Bio

Research Interests

To ensure long-term food system sustainability, human agricultural activities need to change. Modern conventional agricultural systems have been optimized for crop yields, but often ignore the environmental and social effects of their practices. Achieving long-term sustainability in the food system will require a reshaping of farm-level production systems to protect and regenerate essential natural resources, foster biodiversity and ecosystem services, and support the people producing our food. My long-term goal is to promote the sustainability transition in agriculture through robust science by investigating:

(1) farm-level tradeoffs involved in the transition from conventional to diversified farming strategies,

(2) how farm owners perceive these tradeoffs and their motivations to change their practices, and

(3) how these tradeoffs and farmer-level decisions vary across geographies and spatial scales.

Following my postgraduate studies, I plan to lead research in an academic or private setting on these topics in pursuit of a food system that treats agricultural lands as ecosystems that also produce food. A few topics I plan to consider in my research are:

(1) How might we define foodsheds as an ecological and social unit in discussing food system change? One factor in the transition away from conventional staple crop monoculture farming is how farmers might access markets for non-commodity goods; what might be suitable methods for organizing population centers and agricultural lands as replicable units for constructing a regional, foodshed-based food system?

(2) How do communities and individuals differ in their decision-making around production strategies, the transition to diversified farming systems, and local food consumption, and what are the demographic or other human factors that can be used to predict this variability in decision-making? “Where, and why there, might both farmers and consumers alike be inclined to support regional food consumption and non-conventional farming methods?”

(3) How have new technologies influenced farm-level behavior change over time, and what are the long-term effects of this adoption on farmers? What are the characteristics of novel technologies that either reinforce the dominance of monoculture agriculture or encourage the transition towards alternative production models? What might technological adoption over time tell us about post-conventional farming adoption (the transition from conventional to diversified production)?

Personal

Before beginning my education and career in agroecology and food system sustainability I was a cook for many years. My longstanding relationship with food underpins nearly all of my professional and personal activities. I enjoy home cooking, particularly for others. Recently, I’ve been working on fresh pasta and corn tortillas with moderate success, but I haven’t found anything more satisfying than a long-simmered stock and the soups and stews that follow.