Waste management is already fairly streamlined on Lopez due to the expense of transporting waste products off the island, and the organization of the award-winning solid waste facility . Current opportunities for improvement include the local bio-char production and co-composting effort, as well as maximizing food waste recovery from all island retail stores and restaurants to be returned to local farms for composting. Food recovery from the fields and orchards occurs through a volunteer-run gleaning program, which could be scaled up with further support or participation incentives. A significant challenge for farmers is to reduce all plastic use and substitute with alternative materials, as plastic is no longer accepted at the Dump for recycling and must be paid for at time of disposal.In order to build a climate-themed farmer training program on Lopez, fundraising and/or grant-writing is needed to bring together land and human resources to execute such a program. Hiring a skilled farm-based education and other staff to support educational efforts is a challenge that must be worked out before this opportunity can be realized. Improving upon the K-12 food and climate education efforts at the school is a more easily accomplished opportunity through partnership and participation of more farms and educated adults on the island. Additionally, recognizing that several young people on Lopez are already actively farming and interested in doing so in the future presents an opportunity to strengthen countywide Young Farmer leadership programs in order to expose these aspiring young farmers to new practices and skills needed to create successful farm operations.Using data gathered from interviews and observations of current farmland operations on Lopez and referring back to Ostrom’s ten variables,vertical garden indoor system it becomes clear that farmer self organization to sustain the local food system is very likely.

Nevertheless, the propensity for farmers to self-organize does not guarantee that the more complex and overarching political and economic challenges will be resolved through grassroots self-organizing; farmers must integrate and collaborate with other circles of the polycentric governance structure in which they are nested to adopt necessary reforms. The ARC, for example, is a Citizen Advisory Committee tasked with advising the County Council on issues affecting the Agricultural environment comprised of 15 voting seats, at least 50% of which must be farmers. It is currently seeking to advance the goals expressed by farmers for favorable county land use policies through promoting the adoption of an “Agriculture” specific section of the Land Use Element of the Comprehensive Plan, currently under revision. A revaluation and realignment of county policy and political economy are needed to accurately account for and support the endeavors of the Lopez agricultural community. Currently, revenues from sales of local food products comprise roughly 2% of total county revenue . However, farms are contributing so much more to the island economy than sales of food products: they are attracting tourists, educating community members at farm tours, quantifying efforts to sequester carbon on working lands, creating resilience to offisland food supply chain disruptions, building community health, and weaving a fabric of community land ethics that infuses the Lopez “sense of place.” Tourists, local residents, and restaurants alike attribute their desire to come to the San Juan Islands in large part to the local food scene and pastoral island character. If the county is able to more holistically account for the value streams generated by local farms, it will become easier to justify commitment of staff and funds to support the goals of successfully transitioning, protecting, and sustaining the progress made on local farms for future generations.

Tax revenues from vacation rentals, for example, could be channeled in some percentage towards supporting farmland transitions and expanded farm worker housing, as these agricultural activities directly feed back into the tourism industry.Many farming practices used on Lopez contribute to carbon storage and thus climate mitigation, and these same practices are widely utilized due to their numerous benefits such as crop nutritional quality, water conservation and drought resilience, pollution prevention, fire resilience, improved soil fertility, and numerous positive human health and community-building impacts. However, the impacts of agroecological farming practices on sustainable economies and livelihoods is less clear, and a space for policy intervention . On the policy side, there is a need for greater flexibility in housing allowances on lands zoned as “agricultural.” This is important for both allowing farm workers to live affordably and work on multiple farms, as well as for enabling some parcels to be farmed cooperatively, with multiple families living on and farming a piece of land. More flexibility in farmland use, ownership models, and housing availability has potential to serve the needs of both farmers and the agritourism industry, connecting visitors directly to the wellspring of the local food system. Legal streamlining and strategic language in county housing policy have potential to redress current farmer concerns and confusion and could expedite creative affordable housing solutions such as tiny houses for farm worker housing. Several of these goals around clarifying language and allowing for ease of permitting for farm worker housing are addressed in the recent ARC memo urging the San Juan County Council to adopt section 2.2N.Agriculture as part of the Land Use Element .Adopting policies that explicitly recognize and address the need for health care, retirement funds, and basic social services among farm worker and farmer communities would further strengthen the ability of farming to present a viable, sustainable, equitable career opportunity for young and aspiring farmers.

