PATRICIA ALLEN

Patricia Allen tells how one man’s garden grew into the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

Patricia Allen is Director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at the University of California—Santa Cruz, a world-renowned social justice research program in sustainable food systems. The program offers 6 month, experiential, residential training program in organic horticulture, marketing and food systems on 28 acres of land that has been farmed organically for 40 years. CASFS is also host to LifeLab, a non-profit experiential program for school children, youth and educators around farming, gardening and food systems.

Allen’s interest in farming and food systems was inspired by her grandmother who owned and ran a small farm by herself, the only woman-run farm of that time in California. Allen witnessed her grandmother’s struggle to survive as large farms overcame the landscape. This brought to Allen’s awareness the social justice, gender, race, economic and ecological issues related to food systems. Her 20 years of research focuses on the political economic structures that can constrain or enable social equity in sustainable food systems. She is the author of Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability and Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System, which analyzes social movements and alternative agrifood institutions in the United States.

Allen initiated and organized the first “Farm Conference,” in 1981,which has become an annual statewide conference on family farming and direct marketing, and sustainable agriculture, as well as the “Sustainable Agriculture: Balancing Social, Environmental, and Economic Concerns” national conference, designed to explore a comprehensive vision of agricultural sustainability and articulate a broad-based research and policy agenda for sustainable agriculture.