The Political and Economic Consequences of Defining Sustainable Agriculture in the US

Despite the increasing popularity of sustainably produced foods, a concrete definition of sustainable agriculture has been elusive. Even the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) article, “What is Sustainable Agriculture?” starts with the idea that “Some terms defy definition. ‘Sustainable agriculture’ has become one of them” (Gold 2011). This essay explores (1) the history of sustainable agriculture as a concept in the United States, (2) the political and economic forces that have impacted and stifled the process of defining sustainable agriculture, and (3) the implications for social justice that come with creating a specific definition of sustainable agriculture. Recognizing that the ability to define a varied set of agricultural practices as “sustainable” (or not) is an important source of political, economic, or social power, this essay explains how such processes might impact the future of food systems in the United States.     

Barriers to the Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture on Rented Land: An Examination of Contesting Social Fields*

Abstract While over half of the cropland in the United States is rented, interest in land tenancy within sociological circles has been sporadic at best. In light of the prevalence of rented land in agriculture—particularly in the Midwest—it is vital that further research be conducted to investigate the effect that the rental relationship has upon the various aspects of rural life. This paper takes a step in this direction by examining the social dynamics among landlords, tenants, and agricultural agency professionals to better understand how those dynamics affect the adoption of sustainable agricultural methods on rented land. This paper is theoretically informed by the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his theory of practice and his concepts of “habitus” and “field.” Toward this end, I argue that multiple (yet overlapping) social fields make up the social body of production agriculture, leading to contestation and field reconstruction. In developing this argument, a strategy for change is presented in accordance with the conceptual postulates of Bourdieu's theory of practice to promote a more widespread utilization of sustainable agricultural practices on rented land.     

Creating Tactile Space during a University Extension Field Day Event: The Case of a Sustainable Agriculture Innovation

Drawing on the concept of “tactile space,” we evaluate the experiential learning environment of a university extension field day event focused on a sustainable agriculture innovation: biodegradable plastic mulch. Introduced by sociologist Michael Carolan, “tactile spaces” are sensuously rich learning environments where participants interact with each other and the environment in an “embodied” and “embedded” manner leading to long‐lasting attitudinal and behavioral change. In our study, farmers, extension professionals, crop consultants, and mulch manufacturers participated in a field day event designed to provide both embodied and embedded experiences in an effort to stimulate interest in biodegradable plastic mulch, an economically and environmentally sustainable alternative to polyethylene mulch. Field day participants engaged in hands‐on demonstrations preceded and followed by focus group sessions. Enhancing the learning environment in these ways improved the success of the field day event by encouraging practice‐based forms of learning, which supplemented and reinforced the claims made about biodegradable plastic mulch. However, the tactile space could have been enriched by providing more opportunities for participants to become embedded within the environment, and by adding elements to overcome the temporal limitations of the field day event. This research contributes to the broader literature on participatory research and extension.     

Positive Development in a Disorderly World

Adolescents need to develop competencies to navigate an adult world that is complex and disorderly: a world of heterogeneous macro‐ to microecological systems containing contradictions and catch‐22s. This exploratory essay examines adolescents' conscious processes of developing pertinent competencies for pursuing goals (agency) in these kinds of “real‐world” settings. It draws on qualitative longitudinal research on youth's experiences working on arts and community projects in which they encounter the irregular dynamics of complex human systems. I describe how youth develop “strategic thinking”: executive skills for formulating strategies based on forecasting dynamics in navigating these systems. I also describe how youth learn to manage emotions (in self and others) that arise in these real‐world transactions and how they develop motivation that sustains their work toward goals. Even as we learn more about the biological hardware of development, I argue that we must study youth's conscious, proactive processes in developing their own “software” to navigate complex and disorderly human worlds.     

Relational Equity as a Design Tool Within Making and Tinkering Activities

This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice” and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.     

Divers' Accounts of Normal Risk

This research examines how deep sea divers learn to expand notions of risk to include practices that violate formal training and may increase vulnerability to injury. Cultural constructions of “normal” or acceptable risk are learned in interaction with experienced divers who define the rules of membership and provide accounts that excuse or justify participation in high risk activities. The research explores how novice divers learn to distinguish categories of formal, normal, and excessive risk as they expand their risk involvement and attempt to achieve membership in the deep diving subculture. The study concludes with a discussion of risk normalization in everyday life and other leisure and occupational subcultures.     

