Dr. Dana James and Dr. Susanna Klassen, two UBC IRES alumni, are among an international group of researchers named global champions of the Frontiers Planet Prize. Their winning contribution is to a landmark paper published in Science that reveals how agricultural diversification can deliver significant social and environmental benefits.
The prize also honors the contributions of current and past UBC researchers Dr. Hannah Wittman, Dr. Zia Mehrabi, Dr. Claire Kremen, and co-first author Dr. Laura vang Rasmussen.
For James and Klassen, who were PhD students at IRES while contributing to the study, what matters most is what comes next. Will the world be willing to do the hard work of making these findings real for farmers?
Grappling with the implications
The Science paper has drawn praise for its scope and its clear finding that agricultural diversification, e.g., integrating multiple crops, livestock, and land management practices, is a win-win for human well-being, biodiversity, yields, food security, and ecosystem health.
Yet Klassen and James note that “win-win” scenarios on paper don’t always translate into easy wins on the ground.
“Farmers are struggling,” says Klassen. “And they pass that on to their workers, who are sacrificed in this system. We can’t expect farmers to take on a whole new way of farming without support.”
Most Canadian farmers, she points out, are burdened with debt because land is so commodified and so expensive, with a handful of corporations dominating food retail. In this context, diversification isn’t just a technical fix—it’s a structural challenge.
Klassen, who now runs a small farm with her partner alongside working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, has seen firsthand that diversification can increase resilience, but also demands more labour.
“I believe in the impactful result that came from our Science paper, that diversification has huge benefits for people and land. But there are also trade-offs. The more diversification that we incorporate, the more work it seems to require,” she says, “at least at first.”
Take blueberries, for example. On monoculture farms, harvests happen all at once, requiring a large, short-term labor force. But on a diversified farm, harvests are staggered, requiring constant monitoring and a wider range of management skills.
The nuanced reality of more resilient systems requiring more sustained effort is one Klassen believes must be addressed head-on. One of her next research steps focuses on the labour implications of diversification, and how to build systems of support for small-scale farmers doing this work.
Science with a message
“Science speaks to policymakers,” says James, who currently works in the non-governmental sector. “And we’re hoping this paper offers additional evidence to people in a position to create supports and remove barriers to diversification for farmers.”
The paper’s findings should prompt action from governments and institutions: it presents evidence from 24 real-world datasets across 11 countries, demonstrating that diversification isn’t just a niche experiment. Diversification works, and it’s already working for many farmers around the world.
Klassen and James emphasize that policy tools are still out of sync, with many policy instruments directly or indirectly supporting agricultural simplification rather than diversification.
Additionally, to support the transition to more diverse agricultural systems, “we need to think beyond incentivizing the initial point of transition,” says James, “and also invest in maintenance to help farmers once they adopt diversification strategies, so they can keep up certain practices in the long-term.”
The challenges of collaboration
James and Klassen suggest that research and policy infrastructures in many Western contexts continue to favor agricultural simplification not because there was never evidence for diversification’s benefits, but because conducting rigorous, collaborative studies on such complex systems is extraordinarily challenging.
Studying diversification means grappling with variation, complexity, and local contexts. As a result, the data are difficult to harmonize, making it hard for science to validate what agroecological movements and traditional knowledge systems have long observed in practice.
That’s why the collaborative structure of the Science paper was so crucial. Unlike meta-analyses that harmonize studies post-publication, this project involved researchers co-designing the process from the outset. Researchers who contributed data were also part of the research process—and every one of them is listed as a co-author. That model, James and Klassen emphasize, was fundamental.
James contributed data from her PhD, where she worked with agroecological farmers in southern Brazil who had documented their practices as part of a certification process. Klassen’s dataset came from BC blueberry farms, the basis of her Master’s research. Together, their contributions fed into the paper’s integrative analysis of how diversification strategies play out across different systems and regions.
The two IRES alumni highlighted how impactful it was to be included as graduate students, and for their work to be valued for its unique richness and then brought together with other datasets and a larger research network to create something powerful.
Rethinking the system
For James and Klassen, it’s time to start asking deeper questions.
What are the structural barriers keeping farmers locked into simplified systems?
Are these barriers regulatory, economic, cultural—or all of the above?
What would it take to align institutions so that their policies don’t contradict each other on the ground?
Organizations like Food Secure Canada are already trying to tackle this policy misalignment, creating frameworks that make sense across multiple scales. But more must be done to shift power, change narratives, and support farmers as multi-functional stewards—not just producers.
Ultimately, Klassen and James are calling for a broader reimagining of what more sustainable and just food systems could look like.
“We should be recognizing and honouring the labour that farmers and workers do as providing multiple outcomes, services, and benefits,” says James. “Farmers grow food, but they’re providing more than that— they’re also providing ecological services, stewarding land, and building community resilience.”
“What would agriculture look like,” Klassen asks, “if we treated food as a human right? And what if we didn’t treat land as a commodity?”
Text and image compiled by Nivretta Thatra, June 2025.