Submitted by Alastair Iles on
The proposed project would contribute to dissertation level research on the barriers of access to farmland for small scale organic farmers in the California Central Coast. A recent area of emphasis within agricultural policy has been to develop programs to create “new farmers” in order to ostensibly reverse a national trend of dwindling farms and increasing average farmer age. However, most of the resulting programs overlook the challenges that new farmers face that are non agronomic, like access to affordable and quality farmland. Work thus far in this project consists of in depth qualitative interviews with beginning farmers and a review of trends in land access policy in the state. The undergraduate researcher(s) would work under the close supervision of a graduate student studying California’s agricultural system, specifically using the cases of beginning immigrant farmers seeking small plots of farmland. The primary duties of the SPUR student will be to maintain, improve, and contribute to design of a web-based participatory mapping platform that facilitates farmer-led data collection on farmland availability and quality. The goal of this participatory mapping application is twofold:
1) Provide an agricultural extension tool that facilitates land linking between suitable land and beginning farmers
2) Visualize the problems of land access for a variety of regional actors and policy argumentation
Over the 2017-2018 academic year this mapping application will be tested with beginning farmers throughout California. This work is positioned within an environmental politics framework but also speaks to debates on sustainable agriculture, methods of participatory geospatial research, and general food system issues.
GIS visualizations of land access. Spatial data on farmland (soils, parcels, zoning type) have been aggregated on a web GIS platform using the open source software CartoDB. In addition to the official data sources, the graduate student supervisor has facilitated a community data collection effort to characterize available farmland. The undergraduate apprentice(s) will interpret feedback on the mapping platform from a diversity of actors in the food system in order to improve the utility of the process.
Troubleshooting and improving the web GIS application. In order to aggregate and visualize data from multiple sources and formats, data must be processed organized and visualized through a complex workflow. Tasks include using cleaning large data sets with database management tools like R, SQL, or custom Python scripts.
The SPUR applicant can expect to gain skills and experience in qualitative food systems research, especially into the intersection of sustainable agriculture and land-use policy. He/she will practice and develop skills in emerging webGIS tools including online and participatory mapping including Python, R, SQL, PostGIS and CSS. Solutions to geospatial representations will often require independent research into geospatial techniques and queries including interacting with online support communities. Experience with GIS software and/or computer programming is desired. In fact, this project is ideal for a computer science or GIS-oriented student who has an interest in applying these skills to an environmental and social issue. A student who is strongly interested in domestic food system research including environmental and justice aspects is encouraged to apply, but will be expected to engage with dedicated GIS learning.