Conventional versus Alternative Agriculture: The Paradigmatic Roots of the Debate*

Abstract Analysts have described conflict between the economically dominant industrial sector of society and the environmental movement as representing competition between two opposing worldviews or social paradigms. There appears to be a similar schism developing in agriculture. The conventional paradigm of large-scale, highly industrialized agriculture is being challenged by an increasingly vocal alternative agriculture movement which advocates major shifts toward a more “ecologically sustainable agriculture.” Some have suggested that alternative agriculture represents a fundamentally new paradigm for agriculture. This paper seeks to clarify and synthesize the core beliefs and values underlying these two approaches to agriculture into a “conventional agriculture paradigm” and an “alternative agriculture paradigm.” The writings of six major proponents of alternative agriculture are compared with those of six leading proponents of conventional agriculture to document the major components of the two agricultural paradigms. The two sets of writings reveal dramatically divergent perspectives on a wide range of agricultural issues. The competing paradigms can be synthesized into six major dimensions: 1) centralization vs. decentralization, 2) dependence vs. independence, 3) competition vs. community, 4) domination of nature vs. harmony with nature, 5) specialization vs. diversity, and 6) exploitation vs. restraint. The emerging controversy over “low-input, sustainable agriculture” (LISA) illustrates the paradigmatic gulf between alternative and conventional agriculture, as well as the pitfalls facing alternative agriculturalists as they attempt to replace conventional agriculture as the dominant paradigm.     

Social Theory and the De/Reconstruction of Agricultural Science: Local Knowledge for an Alternative Agriculture1

Abstract As a result of environmental and agrarian activism and of academic critique, a substantial amount of space is available now for moving agricultural technoscience onto new trajectories. A critical rural sociology has played a key role in pushing forward the deconstructive project that has been instrumental in creating this space. And rural sociologists can be active agents in the reconstruction of the alternative science that must emerge from “actually existing” science and that must be developed if there is to be a truly alternative agriculture. But to be effective in this effort we need to enlarge not only the canon of our colleagues in the natural sciences, but our own canon as well. This article suggests that the theoretical resources for such reconstruction are available in contemporary sociological and feminist interpretations of science. Material resources for the reconstruction of a “successor science” are to be found in the “local knowledge” that is continually produced and reproduced by farmers and agricultural workers. Articulations and complementarities between theoretical resources are suggested and potentially productive research areas are outlined.     

Social Learning and Innovation at Retail Farmers' Markets*

Abstract Retail farmers' markets are seen as key institutions in a more “civic agriculture,” but little is known about how they promote small business entrepreneurship. Drawing on research in economic sociology and economic geography, this paper examines the role of social learning in vendor innovation. Data from a 1999 mail survey of farmers' market vendors in California, New York and Iowa show that business innovation, as represented by intensity of vendors' innovative marketing practices and vendors' successful enterprise expansion, was modest. Social learning through engagement with customers contributed to more innovative marketing by vendors, while social learning through engagement with customers and fellow vendors increased the likelihood of vendors diversifying to additional markets beyond the farmers' market. Certain individual and enterprise characteristics also influenced vendor innovation. This suggests that, although important, the beneficial effects of social learning for vendors at farmers' markets remain moderated by human capital and structural factors.     

Do You See What I See? Examining the Epistemic Barriers to Sustainable Agriculture*

Abstract This paper examines the epistemic barriers to sustainable agriculture, which are those aspects of food production that are not readily revealed by direct perception: such as decreases in rates of soil and nutrient loss, increases in levels of beneficial soil micro‐organisms, and reductions in the amount of chemicals leaching into the water table. While many of sustainable agriculture's most touted benefits cannot easily or immediately be seen by producers, the opposite can be said of the benefits of conventional agriculture: from, for example, weed‐free rows and pest‐free fields to tall stalks, large yields, and commodity uniformity. Yet, while its benefits are readily apparent to many operators, the costs of conventional agricultural production often are not because conventional agriculture partly externalizes those costs to society at large. This paper investigates how the tension between the “visible” and the “nonvisible” plays out in the debate between sustainable and conventional agriculture. It concludes by suggesting potential solutions to overcoming these epistemic barriers, so as to make the epistemologically distant aspects of sustainable (namely, the benefits of) and conventional (namely, the costs of) agriculture more visible to all.     

