UC Berkeley

Those directly involved in land stewardship—farmers, ranchers, peasants, campesinos, Indigenous people—are increasingly called to the frontlines of multiple crises. They are tasked with feeding humanity, maintaining global biodiversity, and sustaining cultures amidst rising global temperatures, corporate hegemony, pandemics, and constant war. In California, farmers and land stewards are called upon to weather the interlocking crises facing the state’s agricultural system: increased threat of wildfires, drought, floods, and public health crises. Agroecology is a mobilizing framework utilized by social movements around the world to increase community food sovereignty and create thriving food and agricultural systems. Movements for agroecology and food sovereignty in the United States, however, face severe constraints due to entrenched notions of individualism, private property, market-based solutions, neoliberalism, and the commodification of food and land.

This dissertation aims to illuminate how ecological, social, and cultural forces converge within the body of the soil by focusing on communities enacting forms of food sovereignty in California. By attending to the subterranean and the underground, I seek embodied relationships that realize agroecological transitions in the cracks of California’s plantation-based agricultural landscape. How might soil act as a medium for collective memory and action in ways that realize agroecology in the United States? How are (dis)embodied or material relations with food and land entangled with culture, especially for land and capital-limited farmers striving for self-determination? And what personal, ecological, and collective thresholds must be crossed to realize just transitions in agroecology and food sovereignty across the US?

In particular, this dissertation traces connections between soil ecology and social practice among a diverse network of farms, mutual aid organizations, non-profits, and grassroots movements enacting forms of agroecology in California. This work emerges from years-long dialogue with land and capital-limited communities cultivating small (<10 acres) and marginal lands using a hand-scale no-till farming system. This system was developed by farmers and utilized by individuals from diverse racial, cultural, class, and geographic contexts. This dissertation integrates a wide range of

methods including soil health measurements, field experiments, on-farm studies, interviews, and participant observation to document the impacts of farmer-developed practices on soil health and agroecological transitions. Overall, these efforts found that hand-scale no-till significantly improved soil moisture, reduced bulk density, raised carbon and nitrogen stocks, and increased nutrient cycling, with important social-ecological forces shaping how the system impacted farms across geographies and soil types. Additionally, this dissertation explores the integration of small-scale agriculture with anti-hunger efforts, demonstrating how principles of food sovereignty can be enacted through attending to personal relationships, self-determination, holistic nourishment, reciprocity, solidarity economies, and power dynamics. By weaving in my positionality and personal connections to California’s agricultural history, this dissertation engages with the personal, ecological, and collective thresholds necessary to realize just transitions in agroecology and food sovereignty across the US.