmers tended to burn legume residues in particular, which is notable since these higher quality residues are often considered key to sustainable soil nutrient management. Farm typologies featured different allocation patterns of ONS and were associated with resource endowment and farmer networks, including external ties to extension agents and internal ties to other farmers. Finally, there was a strong overarching influence of agroecological zone that often escapes characterization on the allocation of ONS. As research and development organizations continue to engage with smallholder farmers to reduce the burden of global food insecurity, the insights gained by this research will allow better anticipation of drivers and obstacles to improved nutrient management in these farming landscapes and communities.

We are living in an era of the audit. Sustainability indicators are used to ensure that industries are behaving responsibly. The audits are well elaborated in their environmental requirements, but they are often less directly engaged with issues of social sustainability. Should they be? After describing a number of challenges with measuring social sustainability, this paper defends representing social sustainability through indicators by taking a performative orientation toward them. Here, we suggest holding a relationally real analytical stance about what contributes to more equitable and diverse assembling processes. In iteratively doing so, we can work to determine indicators that are less focused upon the practices they are meant to represent, and more on their potential impact on intended audiences. In other words, this takes up the suggestion that indicators are themselves agents and then takes this a couple of steps further by arguing for the potential work social scientists can do using indicators to move toward better futures. We ground this theorizing in two short vignettes taken from the authors’ work in food and agriculture cooperatives and also in a fruit industry.

Within the market-making literature lies nuanced discussions dealing with the plurality and construction of subjectivities and value. These topics have been of particular interest to those interested in platforms hoping to engender so called caring capitalism, which speaks to financial ecologies that are both more-or-less market and more-or-less social. The empirics of this paper draw from research involving two groups: (1) U.S. food entrepreneurs operating less than three years who turned to community-based lending platforms for financing and (2) U.S. food entrepreneurs operating less than three years who turned to conventional national lenders (the JP Morgan Chase’s and Bank of America’s of the world) for financing. Qualitative semi-structured interviews are triangulated with data from a survey instrument that resulted in the generation of a word cloud for each group depicting respondents’ goals and outlooks. The argument is animated by an embodied reading of the “ecologies” concept (e.g., Hall, 2012; Langley and Leyshon, 2017b; Lai, 2016: 30), which is employed to further attune the analysis to the emergence and mobilization of variegated socio-material practices. The goal is to further enliven relational economic geography and sociology as I explore how entrepreneurs come to embody the outlooks they do.

This paper draws from interviews with (1) US farmers who have adopted automated systems; (2) individuals employed by North American firms that engineer, manufacture, and/or repair these technologie...

Some are predicting that as much as 70% of the nation’s farmland will exchange hands between 2011 and 2031 (Dean, 2011). Given these changes looming on the food horizon, there is a need to better understand the processes, barriers, and opportunities related to intergenerational farm transfer, especially at the rural-urban interface. I draw upon data collected through interviews with five distinct populations: first-generation farmer, beginning (FGB); first-generation farmer, experienced (FGE); multigenerational farmer, beginning (MGB); multigenerational farmer, experienced (MGE); and first generational farmer, aspiring (FGA). Two questions in particular are addressed: (1) what are the different values, motivations, and perceptions among FGB, FGE, MGB, MGE, and FGA toward farming and how do these experiences shape on-farm practices and (2) what are the barriers to farm entry (structural, economic, social and epistemic) and how have respondents worked to overcome them? The data used to explore these questions are drawn from semi-structured interviews with individuals from each of the aforementioned farm categories located near Omaha, Nebraska, or Des Moines, Iowa.

This article is based on research conducted in Colorado in late-2019 and again post-COVID outbreak, from April through May of 2020. In addition to (virtual) face-to-face interviews, the study used ...

Using 3D radiative MHD simulations and Lyman-$��$ transit calculations, we investigate the effect of magnetic fields on the observational signatures of atmospheric escape in exoplanets. Using the same stellar wind, we vary the planet's dipole field strength ($B_p$) from 0 to 10G. For $B_p3$G in the blue wing) the absorption increases caused by the growing volume of the magnetosphere. Finally we show that transits below and above the mid-disc differ caused by the asymmetry of the double tail structure., Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 12 pages, 8 figures

In addition to upending nearly every segment of the economy, COVID-19 has uprooted social life as we know it and the innumerable discourses and practices therein contained. While a terrible event, it can also be approached as offering a once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) natural experiment. This is certainly true as far as the global pandemic applies to how and what we eat, given how it has radically altered many everyday food-related practices, whether due to supply chain failures or state-mandates (e.g., shelter-in-place orders). This paper is based on data collected pre- and post-outbreak, triangulating survey and qualitative data, in an attempt to further interrogate the concepts of ethical consumption and activism broadly defined, including the idea of consumer activism. With conceptual assistance from social practice theory, the paper interrogates certain long-standing questions in the literature, such as ethical consumption's link to other forms of political action. It also poses new ones, such as by disentangling the various ways individuals do (and do not do) ethical consumption. Finally, the data suggest tentative empirical and conceptual paths forward as we contemplate ethical consumption and social activism more generally in the shadow of COVID-19.