Designing Dreams or Constructing Contradictions? European Union Multifunctional Policies and the Polish Organic Farm Sector*

Analysts have heralded the principle of “multifunctionality” undergirding the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy “Second Pillar” support mechanisms as a “new . . . and strong paradigm” for agriculture ( van der Ploeg and Roep 2003 ), with the potential to re‐embed social, environmental, and ethical concerns into the structure of the agricultural system. Multifunctionality‐inspired agrienvironmental policies arguably represent an alternative to the productivist‐focused structural forces driving global industrialized agriculture. Yet few empirical studies interrogate the links between the assumed benefits of these policies and farmer experiences. This article examines the introduction of European Union multifunctional agrienvironmental policies in Poland, specifically incentives and supports for certified organic farming, and demonstrates that while favorable incentive subsidies have promoted increased entry into the organic farming sector, inattention to contextual factors has generated barriers to entry and access, creating unanticipated vulnerabilities for Poland's organic farmers and subsequent contradictions in policy implementation. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that, although specific organic certification standards have changed little since Poland's accession to the European Union, the processes associated with new EU multifunctional policies have shifted toward greater institutionalization and bureaucratization, potentially thwarting the efficacy of multifunctional incentives for organic agriculture in the Polish context.     

Multisensory Emplaced Learning: Resituating Situated Learning in a Moving World

This article outlines the implications of a theory of “sensory-emplaced learning” for understanding the interrelationships between the embodied and environmental in learning processes. Understanding learning as multisensory and contingent within everyday place-events, this framework analytically describes how people establish themselves as “situated learners.” This approach is demonstrated through three examples of how culturally constructed sensory categories offer routes to knowing about the multisensoriality of learning experiences. This approach, we suggest, offers new routes within practice-oriented educational theories for understanding how human bodies become situated and embedded in cultural, social, and material practices within constantly shifting place-events.     

Learning about fishery management: Evaluation of a contextualized responsive evaluation approach

This article discusses the extent to which a responsive evaluation (RE) approach contributed to learning by stakeholders in a case of high complexity. Fishery management in Grand-Popo, Benin is characterized by ambiguity, that is contrasting views among fishery stakeholders about what should be done, why, how, where, and when to resolve fishery problems like the depletion of fish-stock and absence of income alternatives. It was also characterized by great gaps (mismatches) between interventionists’ plans and actions, despite generations of interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness. The RE approach aimed at facilitating interactions between interventionists and fishing people to stimulate learning and hence reduce the ambiguity and mismatches. In this article, we take distance and evaluate the results of this action research approach. We found that in the interaction some learning indeed occurred. The fishing people learned among others that intervention resources are limited and that they should organize themselves to lobby for and monitor interventions to solve their problems. Interventionists learned that they could share knowledge about their roles and limited resources with fishing people so that the latter could lobby for more resources. Fishing people however, did not learn to adopt more sustainable fishing practices. Also, interventionists did not learn to influence politicians and financial partners themselves for sufficient resources. Both categories of stakeholders developed ideas for how to collaborate to improve fishery management. We conclude that although some single-loop, double-loop and social learning occurred, the learning was limited and reflect on the related challenges for RE in natural resource management.     

Language,culture and access to mathematics: a case of one remote Aboriginal community

For many students, coming to learn mathematics is as much about the pedagogical relay through which concepts are conveyed as it is about the mathematics per se. This relay comprises social, cultural and linguistic norms as well as the mathematical discourse. In this study, I outline the practices of one remote school and how the teaching practices scaffold Indigenous learners whose home language is different from the language of instruction (Standard Australian English) as they come to learn mathematics. Through various strategies, teachers have created positive learning environments that celebrate the home languages of the students while supporting the transition into Standard Australian English and the discourse of mathematics.     

