Contemporary California Research Articles

Cosmic California

One of the more controversial themes in contemporary readings of race is the Mexican author José Vasconcelos’s 1925 call for a “cosmic race” (raza cósmica) to transcend all prior races in the course of the inauguration of an “aesthetic era” (era estética) in human evolution. Although his language was later picked up by Chicano celebrants of La Raza and has received a variety of endorsements and critiques within the burgeoning literature comprising Latino/a critical race theory (CRT), no suggestion that contemporary California civilization may be the most compelling candidate for Vasconcelos’s project has yet been essayed. Carefully analyzing Vasconcelos’s arguments, this article exposes important shortcomings in his brief on behalf of a future Latin American race, clarifying the failure of his political efforts to redirect Mexican revolutionary politics in the 1920s and exposing the bankruptcy of his later flirtations with fascism. The article takes up the most promising feature of Vasconcelos’s arguments, namely his advocacy of a mingling of all races (mestizaje), to sponsor contemporary California as containing key features of that particular vision. To locate this Californian alternative, the article highlights the relevance of Oaxaca for its role in the origins and development of California’s naming and its overall myth. It explicates the importance of that role through the larger history of Mesoamerican civilizations and the primary importance for that history of the culture hero Quetzalcóatl.

The Ecological Origins and Consequences of the Rodent Bait Station: From WWII Britain to Contemporary California

ABSTRACT This article describes the origin of the rodent bait station, a globally distributed system for controlling rats, currently creating a secondary ecological crisis affecting wildlife who eat rats that have eaten the poison. I argue that this system is tied to settler colonial places like California and that banning poison will not address the crisis. It details the history of this box as a scientific ecological solution to rat control, created by Charles Elton and his research group during WWII. I pair this account with an account of contemporary science into the ecological crisis of rodenticides.

Material Imageability: The Architecture of Façades and Envelopes

AbstractOrchestrating façades and fenestration has become a much elevated art in contemporary California. Highly articulating the way a building faces onto the street is an expertise of Oakland‐based architect Thom Faulders. Blaine Brownell, architect, educator and researcher in emergent materials, examines Faulders Studio's recent oeuvre and its audacious and attractive material expression.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction

Celebrating 100 Years of California History

Celebrating 100 Years of <i>California History</i>

Lifetime coastal and oceanic foraging patterns of male Guadalupe fur seals and California sea lions

AbstractCarcasses of adult and subadult male Guadalupe fur seals (GFSs) are beached on Isla Magdalena, representing about 73% of all GFSs beachings since 2003. Analysis of carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in dentin collagen from male GFSs was used in an attempt to distinguish animals from two possible locations of origin: the oceanic Guadalupe Island (GI) and the coastal San Benito Islands (SBI). Samples of conterminous and contemporary California sea lions (CSLs) were included as representative of coastal predators. Two distinct groups of GFSs were evident based on δ13C values: coastal GFSs with higher δ13C values than CSLs, and oceanic GFSs with lower δ13C values than CSLs. Significant temporal trends were observed in the δ15N values; values for oceanic GFSs and CSLs increased annually (0.082‰ and 0.089‰, respectively), while those for coastal GFS decreased annually by 0.183‰. The isotopic segregation of oceanic and coastal GFS males, presumably from GI and SBI respectively, has been present at least since the mid‐1990s. This segregation may be due to dissimilar ingestion of prey from oceanic vs. coastal origin prior to their seasonal co‐occurrence in the Gulf of Ulloa.

Groundwater in California: From Juridical and Biopolitical Governmentality to a Political Physics of Vital Processes

This article analyzes the emergence of a political rationality of groundwater in contemporary California. It contrasts a new government of nature that we call a ‘political physics of vital processes’, operative in the case of the Orange County Water District, with juridical and biopolitical rationalities of groundwater governance. To do so, we propose a genealogical account grounded in a reading of a key concept in Aristotle’s first book of Politics. The case is analyzed along the axes of subjectivity, space, and temporality, opening to a novel way of conceptualizing the relation between power and nature.