When farmers are reliant on personal wealth or off farm jobs for benefits and financial security, the attraction and viability of farming as a career pathway is compromised. Referring back to the language of the 2011 “Growing our Future” report, state and local policies are needed to “foster farm businesses and support a thriving local farm economy.” This need not be a pure market, profit-driven economy, but rather an economy that exchanges goods and services of both monetary and non-monetary value . Finally, policy initiatives at the county and state level could help create fulfilling,vertical plant rack living wage jobs in agroecology through facilitating the relocalization of food production, processing, distribution, marketing, and education. Jobs such as 1) developing and installing appropriate technology for small farms, including on-farm energy generation, 2) preparing and distributing value-added products , 3) processing small scale grain and dry bean harvests, 4) operating an inter-island food hub, 5) processing woody debris to produce both bio-char and energy, 5) tracking climate impacts and threats to agriculture at the county level, and 6) operating a climate-resilient farmer training program would help strengthen local purchasing power and keep wealth circulating within the local economy.Lopez Island, and other islands in the Pacific Northwest region, are facing a pivotal moment in their pathways towards building sustainable, equitable, and resilient local food systems. Challenges are threatening progress to date, from climate change to soaring land values, to the aging farmer population without a clear pool of beginning farmers to take their place. In order to maintain progress, more investment and action is required in the policy, education, and economic arenas to level the playing field for small-scale farmers from a variety of race/class backgrounds and pave the way for socially and environmentally regenerative farmland transfers. As shown in Figure 10, many elements must be in place for building desired food systems. Lopez currently hosts a strong contingent of knowledgeable farmers, local food organizations, local university partners, and consumers prioritizing local food, while state and county agriculture policies and next generation farmer education are works in progress. A “model” of county agriculture governance and work towards sustainable farming on Lopez must ultimately challenge the economic roots of the dominant food system, the private property paradigm, and business-as-usual in terms of food pricing and affordability– prices for food are too high to allow equitable access among lower income brackets, yet can’t easily be reduced due to concerns of adequately compensating farmers. Therefore, addressing root causes of poverty and raising purchasing power for food among low income households is essential to restoring justice and equity in the food system. Labor considerations, living wage job availability, and affordable farmland are all challenges linked to the current political economic context. With farmers earning net negative incomes annually and struggling to access health care, these realities demand policy and political attention, reversing the trends of the “neoliberal state” placing the burden of action on individuals and directly impacted communities with limited ability to successfully confront existing corporate influence over systems of political power and food policy.

Direct confrontation with existing power structures requires alliances between farmers, consumers, and policymakers. It is time to move beyond an ethic of “rugged individualism” and towards a regenerative, agroecological, and cooperative resource management ethic. In a time of food and climate crisis, important moral, ethical, and environmental questions are raised about the current hegemony of private property ownership and a “do-ityourself” mentality; there is a need for collective action and management of the planet’s natural resources as a “commons,” along the lines of Ostrom’s all to action . Conservation organizations, public land trusts, and others in the public and non-profit sphere are called upon to step into the solution space, recognizing synergistic opportunities between ecological conservation goals and sustainable food system needs. By harnessing existing resources and institutions operating on behalf of the “public good,” food system goals can be met holistically, rather than focusing exclusively on one system element at a time . Society’s ability to address food system change can be enhanced by moving outside of the private and for profit sectors . Furthermore, important opportunities exist in the realm of collaboration, cooperation, and collective ownership of resources in the Lopez Island food system: the Food Hub project, the expansion and coordination of Lopez Island Family Resources Center activities to provide food to low-income families, and opportunities for cooperative farm management are not yet fully realized, but are among the most promising options for continued progress towards an equitable and resilient local food system. There are also promising signs of both organic and conventional farmers recognizing opportunities to come together and share information along the lines of regenerative agriculture practices, which can advance shared goals of soil preservation and enhanced crop productivity. Each of these collaboration opportunities requires some opposition to the speculative real estate market and second home industry, which if left unchecked might otherwise remove prime farmland from productive use10. Summarizing the work that needs to be done to secure transitions to local food systems, Judy Feldman of the Organic Farm School states, “ultimately, we need new farmers, and the question is, how to inspire more bright young people to go into growing food for us? There are complex issues in the mix: politics, regulations, food safety concerns, farmland loss. We need the best and the brightest” . Echoing this climate farming link, lecturer and farmer Eli Wheat of U.W. states, “small-scale farms can become an active part of solving the climate change problem—capturing carbon that would otherwise be stored in the atmosphere in the form of organic matter and storing it in the reserves of soil” . Here, education becomes important: farmer training programs targeting both young adults, and older individuals transitioning into farming are in need of development to encourage the “best and the brightest” to take on the challenges of building a climate resilient and equitable food system. From a business perspective, starting a farm is similar to starting any small business: high failure rates, steep learning curves, and a leap of faith initially, that can ultimately pay off for those who are creative and determined enough. However, the cards are stacked against small operations in today’s national political economy. There is a need to redesign policy and infrastructure to enable small farms to exist and increase their odds of success: “all of the infrastructure that used to support a diverse systems of food production has slowly disappeared in favor of larger structures presumed to be more efficient” . Small scale infrastructure such as grain processing machines, mills, dry bean processing facilities, and other technologies used to be present in the San Juan Islands and must return as food systems relocalize and optimize for multiple values rather than yields and profits alone.