Agriculture as an upholder of cultural heritage? Conceptualizations and value judgements—A Norwegian perspective in international context

The multifunctional role of agriculture as a producer of collective goods in addition to food and fibre, has been stressed within the context of negotiations on the liberalization of the world market for food (WTO) and in general in discussions concerning restructuring of the agricultural sector. One of these collective goods, cultural heritage, is connected to agricultural practice and covers objects, sites and areas influenced by agricultural activity, as well as experience based knowledge of work, resource utilization and management. Agriculture is seen both as a threat to and a caretaker of cultural heritage. This double role is recognized in Norway, although the responsibility of the agricultural sector as a caretaker of cultural heritage is stressed. This article investigates the connection between agriculture and cultural heritage as expressed by public and private actors who define the policy agenda, namely the cultural heritage or environmental, the agricultural and tourism sectors. This is done by analysing explicit and implicit value judgements in central concepts like “cultural heritage”, “active agriculture” and “added value”. The Norwegian case is compared to the international context. The analysis shows that within a Nordic context active farming and cultural heritage is positively linked and the farmer is seen as a major caretaker, while in documents from dominant international actors cultural heritage is seen as something on the side of active farming. Although differences reflect some actual variation in the consequences of agricultural practices, it is clear that concepts serve as ‘legitimizing tools’ placing central actors within a specific political agenda.     

Motherhood Motivations: African Refugee Women Resettled in Australia and Return Visits to a Country of First Asylum

This article expands on conceptualizations of refugee “return” by examining why African women resettled as refugees in Australia return to visit the country of first asylum from which they were previously resettled. I show that their return visits do not relate to attachment to place, but are motivated by social obligations to practise “motherhood” to family members who, due to conflict‐induced displacement, remain in a country of first asylum. I argue that the phenomenon of refugee “return” cannot be conflated exclusively with return to country of origin but is, for African women in particular, centred on the reinvigoration of care relationships across diasporic settings of asylum in which family remain. Building on an emergent focus on feminization in migration studies, I show how these gendered dynamics of refugee “return” are an entry point from which to re‐consider how scholarship and policy take into account “family” in contexts of forced migration.     

Embeddedness and local food systems: notes on two types of direct agricultural market

Direct agricultural markets, predicated on face-to-face ties between producers and consumers, are often seen as central components of local food systems. Activists and academic analysts often assume that trust and social connection characterize direct agricultural markets, distinguishing local food systems from the “global food system”. This article examines that premise about direct agricultural markets, using the concept of social embeddedness from economic sociology to analyze the interplay of the economic and the social. Specifically, it draws on Block's (1990) elaboration of the concepts of marketness and instrumentalism to qualify the concept of social embeddedness. Taken together, and augmented by consideration of how they relate to power and privilege, these concepts provide an analytical framework that more accurately describes the social relations of two types of direct agricultural markets — the farmers’ market and community supported agriculture. In providing an alternative market, farmers’ markets create a context for closer social ties between farmers and consumers, but remain fundamentally rooted in commodity relations. In attempting to construct an alternative to the market, as reflected in an explicit emphasis on community and in the distinctive “share” relationship, community supported agriculture moves closer towards the decommodification of food. Nonetheless, in both types of direct markets, tensions between embeddedness, on the one hand, and marketness and instrumentalism, on the other, suggest how power and privilege may sometimes rest more with educated, middle-class consumers than with farmers or less-advantaged consumers. Recognizing how marketness and instrumentalism complicate social embeddedness is critical for understanding the viability, development and prospects of local food systems.     

Environmentalization: Origins,Processes, and Implications for Rural Social Change1

Abstract This paper seeks to go beyond the sui eneris conception of the increased role of “green” forces and the concomitant environmentalization of institutional practices in the United States and elsewhere across the world. It is argued that these forces must be located in the transition from social-democratic to neo-conservative regimes of social regulation of economy and society that has occurred during the past 15 or so years of global economic stagnation. This transition and its reflection in greening and environmentalization may be seen to have contradictory implications for rural societies. These implications are explored briefly with respect to sustainable development programs in the developing countries, sustainable agricultural research and outreach in the United States, and the possible growth of environmental symbolization of rural spaces.