Coyote (Canis latrans) use of marine resources in coastal California: A new behavior relative to their recent ancestors

Coyotes ( Canis latrans) are known to consume marine foods, but the importance and persistence of marine subsidies to coyotes is unknown. Recent access to a marine subsidy, especially if gained following apex predator loss, may facilitate coyote expansion along coastal routes and amplify the effects of mesopredator release. Our goal was to quantify and contextualize past and present marine resource use by coyotes on the central coast of California via stable isotope analysis. We measured δ13C and δ15N values in coyotes, their competitors, and their food resources at two modern sites, seven archaeological sites spanning in age from ~3000 to 750 BP, and from historical (AD 1893–1992) coyote and grizzly bear hair and bone sourced from coastal counties. We found evidence for marine resource use by modern coastal California coyotes at one site, Año Nuevo, which hosts a mainland northern elephant seal ( Mirounga angustirostris) breeding colony. Seals and sea lions account for ~20% of Año Nuevo coyote diet throughout the year and this marine subsidy likely positively impacts coyote population size. Isotopic data suggest that neither historic nor prehistoric coyotes consumed marine-derived foods, even at sites near ancient mainland seal rookeries. Marine resource use by some contemporary California coyotes is a novel behavior relative to their recent ancestors. We hypothesize that human alteration of the environment through extirpation of the California grizzly bear and the more recent protection of marine mammals likely enabled this behavioral shift.

Genetic assessment of the San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike reveals evidence of historical gene flow with Santa Catalina Island

The San Clemente loggerhead shrike (Lanius ludovicianus mearnsi) is an endangered species endemic to San Clemente Island in California. Previous genetic analyses of the California shrike populations have had mixed results due to small sample sizes and/or few genetic markers. Here we present a rigorous analysis of 381 historical and contemporary California shrike samples genotyped at 11 new polymorphic microsatellite loci and the mitochondrial DNA control region. Our results suggest generally high genetic diversity in all populations and that loggerhead shrikes on San Clemente Island are genetically differentiated from both the Mainland and other island populations. Bayesian clustering suggests primarily three genetically differentiated populations: (1) Mainland, (2) San Clemente Island, and (3) the islands of Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. Historically, however, the San Clemente Island shrike cluster closely with the Santa Catalina Island population, suggesting historical gene flow between these populations. A Bayesian phylogeny of common mtDNA haplotypes across North America reveals two primary clades and a general division between western and eastern populations. Geographic patterns suggest maternal gene flow from mainland to the islands but not vice versa. These results indicate that the captive breeding program has been successful at maintaining genetic diversity in the San Clemente Island shrike population, but that allele frequencies have shifted significantly over the past 100 years. Overall, our results suggest the San Clemente shrike (L. l. mearnsi) is a validated subspecies that is morphologically and genetically distinct, and that ongoing conservation efforts are justified.

Tortillas from Grapes: T. Coraghessan Boyle Reimagines Steinbeck's Social-Protest Novel

Abstract T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain begins with an epigraph taken from The Grapes of Wrath—“They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live like they do. A human being couldn't stand it to be so dirty and miserable”—an intimation that he will probe the same issues Steinbeck explored and ask similar questions of his readers. Published fifty-five years apart, these novels have become companion pieces, telling virtually the same story of abuse and dispossession. Just as the Joads represent an entire population of Dust Bowl Americans, who migrate from nothingness into nothingness, facing horrors in California just as they had in their home states—unemployment, poverty, starvation and inhuman living conditions—Boyle shows that these historical events are not specific to the 1930s. In contemporary California, large populations of Mexicans and Latin Americans immigrate with a dream, arriving only to find despair. Like Steinbeck, Boyle exposes their distressing realities. Both Steinbeck and Boyle were met with harsh criticism for their exposés that hit too close to home. Boyle, then, picks up where the earlier writer leaves off, devoted to continuing Steinbeck's vital mission to bring wrong to light and, hopefully, to instigate social change.