The growing interest in incentivizing sustainable agricultural practices is supported by a large network of voluntary production standards, which aim to offer farmers and ranchers increased value for their product in support of reduced environmental impact. To be effective with producers and consumers alike, these standards must be both credible and broadly recognizable, and thus are typically highly generalizable. However, the environmental impact of agriculture is strongly place-based and varies considerably due to complex biophysical, socio-cultural, and management-based factors, even within a given sector in a particular region. We suggest that this contradiction between the placeless generality of standards and the placed-ness of agriculture renders many sustainability standards ineffective. In this policy and practice review, we examine this contradiction through the lens of beef production, with a focus on an ongoing regional food purchasing effort in Denver, Colorado, USA. We review the idea of place in the context of agricultural sustainability, drawing on life cycle analysis and diverse literature to find that recognition of place-specific circumstances is essential to understanding environmental impact and improving outcomes. We then examine the case of the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), a broad set of food-purchasing standards currently being implemented for institutional purchasing in Denver. The GFPP was created through a lengthy stakeholder-inclusive process for use in Los Angeles, California, USA, and has since been applied to many cities across the country. The difference between Los Angeles' process and that of applying the result of Los Angeles' process to Denver is instructive, and emblematic of the flaws of generalizable sustainability standards themselves. We then describe the essential elements of a place-based approach to agricultural sustainability standards, pointing toward a democratic, process-based, and outcome-oriented strategy that results in standards that enable rather than hinder the creativity of both producers and consumers. Though prescription is anathema to our approach, we close by offering a starting point for the development of standards for beef production in Colorado that respect the work of people in place.

The future of food is uncertain. We are facing an overwhelming number of interconnected and complex challenges related to the ways we grow, distribute, access, eat, and dispose of food. Yet, there are stories of hope and opportunities for radical transition towards food systems that enhance the ability of living things to co-evolve. In this chapter we summarize the rationale for this Handbook on Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems and reflect on the value and contribution of regenerative approaches to achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We them propose six principles for regenerative food systems that build on the diverse contributions that make up this book: acknowledging and including diverse forms of knowing and being; taking care of people, animals and the planet; moving beyond capitalist approaches; commoning the food system; promoting accountable innovations; and long-term planning and rural–urban relations. We conclude by reflecting on the value of regenerative food systems as a concept and practice, proposing it has the potential to move us beyond the boundaries of sustainability. Regenerative approaches take into account not only farming systems, but also farm families, rural communities, landscapes, and regions and ecosystems. They are key to our collective food futures.

This paper challenges conventional understandings of how we think about consumer food waste by investigating the food purchasing/wasting views and practices of 102 Colorado (USA) residents (67 households). The methods used in this study included the triangulation of surveys, self-reported pictures of food waste and related daily reports over a two-week period, and focus groups. Understanding who is, and what are, driving food waste is important if the aim is to create policy interventions that meaningfully mitigate loss. This paper approaches concepts like consumer sovereignty and agency through a non-essentialist lens, which is to say it repositions food waste as a mode of ordering as opposed to an outcome of discrete, self-evident products—e.g., attitudes, autonomous consumers. Doing this opens the analysis up to connections that might otherwise go unrecognized when those categories are assumed to be absolute and obvious. After presenting numerical data gleaned from online surveys, findings are organized around the following themes: humans-as-assemblage; storage devices-as-assemblage; and mobility-as-assemblage. The paper concludes synthesizing these themes while suggesting interventions mindful of these fluid socio-material coming-togethers.

