Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how organic standards have shaped the thought and practice of organic agriculture in British Columbia. While organic agriculture is often viewed as offering an alternative to the unsustainable trajectory of conventional agriculture, this thesis argues that commercialized organic agriculture as it currently exists offers only a minor potential for food system reform. Organic farming pioneers who originally came together at the grassroots in BC aspired to enact radical agrarian ideals that could counteract the social and environmental ills wrought by decades of adherence to conventional agriculture. By creating organic certification schemes that granted mainstream market access to organic producers, these farmers attempted to promote their ideals by transforming organic agriculture from a marginal fringe movement into a formal capitalist enterprise. While commercialization has reaped benefits, at the same time the standardization of organic agriculture that is prerequisite to sought-after market access has considerably undermined progress towards the ’alternative’ goals advocated by organic farmers I interviewed. Issues I explore throughout show that the operationalization of ’organic’ via codified certification standards has given way over time to a gradual erosion of organic principles. I argue that despite the efforts to impart knowledge of, and enforce adherence to, ’pure’ notions of organic practice through organic standards, the pressure of market forces instead causes growers to sacrifice organic ideals in the name of taking measures to boost productivity instead. As organic agriculture is integrated ever more deeply into regimes of certification and standardization required for participation in the market, it has become more and more akin to the very conventional agricultural paradigm it was originally intended to oppose. In sum, although the organic market has grown with remarkable speed in recent years, this growth cannot be viewed as indicative of the arrival of a truly radical ’alternative paradigm’ of agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".