Ripping off Hollywood celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, luxury fashion and self-branding in California

Abstract My article takes The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola (2013) – and the post-Fordist, promotional, consumerist constellation it is consciously set in – as a case study of the metamorphosis of the agency, value and meaning of celebrity in contemporary California. I discuss how, in the era of social networking, the construction of celebrity has undergone a process of transformation that entails two conflicting, although strictly interlaced, tendencies. On the one hand is the Hollywood star, supported by a persisting industrial policy and holding a monopoly of attention. On the other is the multiplication of platforms for distributing visibility, including the spectacle of fashion-bloggers, trend-setters and ‘celetoids’ and forms of self-publicity, self-broadcast and life-casting of ‘ordinary individuals’ through the web. Especially, thanks to the diffusion of luxury fashion brands (and a precise marketing policy), a new liaison is taking place between the accredited star and a type of fans increasingly transforming themselves into would-be celebrities. I suggest here that the ‘Bling Ring’ story can be better understood when set against the background of LA’s culture of branding and self-branding, a culture of self-commodification marked by the idea of empowerment through ever-renewing skills of self-presentation and artificially framed styles of life. At the same time, I hint at the social disparity embedded in LA, with its elites’ ambivalent behaviour, including the nostalgic glance of a Hollywood insider (Coppola), to contest a notion of ‘democratization’ of fame. I wish to demonstrate how new-media-conveyed developments in American youth’s behaviour – based on the skills of networking, on the auto-didactic, entrepreneurial activity of web participation, on open access and unrestricted appropriation – are challenging the privilege of fame aristocracy (the Hollywood stars), but not its vertical concentration of wealth and its individualized mode of power.

Listen, Slowly by Thanhhà Lại (review)

Reviewed by: Listen, Slowly by Thanhhà Lại Karen Coats Lại, Thanhhà Listen, Slowly. Harper/HarperCollins, 2015 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-222918-2 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-222920-5 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 Twelve-year-old Mia is the only member of the family available to help her grandmother finally get some answers about what happened to Mia’s grandfather, who was captured during the Vietnam War. Leaving California behind, Mia and her grandmother travel to the Vietnamese village of Mia’s father’s birth, where Mia is overwhelmed by the attentions of officious aunties and suspicious cousins who are fascinated with Mia and anxious to show hospitality, even producing a translator—a boy who has gone to school in America and speaks English with a delightful Texan-Vietnamese accent. Fortunately for Mia, she understands Vietnamese even if she can’t speak it, a fact she cagily keeps to herself in order to gain information amid the flurry of constant activity, and she’s even able to conspire with her cousins to escape the vigilant attention of the adults. Meanwhile, a detective has found the man who guarded Mia’s grandfather in his last days, and Mia and her grandmother must then to travel to Saigon to find more answers. The village experience and Mia and her grandmother’s travels in the city offer Lại a way to introduce readers to various aspects of Vietnamese culture with both wry wit and genuine enthusiasm. She’s chosen her narrator well: Mia is a thoroughly credible contemporary California girl, tempering her wonder and fascination regarding this world of mosquitoes, luminous frogs, no privacy, and endless food with a full measure of good-natured tween eye-rolling. Her surprise at finding a new friend in a difficult cousin, as well as a new perspective on what really matters, is as endearing as it is instructive for readers, and they may be prompted to take more interest in their own family histories. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Towards the great transformation: (4) Agrarian and urban rebellion, the 2008 crisis, art/philosophy/science, and Keiller's ‘Robinson Crusoe’

After introducing an informal mapping of some aspects of the contemporary world and relevant notions and artworks, the series has so far concentrated on one of the artworks, Patrick Keiller's film Robinson in Space, exploring it through quotation, textual and visual, summary, interpretation and analysis. One particular life-form plays a dominant part in the film, lichen, with one associated activist image, that of Shakespeare's and Marx's ‘old mole’, as contrasted in the previous episode to Deleuze's alternative of a snake. Keiller's work provides a useful further mapping of this terrain and of its investigation at a particular place and time – an apparently rural rather than urban landscape during the climactic year of 2008 – that, playfully but seriously, trangressively transcends the boundaries of art, philosophy, and science. One major excavation from that landscape is a particular struggle against enclosure in the 1590s which, becoming clearer in the early seventeenth century and yet clearer in the early years of the twenty-first century, was and continues as an urban-and-agrarian struggle. As long as the agrarian component of these urban-and-agrarian struggles continues to be sidelined, the analytic insights, experience and tools of the Renaissance ignored, and praxis taken almost entirely off the map, the acute instabilities of 2008 and consequent savage cutbacks under the name of ‘austerity’ will continue and deepen on a terminal course. Keiller ends his journey with accounts of disaster, a ‘utopian’ solution, and a hint of a way forward. The necessarily minute account of Keiller's journey given here in this series (not, of course, a substitute for familiarity with the project itself) ends, before returning in passing in subsequent episodes to the contexts and works introduced in the initial episode, with a new shipwreck of Keiller's ‘Robinson Crusoe’ where, by the logic of this series, we find ourselves relocated within a unique combination of reptiles and mammals recently identified in contemporary California.