This handbook includes contributions from established and emerging scholars from around the world and draws on multiple approaches and subjects to explore the socio-economic, cultural, ecological, institutional, legal, and policy aspects of regenerative food practices.The future of food is uncertain. We are facing an overwhelming number of interconnected and complex challenges related to the ways we grow, distribute, access, eat, and dispose of food. Yet, there are stories of hope and opportunities for radical change towards food systems that enhance the ability of living things to co-evolve. Given this, activities and imaginaries looking to improve, rather than just sustain, communities and ecosystems are needed, as are fresh perspectives and new terminology. The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems addresses this need. The chapters cover diverse practices, geographies, scales, and entry-points. They focus not only on the core requirements to deliver sustainable agriculture and food supply, but go beyond this to think about how these can also actively participate with social-ecological systems. The book is presented in an accessible way, with reflection questions meant to spark discussion and debate on how to transition to safe, just, and healthy food systems. Taken together, the chapters in this handbook highlight the consequences of current food practices and showcase the multiple ways that people are doing food differently.

The paper takes a critical look at how food retail firms use big data, looking specifically at how these techniques and technologies govern our ability to imagine food worlds. It does this by drawing on two sets of data: (1) interviews with twenty-one individuals who oversaw the use of big data applications in a retail setting and (2) five consumer focus groups composed of individuals who regularly shopped at major food chains along Colorado’s Front Range. For reasons described below, the “nudge” provides the conceptual entry point for this analysis, as these techniques are typically expressed through big data-driven nudges. The argument begins by describing the nudge concept and how it is used in the context of retail big data. This is followed by a discussion of methods. The remainder of the paper discusses how big data are used to nudge consumers and the effects of these practices. This analysis is organized around three themes that emerged out of the qualitative data: path dependency, products; path dependency, retail; and path dependency, habitus. The paper concludes connecting these themes through the concept of governance, particularly by way of their ability to, in Foucault’s (2003: 241) words, have “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” worlds.

The article examines two seemingly disparate case studies, one involving conventional corn producers and agriculture professionals located in North Dakota, the other focusing on participants in a diverse urban agriculture cooperative in an anonymized U.S. city. Drawing on qualitative interviews and data-presenting devices known as “word clouds,” the article explores how, and to a lesser extent why, understandings of the terms “social justice” and “autonomy” varied between these spaces. While these imagined political ontologies differed greatly, the article describes each case as grounded in a shared neoliberal (“real”) world that negatively impacts both populations, a realization that could provide a source of recognition and reconciliation between groups. The article concludes by asking why those interviewed in the rural space failed to understand their marginalization to be an artifact of the neoliberal highly individualistic worldview that their articulated imaginaries appear to support, while also exploring how the divergent political ontologies between the groups can be brought into better conversation with each other.

This paper draws from data collected through interviews with the following groups: big data and/or precision farm equipment firm employees from numerous countries; commodity farmers in the U.S. who use big data; individuals from the U.S.-based Right to Repair movement; and farmers associated with Farm Hack from the U.S. and the U.K. With this as the empirical backdrop, the author interrogates the concept of “access” by way of the phenomena of justice, ontology, and claims making—emergent themes to come out of the qualitative data. This in turn allows the author to conceptually, analytically, and empirically unpack the concept into the following three categories: access, property, and sovereignty. A framework then emerges to talk about these socio-technical assemblages in terms of what they do and the political ontologies they engender, recognizing, for instance, that while access can afford individuals and groups benefits it can also detract from an individual's and/or group's ability to flourish. Being able to identify those practices of agro-digital governance that afford sovereignty can inform policies and programs by nurturing an understanding the worlds they make possible. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Agricultural production contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. If the agricultural sector is to mitigate its contributions, farmers must actively adopt conservation practices. Recent studies have shown farmers’ beliefs about climate change to be influential in their support for adopting these practices. This study explores how social groups and their climate change messages interact with regional biophysical expressions of climate change to influence farmers’ climate change beliefs. We apply a recently revised realist framework to qualitative data from 104 interviews with corn farmers in Iowa and Indiana, United States (US). Our findings illustrate that many farmers are able to detect the biophysical expressions of climate change; however, their acknowledgement of the impacts of climate change in most cases does not translate into an acknowledgement of the anthropogenic nature of climate change. Conflicting social messages produce uncertainty about or disbelief in human...

Cities are increasingly turning to food policy plans to support goals related to food access, food security, the environment, and economic development. This paper investigates ways that rural farmers, communities, and economies can both support and be supported by metropolitan food-focused initiatives. Specifically, our research question asked what opportunities and barriers exist to developing food policies that support urban food goals, particularly related to local procurement, as well as rural economic development. To address this question, we described and analyzed a meeting of urban stakeholders and larger-scale rural producers related to Colorado’s Denver Food Vision and Plan. We documented and explored “findings„ gleaned from a supply chain diagraming and data compilation process that were then used to inform an event that brought together diverse supply chain partners. Three findings stand out. First, facilitating dialog between urban food policymakers and rural producers to understand potential tensions, mitigate such tensions, and capitalize on opportunities is essential. Second, perceptions and expectations surrounding “good food„ are nuanced—a timely finding given the number of preferred procurement programs emerging across the county. Third, critical evaluation is needed across a diverse set of value chain strategies (e.g., conventional and alternative distribution) if food policy intends to support heterogeneous producers, their communities, and urban food policy goals.

