"Beyond corn, soy, and wheat? Re-imagining a diverse U.S. agricultural landscape"

Agricultural landscapes in the United States are becoming drastically simplified and commodified, causing concern for biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and widening socioeconomic injustices upon which U.S. agriculture has been built. Given that crop production is heavily concentrated in certain areas and crop diversity is declining, there is a critical need to understand pathways toward diversifying agricultural systems and increasing agrobiodiversity writ large. This research addresses this need through mixed and multiscale methods that model crop diversity across the U.S. and, through a political agroecology and spatial imaginaries framework, interrogate the underlying mechanisms of such in the Magic Valley of southern Idaho – a region with quantitatively crop-diverse landscapes. Collectively, this work assesses how and why U.S. agricultural landscapes simplify or diversify and asserts the immediacy of reckoning with past and present land use paradigms to re-imagine what is possible.

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About the speaker

Kaitlyn Spangler (she/her) is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Geography at Penn State focused on transdisciplinary climate science. She is a human-environment geographer whose research works toward building more sustainable and diversified working landscapes and, therein, equitable and just climate change solutions. Her work integrates geospatial modeling, critical and feminist data science, and in-depth qualitative methodologies to mix “big” data with “deep’ data.

Spangler earned her Ph.D. in environment and society from Utah State University, her M.S. in geography from Virginia Tech, and her B.A. in anthropology and a B.S. in community, environment, and Development from Penn State.

Recommended readings

1. Spangler, K., Burchfield, E. K., Radel, C., Jackson-Smith, D., Johnson, R.(2022). Crop diversification in Idaho’s Magic Valley: the present and the imaginary. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 42, 99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00833-0
2. Spangler, K., Schumacher, B. L., Bean, B., Burchfield, E. K. (2022). “Path dependencies in US agriculture: Regional factors of diversification.” Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment, 333 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2022.107957