Buddha Rush

“Buddha Rush” is a profile of the artist Casey O’Connor, who in 2005 dumped hundreds of quarter-size porcelain Buddha heads into the American River near Colfax, and a portrait of the town and region's response to the discovery of these unexpected objects. What were Buddhas doing in gold country, where did they come from, and what were they worth? The press sent reporters to find out and residents imagined the town reviving with tourist revenue. Then the Bureau of Land Management got involved: the heads may have been archaeological artifacts removed illegally from federal land. An arrest was made, but the mystery remained unsolved. Then in 2006 O’Connor came forward to take responsibility; the Buddha heads were not antiques from Asia but contemporary California art. Working from interviews, media reports, and online commentary, I track the Colfax “Buddha rush” as it grew, ricocheted off histories of the Gold Rush, the Central Pacific Railroad, and Pacific-Rim immigration, and rebounded into modern understandings of Buddhism. I situate the saga in a wider history of modern-contemporary representations of and responses to the Buddha. Ultimately, this is not a story that simply reaffirms conventional notions of the cool or contemplative Buddha; the Buddha's presence and meaning may be less clear, less detached from history, power, and violence than we assume. O'Connor's work and its reception pushes us in unexpected ways toward California’s complex relationships of artistic praxis, landscape, race, class, and culture.

Framing Farm Labor

This is a review essay covering three recent books related to representations of farm labor in California: Richard Steven Street, Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jan Goggans, California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Rick Nahmias, The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

Racial and social class gradients in life expectancy in contemporary California

Life expectancy, or the estimated average age of death, is among the most basic measures of a population's health. However, monitoring differences in life expectancy among sociodemographically defined populations has been challenging, at least in the United States (US), because death certification does not include collection of markers of socioeconomic status (SES). In order to understand how SES and race/ethnicity independently and jointly affected overall health in a contemporary US population, we assigned a small-area-based measure of SES to all 689,036 deaths occurring in California during a three-year period (1999-2001) overlapping the most recent US census. Residence at death was geocoded to the smallest census area available (block group) and assigned to a quintile of a multifactorial SES index. We constructed life tables using mortality rates calculated by age, sex, race/ethnicity and neighborhood SES quintile, and produced corresponding life expectancy estimates. We found a 19.6 (+/-0.6) year gap in life expectancy between the sociodemographic groups with the longest life expectancy (highest SES quintile of Asian females; 84.9 years) and the shortest (lowest SES quintile of African-American males; 65.3 years). A positive SES gradient in life expectancy was observed among whites and African-Americans but not Hispanics or Asians. Age-specific mortality disparities varied among groups. Race/ethnicity and neighborhood SES had substantial and independent influences on life expectancy, underscoring the importance of monitoring health outcomes simultaneously by these factors. African-American males living in the poorest 20% of California neighborhoods had life expectancy comparable to that reported for males living in developing countries. Neighborhood SES represents a readily-available metric for ongoing surveillance of health disparities in the US.

