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Agricultural science necessarily involves a commitment to some form of humanitarian and environmental ethics. For the past century, agricultural science has been based on a productivist ethic of maximizing agricultural production in pursuit or support of food security. Recognition of the ethical and political disposition of contemporary agricultural science can help scientists reorient their work to better address the urgent problems of the upcoming century: environmental degradation, climate change, and social inequality. A commitment to solving these problems is well within the scope of modern agricultural science. Supporting and furthering multidimensional food systems should replace productivism as an explicit goal of agricultural development and scientific innovation.

ContextThe COVID-19 pandemic caused significant shocks to U.S. food systems at multiple scales. While disturbances to long-distance supply chains received substantial attention in national media, local supply chains experienced mixed impacts. As broad closures of schools, restaurants, and other businesses sourcing from local farmers removed key marketing channels for many direct market farmers, consumer interest in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers markets, and on-farm and online direct farm sales increased.ObjectiveIn this paper, we examine the resilience and vulnerability of farmers during the March 2020 through December 2020 period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on California farmers and ranchers engaged in direct market sales.MethodsThrough a widely disseminated survey, we collected responses from 364 farmers and used these data to answer the following questions about direct market farmers in California: 1) What were direct market farmers' experiences of the pandemic from March 2020 through December 2020? 2) Which factors (e.g., relationships, institutions, market channels) did farmers report enhanced their resilience during the pandemic? 3) Which individual and operational factors were significantly associated with resilience during the pandemic? And finally, 4) how do the farmer-reported factors compare to the statistically significant factors associated with resilience? We created three dependent variables-ability to respond to the pandemic, concern about pandemic impacts, and change in profitability-to operationalize several aspects of resilience and examine their association with individual and operational characteristics through a series of ordered logistic regression models.Results and conclusionsAcross both the quantitative models and the farmer reported factors, we found that farmers who increased their use of online sales and marketing during the first year of the pandemic, had larger-scale farms, and had more on-farm crop and livestoc