As a star spins-down during the main sequence, its wind properties are affected. In this work, we investigate how the Earth's magnetosphere has responded to the change in the solar wind. Earth's magnetosphere is simulated using 3D magnetohydrodynamic models that incorporate the evolving local properties of the solar wind. The solar wind, on the other hand, is modelled in 1.5D for a range of rotation rates Omega from 50 to 0.8 times the present-day solar rotation (Omega_sun). Our solar wind model uses empirical values for magnetic field strengths, base temperature and density, which are derived from observations of solar-like stars. We find that for rotation rates ~10 Omega_sun, Earth's magnetosphere was substantially smaller than it is today, exhibiting a strong bow shock. As the sun spins down, the magnetopause standoff distance varies with Omega^{-0.27} for higher rotation rates (early ages, > 1.4 Omega_sun), and with Omega^{-2.04} for lower rotation rates (older ages, < 1.4 Omega_sun). This break is a result of the empirical properties adopted for the solar wind evolution. We also see a linear relationship between magnetopause distance and the thickness of the shock on the subsolar line for the majority of the evolution (< 10 Omega_sun). It is possible that a young fast rotating Sun would have had rotation rates as high as 30 to 50 Omega_sun. In these speculative scenarios, at 30 Omega_sun, a weak shock would have been formed, but for 50 Omega_sun, we find that no bow shock could be present around Earth's magnetosphere. This implies that with the Sun continuing to spin down, a strong shock would have developed around our planet, and remained for most of the duration of the solar main sequence., Accepted to MNRAS

This article seeks to answer the following questions. How are digital platforms encountered and felt by producers and consumers and how do these assemblages shape the foodscapes we imagine and enact? How do elements like digital locks, proprietary code, and ‘open’ code inform how we think about the subject of agrofood governance? Finally, what are the lives being made to live, and left to let die, as a result of digital platforms, from those employing digital locks and proprietary software to those built on open source code? To do this, the paper draws upon two case studies. The first examines London-area producers and consumers linked to the web-based distribution platform FarmDrop. This is followed by a case study involving US producers loosely linked to the group Farm Hack; a group that promotes technology that is collectively built and freely shared, and which desires to ‘hack’ that which is not. To conclude, the article turns briefly to Berry's (2001) thoughts on interactivity. While insightful, as the concept helps us think about the less-than-overt ways in which code-based assemblages enable and disable, the aforementioned case studies allow for some refinements to what it means to do and be interactive.

This article has multiple aims: (1) to understand, with the help of descriptive statistics, how eaters engaged within various alternative foodscapes compare to more conventional eaters when asked questions about things like their interest in local politics, whether they volunteer, and their reasons for buying local foods; (2) to map, with the help of descriptive statistics, changes in how individuals respond to questions after being “exposed” to certain alternative foodscape experiences; (3) and to understand, with the help of practice theory and qualitative data, why individuals might think and behave differently after being exposed to these alternative doings and sayings, findings that lead to a discussion about how aspects of these alternative foodscapes engender the making of more-than-active citizens. A research team studied individuals in Colorado who had recently begun participating in one of the following practices: (1) drop-off community-supported agriculture (CSA), (2) CSA volunteer membership, (3) farmers’ market, and (4) member-owned food cooperative. Researchers surveyed participants and resurveyed them two years later, at which time sampled eaters were also engaged in an extensive qualitative interview, with a total of 119 personal interviews conducted. In addition, the team conducted a phone survey (n = 106) of randomly selected residents in Colorado to represent conventional eaters.

Drawing upon original research examining urban agriculture projects in Denver, Colorado, this article explores the “growing” metaphor used in community development circles, especially those involving food-growing schemes. The authors propose the following analytic distinction: above ground/below ground. The former refers to those capitals we count as community development scholars, whereas the latter speaks to the values shaping the capitals that community members feel ought to count. The article also brings together previously disparate literatures that have more in common than their respective track records suggest – the (above ground) community capitals and (below ground) diverse economies approaches. While explorative, this article aims to help others understand the complex processes involved in not only the generating of community capitals but in the practices and discourses that lead to them being valued by stakeholders.