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Adam Calo

@adamcalo.bsky.social

1.5K followers 1.1K following 360 posts

Assistant Professor | land and food governance | Land Food Nexus Newsletter: https://adamcalo.substack.com/about | Landscapes podcast: https://landscapes.libsyn.com/ https://www.ru.nl/en/people/calo-a

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Jul 15

What drives the enduring myth of “feeding the world?”
@tabledebates.bsky.social

journalspectre.bsky.social @journalspectre.bsky.social · Jul 15

This week we have members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective ( @adamcalo.bsky.social , Maywa Montenegro de Wit , @beniuliano.bsky.social , @alastairiles.bsky.social ) taking on the productivist roots of the "feed-the-world" approach to food security.

spectrejournal.com/the-enduring...

The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World” – Spectre Journal

Members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective argue against the productivist logic underlying the "feed-the-world" approaches to feed security.

spectrejournal.com

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 1d

It all comes back to land.

IPES-Food @ipes-food.org · 1d

It's #WorldFoodDay. Let’s talk about the source of our food – land.

Just 1% of agriculture operators now control 70% of global farmland.

That’s not just inequality, it’s a #foodsystem crisis.

🎥 Canadian farmer Nettie Wiebe explains:
ipes-food.org/video-and-me...

Who Controls Agricultural Land? The shift from farmers to financiers | IPES-Food’s Nettie Wiebe - IPES-Food

Nettie Wiebe exposes the land squeeze and its devastating impact on farmers, communities, and biodiversity.

ipes-food.org

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Reposted by Adam Calo

IPES-Food @ipes-food.org · 1d

🥣 Brazil’s recipe to end hunger is shockingly simple – and it works.

👧🏽 Universal school meals
💸 Cash transfers + minimum wage
🌾 Buying from family farmers
🍲 Community kitchens
📜 The right to food in law
🌱 Support for agroecological farmers

ipes-food.org/brazil-beats...
#WorldFoodDay

WorldFoodDay
Brazil's recipe to end hunger

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 3d

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 10d

Who wants to push the Landscapes podcast to 10k downloads?

landscapes.libsyn.com

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 12d

Abundance discourse

A wicker basket brimming with sweet chestnuts

The chestnut tree and its spiky offerings

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 15d

Useful repost if one believes glyphosate is the key to sustainable agriculture:

The Useful Idiot

Where I keep warning you about the resurgence of lazy land sparing rhetoric

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Adam Calo

IPES-Food @ipes-food.org · 17d

“A scandal that the EU is funnelling large sums of public money [via the #CAP] into farms accused & even convicted of labour abuses.

“Social conditionality has proven toothless – failing to prevent abuse or trigger meaningful sanctions” says @deschuttero.bsky.social
www.desmog.com/2025/09/29/r...

Revealed: EU Farm Subsidy ‘Bankrolls’ Widespread Labour Abuse

This investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. Farm owners convicted of exploiting migrant workers continue to claim millions in taxpayer-funded subsidies, DeSmog can reve...

www.desmog.com

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 26d

From the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina International:

Can the food sovereignty movement really play a role in systemic transformation? Freedom, egalitarian societies, and planetary boundaries

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Can the food sovereignty movement really play a role in systemic transformation? Freedom, egalitarian societies, and planetary boundaries

From the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, the belief that the industrial working class was destined to transform the world prevailed. That small-scale food producers and Indi...

www.tandfonline.com

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · 27d

@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social @dkthomp.bsky.social

Kai Heron @kaiheron.bsky.social · 27d

It's publication day!I hope the book helps to put an end to capital's imposition of bullshit abundance and artificial scarcity for once and for all.

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Sep 7

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Sep 7

let’s do an RCSc seminar on this pape.

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Sep 7

Many are craving the stance you articulate.