Review: THE MIGRANT PROJECT: Contemporary California Farm Workers, by Rick Nahmias

Review: <i>THE MIGRANT PROJECT: Contemporary California Farm Workers</i>, by Rick Nahmias

The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers (review)

Reviewed by: The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers Virginia Brennan, PhD, MA (bio) The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers. Edited by Rick Nahmias and photographs by Rick Nahmias, with a foreword by Dolores Huerta. Albuquerque, NM: Universito of New México Press, 2008. 139 pp. Illus. ISBN 978-0-8263-4407-6 (pbk. alk. Paper). A high-quality paper-bound book, with a preface by Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chávez of the United Farm Workers of America, this volume includes many large-format photographs of contemporary California farm workers and five essays and oral histories. Each sepia-toned photograph in this evocative volume is paired with a paragraph explaining who and what is portrayed and something about the circumstances. For example, next to a photograph of nine young men and a little boy perched on a metal fence, is a paragraph about them: they are charros, the cowboys who ride in charreadas, the traditional Mexican sport out of which the United States’ rodeos grew. Another is a close-up of a scarred shin, the pant leg held back by a weathered hand. The accompanying text explains that Manuel Llamas, the farm worker whose leg is pictured, sustained work-related injuries on both sides of the border. Yet another pictures beautiful, eleven-year old Eunice Rebollar, holding fire extinguishers. The text explains that Eunice accompanies her mother and others who spend several afternoons a week distributing fire extinguishers and smoke alarms to the residents of the nearly 300 local trailer camps in their area. Many facets of the farm workers’ lives are represented here, including health (especially environmental justice issues), education, housing, gender roles, labor, spirituality, gay and lesbian life, family, and cultural strongholds (among them the Nahuatl languages of the Mixtec Indians) often missed by observers who fail to see the complexity and heterogeneity masked by the umbrella terms Hispanic and Latino/a. The essays and oral histories begin on page 89 and continue through the remainder of the volume. We hear from people who have lived it what it is like to cross the border in secrecy, to suffer poor health while working in the fields, to ask one’s children to leave school to work in the fields because the family needs the money, to engage in social justice work in the midst of all this. We hear as well from the Executive Director of California Legal Assistance, Inc., who describes the cases his fifty-attorney low-income law firm has been handling for the farm workers in California for over 40 years. The Executive Director of Washington DC’s Farmworker Justice, an advocacy organization, supplies an essay on recent controversies over immigration policy. Finally, another essay, by a professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley provides a history of California’s migrant farm workers. The author concludes his essay as follows: It is this very spirit of human self-affirmation that Rick Nahmias is able to capture in this book, portraits of irrepressible pride in self-in-work, in being capaz, or capable [End Page 288] of providing for one’s family, future, country of origin as well as the United States. It is an old story worth retelling over and over, in both text and pictures, in the endless need to reaffirm our common origins, destiny, and humanity. (pp. 111–2) This reviewer couldn’t agree more. Virginia Brennan Virginia Brennan is the editor of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Copyright © 2009 Meharry Medical College

Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California , and: Anthropology Put to Work (review)

