Sustainable provision of food, energy and clean water requires understanding of the interdependencies among systems as well as the motivations and incentives of farmers and rural policy makers. Agriculture lies at the heart of interactions among food, energy and water systems. It is an increasingly energy intensive enterprise, but is also a growing source of energy. Agriculture places large demands on water supplies while poor practices can degrade water quality. Each of these interactions creates opportunities for modeling driven by sensor-based and qualitative data collection to improve the effectiveness of system operation and control in the short term as well as investments and planning for the long term. The large volume and complexity of the data collected creates challenges for decision support and stakeholder communication. The DataFEWSion National Research Traineeship program aims to build a community of researchers that explores, develops and implements effective data-driven decision-making to efficiently produce food, transform primary energy sources into energy carriers, and enhance water quality. The initial cohort includes PhD students in agricultural and biosystems, chemical, and industrial engineering as well as statistics and crop production and physiology.
The project aims to prepare trainees for multiple career paths such as research scientist, bioeconomy entrepreneur, agribusiness leader, policy maker, agriculture analytics specialist, and professor. The traineeship has four key components. First, trainees will complete a new graduate certificate to build competencies in fundamental understanding of interactions among food production, water quality and bioenergy; data acquisition, visualization, and analytics; complex systems modeling for decision support; and the economics, policy and sociology of the FEW nexus. Second, they will conduct interdisciplinary research on (a) technologies and practices to increase agriculture’s contributions to energy supply while reducing its negative impacts on water quality and human health; (b) data science to increase crop productivity within the constraints of sustainable intensification; or (c) decision sciences to manage tradeoffs and promote best practices among diverse stakeholders. Third, they will participate in a new graduate learning community to consist of a two-year series of workshops that focus in alternate years on the context of the Midwest agricultural FEW nexus and professional development; and fourth, they will have small-group experiences to promote collaboration and peer review. Each trainee will create and curate a portfolio that combines artifacts from coursework and research with reflections on the broader impacts of their work. Trainee recruitment emphasizes women and underrepresented groups.
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How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
Scholars are increasingly calling for the environmental issues of the industrial agricultural system to be addressed via eventual agroecological system-level transformation. It is critical to identify the barriers to this transition. Drawing from Henke’s (Cultivating science, harvesting power: science and industrial agriculture in California, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008) theory of “repair,” we explore how farmers participate in the reproduction of the industrial system through “discursive repair,” or arguing for the continuation of the industrial agriculture system. Our empirical case relates to water pollution from nitrogen fertilizer and draws data from a sample of over 150 interviews with row-crop farmers in the midwestern United States. We find that farmers defend this system by denying agriculture’s causal role and proposing the potential for within-system solutions. They perform these defenses by drawing on ideological positions (agrarianism, market-fundamentalism and techno-optimism) and may be ultimately led to seek system maintenance because they are unable to envision an alternative to the industrial agriculture system.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10154685
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- ISSN:
- 0889-048X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10030-y