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Reposted by Adam Calo

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

98 1.6K 3.1K

Reposted by Adam Calo

Human Rights Center @hrcberkeley.bsky.social · Sep 2

Our summer fellow Meredith Song worked with Community Alliance with Family Farmers to analyze geospatial data of agricultural land transactions in California. She co-authored a @sfchronicle.com piece to explore what can be done to rein in corporate land ownership:
www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

Who controls California farmland? The hard-to-find answer is disturbing

OPINION: “By creating a transparent, public record of ownership and transactions, we could then design fairer markets, protect local control and plan for a sustainable future.”

www.sfchronicle.com

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Reposted by Adam Calo

Matthew Archer @matthewarcher.bsky.social · Sep 1

@ netherlands 👀

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Sep 1

To regain democratic control of the food system, we call for the establishment of a Land Observatory.

Who controls California farmland? The hard-to-find answer is disturbing

OPINION: “By creating a transparent, public record of ownership and transactions, we could then design fairer markets, protect local control and plan for a sustainable future.”

www.sfchronicle.com

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Sep 1

To regain democratic control of the food system, we call for the establishment of a Land Observatory.

Who controls California farmland? The hard-to-find answer is disturbing

OPINION: “By creating a transparent, public record of ownership and transactions, we could then design fairer markets, protect local control and plan for a sustainable future.”

www.sfchronicle.com

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 25

The energy transition forces new struggles over land. Latest from the Landscapes Podcast:

Listen: plinkhq.com/i/1552882054...

@greenprofgreen.bsky.social "existential politics" in action?

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 24

Using this for my class this Spring. Is there a non instagram version somewhere?

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 23

Great synergy with:

Why won't the "feed the world" myth ever die?

(New essay in Spectre)

open.substack.com

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 23

Advocates of agricultural intensification argue that industrial farming is a necessary evil that wards off global hunger.

But when we recognize that yield increases are not the key to feeding the hungry, the argument falls apart. New, from @rajpatel.org

IPES-Food @ipes-food.org · Aug 22

🇧🇷🥣Brazil proves that ending hunger isn’t a technological challenge, but a political one.

It requires redistribution, democratic planning, and sustained public investment – not just GDP growth or fertilizer subsidies, @rajpatel.org writes for @foodtank.bsky.social

foodtank.com/news/2025/08...

No Beef Here. Brazil Beat Hunger the Right Way

Brazil feeds the world, but its greatest export might be the policies that ended hunger at home.

foodtank.com

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Reposted by Adam Calo

Silvia Secchi @profsecchi.bsky.social · Aug 19

Here's my open access paper "Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture?"!
I show that using $1,000 sales value as the threshold to be considered a farmer in the Census of Agriculture + increasing the # of operators per farm results in vast overestimates of "farms" & "farmers" 1/

Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture? - Agriculture and Human Values

Agriculture and Human Values - The most recent changes in the US Census of Agriculture (CoA) have caused substantial increases in the number of farmers. At the same time, by including lifestyle and...

link.springer.com

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 18

Full transcript for the latest episode of Landscapes now available.

Listen to Lindsay Shade and Karen Rignall describe how the legacies of land control challenge simplistic ideas of transitions.

The Afterlives of Coal

Energy transitions without confronting the legacies of land ownership? [Landscapes Podcast 16]

open.substack.com

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 18

Does anyone have a good English translation of Illich’s “Necesidades”

Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 15

Confronting the legacies of landownership may be the only path to meaningful landscape transformation.

The article that this episode is base on was originally shared by @jmijin.bsky.social

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia

PDF | The US has witnessed unprecedented federal investments targeted to ‘energy communities’ since 2021. Scholars, policy-makers, and activists have... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

www.researchgate.net

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Adam Calo @adamcalo.bsky.social · Aug 15

Lessons from the research of Dr Lindsay Shade and Dr Karen Rignall offer a stark warning to those who see the key to progress as simply a challenge of streamlining procedural impediments. Powerful interests have their way of shaping what happens on the land.

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