Project Overview
COAR Transitions is a research, education, and policy initiative across five UC campuses & UC ANR with the goal of contributing to the creation of more resilient food systems and food sovereignty in California. This work is done through expanding and aligning knowledge and networks that support transitions toward these types of systems. We understand COAR transitions as constituting, but not limited to, a suite of principles, practices, and processes (e.g., crop and landscape diversification, cover cropping, crop-livestock integration, decentralized regional composting, beneficial uses of fire, salmon revitalization, and circular economies) that land stewards, farmers, farmerworkers, Tribes, community organizations, and others enact within a particular landscape context.
While efforts to research and implement these transitions are ongoing within the state, these efforts need to be expanded and integrated to meet the needs of all Californians, including historically dispossessed and underserved communities as well as state-level goals for systemic agricultural transitions, including increasing the amount of cropland in organic production.
Through community-engaged, policy-relevant research and action-oriented educational programming, we use agroecology as a transdisciplinary framework to build on ongoing transition efforts, including organic and regenerative agriculture, and to synthesize and extend transition opportunities in collaboration with local, regional, and statewide partners.
Key Objectives:
- Regional Agroecological Transition Research + Tool Development:
- Increased knowledge of agroecological transitions in multiple regions through qualitative and quantitative mapping and on-the-ground outcome-focused assessment
- e.g. analysis of spatial, temporal, and biophysical trends in production, crop diversification, and regional composting.
- Developing assessment tools to track outcomes of agroecological transitions, and potential transition pathways
- Increased knowledge of agroecological transitions in multiple regions through qualitative and quantitative mapping and on-the-ground outcome-focused assessment
- Community Engagement + Policy Analysis:
- Collaborative development of community-shaped descriptions of the contextual factors governing how and why agroecological changes happen (i.e. regionally-specific theories of change)
- Guidance for policy-makers on actionable steps to support agroecological transitions
- Collaborative asset mapping that evaluates how transitions do/do not serve those who are "historically underserved and dispossessed"
- Institutional Change:
- Facilitating coordinated institutional changes through enhanced UC undergraduate and graduate and extension education
- Creation of a short course on agroecology for cooperative extension and technical assistance providers; proposals for changes to UC and state policy
- Establishment of a UC-wide Agroecology Consortium.