Agricultural extension has long been the subject of scholarly critiques for its hierarchical approach to knowledge transfer and its complicity in promoting agricultural intensification and farm sector consolidation. Here, however, we suggest that there are already-existing examples of different kinds of agricultural extension practices, ones that challenge the capitalist—understood here as synonymous with racial capitalist—paradigm that dominates in California’s agricultural landscapes and elsewhere. We discuss one such example, providing a case study of Diana’s efforts to support Spanish-speaking, small-scale, Latine farmers in California. Drawing from feminist political economic theory, we argue that extension is a site of heterogeneity, where existing power asymmetries are both maintained and transformed. Diana’s efforts to transform such power asymmetries illustrate the labor that some extensionists mobilize to support small-scale Latine farmers and other farmers of color in the context of U.S. agri-capitalism. We highlight 4 ways in which Diana’s labor disrupts extension norms, including (1) filling gaps in state programs with invisible labor, (2) building mutual trust through social relationships beyond work, (3) blurring distinctions between extension work and farm work, and (4) broadening definitions of “farmers” beyond business ownership and land tenure. In doing so, we advocate for a critical understanding of heterogeneity among extension practices, as extensionists both contribute to and challenge racial-economic inequalities in the agri-food system. With this approach, we hope to identify and better understand how contestations of dominant power arrangements can and do occur in extension contexts in the hopes of supporting these efforts.

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion.

On December 5, 2022, an indirect drive fusion implosion on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a target gain G_{target} of 1.5. This is the first laboratory demonstration of exceeding "scientific breakeven" (or G_{target}>1) where 2.05 MJ of 351 nm laser light produced 3.1 MJ of total fusion yield, a result which significantly exceeds the Lawson criterion for fusion ignition as reported in a previous NIF implosion [H. Abu-Shawareb et al. (Indirect Drive ICF Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 075001 (2022)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.129.075001]. This achievement is the culmination of more than five decades of research and gives proof that laboratory fusion, based on fundamental physics principles, is possible. This Letter reports on the target, laser, design, and experimental advancements that led to this result.