Farming

Gene Giacomelli's research interests focus on food production systems and include controlled environment plant productions systems [greenhouse and growth chamber] research, design, development, and applications, with emphases on crop production systems, nutrient delivery systems, environmental control, mechanization, and labor productivity. He also teaches controlled environment systems, which is an introduction to the technical aspects of greenhouse design, environmental control, nutrient delivery systems, hydroponic crop production, intensive field production systems, and post-harvest handling and storage of crops.

Responsible for the development and implementation of extension and research programs in the area of specialty crops mechanization. Develops educational materials and works cooperatively with faculty, stakeholder and other U.S. and state agencies. Technologies and systems developed provide applied engineering solutions to problems facing the specialty crop industry.

Dr. Greenberg's areas of expertise lie in political ecology, natural resource anthropology, economic anthropology, globalization, law and development, violence, urban anthropology, migration, household livelihoods, peasants, Latin America, and the borderlands. Dr. Greenberg has worked in peasant and fishing communities in Mexico, and has received numerous grants for borderlands research. His current research includes a project on the history of applied anthropology at the University of Arizona. "My research broadly examines the impact of global capital on development and on the well-being of both human populations and the ecosystems that sustain them. Specifically, my research looks both at the level of larger processes on the historical development of capital, and at the local variants of capital it has spawn. In pursuing these interests, I have focused on credit: looking at how it is culturally embedded and used as economic instrument, social relationship, and technology of power. At the level of local processes, my research examines the incorporation of local populations and local ecologies into wider systems, and how their inclusion in them changes their dynamics."