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1. “Can biotech solve the nitrogen dilemma? Reengineering soil ecologies and reconceptualizing soil health.”

   Kendig, Catherine (September 2024, European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) Congress.)

   Part of symposium organized by Kendig and Thompson on The social epistemology of engineered agricultural ecosystems (with Paul Thompson, Per Sandin and Rachel Ankeny). European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) Congress. 

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2. The need for more inclusive deliberation on ethics and governance in agricultural and food biotechnology

   https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2024.2304383  

   Kendig, Catherine; Selfa, Theresa; Thompson, Paul B; Anthony, Raymond; Bauchspies, Wenda; Blue, Gwendolyn; Das, Ashmita; Harrison, Rebecca; Henke, Chris; Jin, Shan; et al (December 2024, Journal of Responsible Innovation)

   An inclusive and socially legitimate governance structure is absent to address concerns over new agricultural biotechnologies. Establishing an agricultural bioethics commission devoted to inclusive deliberation on ethics and governance in agricultural and food biotechnology is urgent. Highlighting the social and ethical dimensions of current agricultural bioengineering disputes in the food system, we discuss how a nationally recognized policy forum could improve decision-making and increase public understanding of the issues. We clarify ways the concepts that are used to categorize food and frame governance of food affect consumer choices, and how dissemination of information and the mode of dissemination can contribute to social inequities. We cite the record of medically-oriented bioethic commissions and the history of international bioethic commissions in support of our argument, and end by discussing what such a commission dedicated to agriculture and food issues could reasonably be expected to achieve. 

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3. What Philosophers Can Learn from Agrotechnology: Agricultural Metaphysics, Sustainable Egg Production Standards as Ontologies, and Why and How Canola Exists

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37484-5_8  

   Kendig, Catherine (January 2023, Springer International Publishing)

   Agriculture is defined normatively and, as such, is an area of research and practice where values are an inextricable constituent of research, where facts and values elide, and normative constraints generate new ethical categories. While discussions of normativity are part and parcel within agricultural ethics and play a prominent role in ethical discussions, I suggest that other areas of agricultural philos-ophy such as agricultural metaphysics or ontologies present valuable case studies for philosophical discussion. A series of case studies focusing on how products are clas-sified, graded, and measured illustrate conceptions of existence, causal relationships, and practice-oriented notions of category-making distinctive of agricultural practice. The first of these case studies shines a light on the process of knowledge integration in agriculture. I show how innovative integration, a process discussed within socially sustainable egg production, is an ineliminably normative process. The second case study, and the main focus of the chapter, concerns the normative role of agricultural standards. I discuss how standards and classes in use within egg production systems and the development and measuring techniques make AA eggs and transformed a highly toxic oilseed rape (used as a machine lubricant) into the non-toxic food-grade agricultural commodity, canola. I contend agricultural products like eggs, peanut butter, and canola oil are constituted by prescribed standards (like AA eggs and double-zero canola) that define not only the product, but also the activities related to its production and the practices that producers perform. Because standards and standardization define the categories of not only agricultural products but also agri-cultural practices, I suggest standards and standardization are best understood as “ontologizing activities.” 

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4. “Surrealing MEAT: Making meat realer (and better?) through technoscience"

   Efstathiou, Sophia; Kendig, Catherine (November 2024, https://meatigation.no/webinar/)

   Rethinking MEAT: Ethics, Practices, Politics. Organized by KLIMAFORSK collaboration project MEATigation: Towards sustainable meat-use in Norwegian food practices for climate mitigation. Supported by Norges Forskningsrådet. 

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5. Local, regional, and global adaptations to a compound pandemic-weather stress event

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acbbe3  

   Haqiqi, Iman; Grogan, Danielle S.; Bahalou Horeh, Marziyeh; Liu, Jing; Baldos, Uris L. C.; Lammers, Richard; Hertel, Thomas W. (February 2023, Environmental Research Letters)

   Abstract Global food security can be threatened by short-term extreme events that negatively impact food production, food purchasing power, and agricultural economic activity. At the same time, environmental pollutants like greenhouse gases (GHGs) can be reduced due to the same short-term extreme stressors. Stress events include pandemics like COVID-19 and widespread droughts like those experienced in 2015. Here we consider the question: what if COVID-19 had co-occurred with a 2015-like drought year? Using a coupled biophysical-economic modeling framework, we evaluate how this compound stress would alter both agricultural sector GHG emissions and change the number of undernourished people worldwide. We further consider three interdependent adaptation options: local water use for crop production, regional shifts in cropland area, and global trade of agricultural products. We find that GHG emissions decline due to reduced economic activity in the agricultural sector, but this is paired with large increases in undernourished populations in developing nations. Local and regional adaptations that make use of natural resources enable global-scale reductions in impacted populations via increased global trade. 

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