Reviewed by: Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California, and: Anthropology Put to Work Robin Ridington (bio) Les W. Field . Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 208 pp. Paper, $21.95. Les Field and Richard G. Fox , eds. Anthropology Put to Work. Oxford: Berg, 2007. 272 pp. Paper, $29.95. Abalone Tales is a beautiful book that does justice to the beauty of abalone itself and to the oral traditions of California coastal tribes. Field is both present as a participant in the story and respectful of his collaborators. He adroitly brings together older ethnographic texts like Karl Teeter's translation of a Wiyot Abalone Woman story with contemporary literary creations like Cheryl Seidner's version of the same story and Florence Silva's stories about her grandfather, the Bole Maru dreamer John Boston, informant to Cora Du Bois in the 1930s. The book is an example of engaged ethnographic reporting that interweaves information from museum collections and oral history of contemporary California tribal people. Anthropology Put to Work is itself a collaborative enterprise in that contributors came together to participate in a Wenner-Gren Symposium on "Anthropology Put to Work/Anthropology That Works?" Each contributor brought his or her knowledge and regional experience to bear on the topic. The result is a thoughtful and multifaceted collection that should be essential reading for graduating anthropologists looking for a place to combine the anthropological calling with meaningful work. [End Page 224] It also suggests ways in which the work of anthropology and the anthropology of work bring about the discipline's "knowledge claims." When I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, anthropology was not part of the curriculum. I decided to become an anthropologist anyway after a chance summer encounter with the Dane-zaa people of northeastern British Columbia, but I was occasionally confronted with the challenge: "Anthropology, how can you make a living from that?" I had a lot of catching up to do, but thanks to a four-square academic program at Harvard and the vision of my teachers among the Dane-zaa, I was able to define the field in a way that combined the practice of anthropology as a calling with employment as a tenure-track professor in an academic department. I was part of a fortunate generation for whom there were ample employment opportunities in university departments. I am eternally grateful for being able to do what I love and make a living from it. Anthropology graduates today must be more creative in defining the meaningful work available to them. These books provide a useful guide. For today's students beginning to contemplate a career in anthropology, a calling to the discipline cannot be counted on to pay the bills and sustain gainful employment. The two books under review touch both on anthropology as a calling and on anthropology as a route to employment. Abalone Tales is a perfect example of collaborative ethnography in which the anthropologist's calling resonates with the deeply held core identity of the Native Americans with whom he works. The book is organized around "the relationship between the fate of abalone and that of Native Peoples of California." The anthropology of Kroeber and his colleagues declared many of the California tribes extinct, even though they exist to this day. Similarly, abalone is commercially extinct on the California coast but continues to have enormous symbolic value among Native Americans. Field describes his collaborative work with the California tribes as polyphonic, in which he and his collaborators explore "Native identity and sovereignty through the lens of abalone" (12). In this case abalone is itself a polyphonic symbol: a mollusk, a food source, a raw material for sacred and ornamental necklaces, and an inspiration for stories that bring the sacred, the material, and the social together. Field researched abalone shell necklaces held in museum collections in Europe and North America and compared these to illustrations from Georg von Langsdorff [End Page 225] and Cora Du Bois. Then he referenced abalone stories collected by Karl Teeter in relation to a beautiful contemporary interpretation by Wiyot Tribal Chair Cheryl Seidner and...

Impact of Variation in Ration Nutrient Inputs on Animal Responses Predicted by Two Dairy Cattle Metabolic Models

<h2>ABSTRACT</h2> The objectives were to assess impacts of variation in ration nutrient levels (i.e., inputs) on metabolic model-predicted animal responses (i.e., outputs) to determine if variations in ration nutrient values are important to model-predicted dairy cattle outputs. The models used were Molly and CPM Dairy. The ration nutrient inputs varied were soluble carbohydrate (SC), starch, CP, soluble CP (SCP), NDF, ADF, lignin, ether extract, Lys, and Met. Three contemporary California commercial rations for ‘high group' lactating dairy cows were used and nutrients were varied individually, +20% or −20% from base values. Animal outputs used to assess impacts of changes in ration nutrient inputs on model predictions were fecal N, urinary N, milk N (Molly only), microbial DM, milk (ME, metabolizable protein, and amino acid (AA) allowable milk in CPM Dairy), milk fat (Molly only), and metabolizable protein allowable milk protein in CPM Dairy. Results were evaluated by comparing relative sensitivities, which are the changes in model output in response to changes in nutrient input normalized for the average nutrient input and average model output. Both models had similar sensitivities to ration nutrient changes, and there was very little difference in model responses among rations, thereby allowing sensitivities to be pooled among rations. Animal outputs with greater sensitivities indicated more sensitive model outputs to changes in ration nutrient changes. For both models, predicted animal outputs were most sensitive to changes in CP, NDF, and SCP (lignin in CPM Dairy only; ether extract in Molly only) supporting the need for chemical analysis of these nutrients. Sensitivity of modelpredicted animal outputs to Met and Lys were ration and model dependent. Molly was sensitive to an AA, even if it was not limiting animal production, due to N excretion in milk and urine. Estimated AA allowable milk in CPM Dairy was the only output that was sensitive to a limiting AA. Both models were insensitive to changes in SC and ADF, indicating that model library values are adequate for ration formulation, evaluation, or both. Results suggest for both metabolic models a large number of ration input nutrients need not be chemically analyzed because they have no substantive impact on animal responses predicted by these models with the rations selected.