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Food sovereignty, a framework focused on systemic change in the food system that accounts for food access, food justice, and food security, is an important driver of community wellbeing. However, the complex determinants of food sovereignty are not fully understood. Interdisciplinary assessments of food systems are needed to establish the impact of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other social identities on food access. Understanding the goals and lived experiences of diverse communities and community members is critically important to advancing research on the sociology of food and agriculture. Drawing from community interviews addressing local food systems in six different communities in Washington's Upper Yakima River Basin, a qualitative assessment of expert perspectives on local and regional food systems illuminates perceived connections between food sovereignty and wellbeing. Findings suggest that food access and dependence on local agriculture varies across and within communities. Additionally, we find that agriculture is undergoing social, economic, and political transitions that may have immense community impacts moving forward. Given the diverse array of both agricultural and recreational economies in the study site, qualitative data informs our understanding of stakeholder perceptions at multiple levels of the food system. The implications of these findings lead to a forward‐looking discussion of linkages between food dimensions and other variables that impact local and regional wellbeing. 

Extreme weather events have cost lives and financial losses across the United States. Moreover, they are expected to increase in frequency, and this will exacerbate their impact on vulnerable sectors such as agriculture. But how farmers could adapt to extreme weather events by adopting different conservation practices has received slight attention in the literature. This study examines how farmers' perceptions of drought and flooding influence their decisions to implement conservation practices in their conventional crop fields. Out of the 350 farmer responses we received, fewer than half indicated a likelihood to adopt no-tillage/reduced tillage (43%), cover crops (40%), crop diversification (37%), and integrated crop-livestock grazing (29%). Using this data and a multivariate probit modeling framework, we show that farmers’ decisions can be partly explained by their perception of drought but not by their perception of flooding. Specifically, the perceived number of drought years significantly increases the likelihood of adopting no-tillage/reduced tillage and diversified cropping in the future. However, the number of drought years is not significantly associated with the use of cover crops and integrated crop-livestock grazing. These results suggest that the effects of extreme weather events on adoption of conservation practices as adaptive measures vary across different practices. Therefore, adaptation policies that make use of conservation practices must be tailored to farmers’ needs and priorities to be effective. 

While conservation practices promote soil health and reduce the negative environmental effects from agricultural production, their adoption rates are generally low. To facilitate farmer adoption, we carried out a survey to identify potential challenges faced by farmers regarding conservation tillage and cover crop adoption in the western margin of the US Corn Belt. We found farmers' top two concerns regarding conservation tillage were delayed planting, caused by slow soil warming in spring, and increased dependence on herbicide and fungicides. Narrow planting window and lack of time/labor were perceived by farmers as the two primary challenges for cover crop adoption. Some sense of place factors, including the commonly included dimensions of attachment, identity and dependence, played a role in farmers' perceived challenges. For example, respondents more economically dependent on farming perceived greater challenges. We found that farmers' challenge perceptions regarding reduced yield and lack of time/labor significantly decreased as years of usage increased, implying that time and experience could dilute some challenges faced by farmers. Our findings indicate that social network use, technical guidance and economic subsidies are likely to address the concerns of farmers and facilitate their adoption of conservation practices.