Conventionalization, civic engagement, and the sustainability of organic agriculture

It is often assumed that organic farming is synonymous with sustainable agriculture. The broad goals of sustainable agriculture include economic profitability, environmental stewardship, and community vitality. However, the “question of sustainability” (Ikerd, 2008) can be asked of any type of farming, including organic production. One way to assess sustainability is to consider farmers’ perceptions of the sustainability of their operations. I draw on data from a survey of certified organic producers in Washington State to broaden our understanding of the sustainability of organic agriculture. Specifically, I consider certified organic producers’ perceptions of the degree to which their operations contribute to broad sustainable agriculture goals. Moreover, I use multiple regression to investigate how these perceived contributions are influenced by farm conventionalization variables (e.g., organic acreage, non-organic sales, and specialization) and civic engagement variables (e.g., direct marketing, community group membership, and participation in sustainable/organic agriculture organizations) while controlling for farmer demographics and farm location. Farm conventionalization appears to have a significant negative effect on perceived contributions to environmental and social sustainability, but a significant positive effect on perceived contribution to economic sustainability. Civic engagement appears to have a significant positive effect on perceived contributions to environmental and social sustainability, but no effect on perceived contribution to economic sustainability.     

An accidental outcome: Social capital and its implications for Landcare and the “status quo”

For 25 years the Australian Landcare program has encouraged rural land managers to work cooperatively to resolve natural resource management issues across the nation. Landcare has spread and the model is used internationally. Despite its successes, Landcare has come under criticism for not sufficiently directing land management practices towards environmental sustainability. This criticism sees it as having maintained the “status quo”.     

Envisioning agricultural sustainability from field to plate: Comparing producer and consumer attitudes and practices toward ‘environmentally friendly’ food and farming in Washington State, USA

A substantial body of sociological research has examined the relationship between farmers’ environmental attitudes and their conservation behaviors, but little research has compared the attitudes of producers and consumers toward the environment with their behaviors or practices in support of sustainable agri-food systems. This paper addresses these shortcomings by analyzing the intersection between producer and consumer attitudes toward environmental sustainability with their actual practices, drawing data from focus group interviews and surveys with producers and consumers in Washington State, USA. We compare farmers’ attitudes toward several agricultural and environmental policies with their self-reported practices to examine whether support for environmental policies aligns with sustainable farming practices. For consumers, we investigate the relationship between their attitudes toward the same agricultural and environmental policy issues with their interest in purchasing food produced in an environmentally sustainable manner. Through our analyses, we find that consumers’ and producers’ practices are not always consistently correlated with their environmental attitudes, but that support for agricultural land preservation is one policy area in which the interests of producers and consumers intersect with their interest in sustainable farming and food. Findings from our individual and focus group interviews assist us in understanding the multiple, sometimes competing, factors that consumers and producers must weigh in making decisions about environmentally sustainable food and farming.     

Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal‐Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Public‐private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small‐scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal‐Mart‐owned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal‐Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and third‐party certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public‐private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.     

A Hypothetical Model of a New Business System Responsive to the Global Environment: A Connected Model

Within developing economies, in particular, but also in underdeveloped economies, current business priorities and practices have appeared to be incongruent with the general discourse of environmental sustainability. It is clear that the different players within the economic framework: government, education system, producers, and consumers—appear to hold differing interests, none of which places any meaningful emphasis on environmental sustainability. Following this observation, this paper seeks to argue for a change of tactics within which current players are treated as stakeholders and co-opted into a new business model that is fundamentally sensitive to the promotion and development of environmental sustainability. This approach is intended to interconnect the key market players’ interests and systematically weave them into a modern environmentally sustainable compliant business ethos.      

Are Conventional Farmers Conventional? Analysis of the Environmental Orientations of Conventional New Zealand Farmers*

Abstract Within the political economy of agriculture and agrofood literatures there are examples of approaches that reject simple dichotomies between alternatives and the mainstream. In line with such approaches, we challenge the assumption that alternative agriculture, and its attendant improved environmental practices, alternative management styles, less intensive approaches, and better approaches to animal and ecosystem welfare, is the only source of agricultural sustainability. This article uses national farm‐survey results for New Zealand's sheep and beef, dairy, and horticulture sectors to examine conventional farmers, measure their assessments of farming practices, and assess their environmental orientation. Analysis identifies a proenvironmental cluster of farmers in each sector characterized by a higher environmental‐orientation score and distinct ratings of other farm practices queried in the survey. We interpret the results in terms of the exposure of different agricultural sectors to the effects of market‐based, audited, best‐practice schemes. The presence of shades of “greenness” among conventional farmers has important implications for environmental management and for our understanding of the various and complex pathways toward the greening of agrofood systems.     

Environmental Harm and “the Good Farmer”: Conceptualizing Discourses of Environmental Sustainability in the Beef Industry

Maintaining sustainability discourses in the face of evidence to the contrary is a topic of considerable interest in sociology. We approach this topic with a focus on the beef industry in Alberta, Canada. By studying the discourses of cow and calf producers this article addresses the following questions: (1) What are the discourses that producers draw on to support their self‐perceptions as stewards of the land, (2) how are these discourses used by producers to negotiate and reconcile their involvement in a system that contributes to environmental degradation, and (3) what are key elements to interpreting these discourses of sustainability? Methods include semistructured interviews with attention to the potential of genomics for enhanced cattle breeding to ameliorate harmful methane emissions. Our findings indicate that producers draw on narratives of balance between economic and environmental concerns, focus on epistemic nearness, and fragment their understanding of the beef industry to maintain discourses of sustainability. These findings offer insights into the impacts that embodied, material forms of knowledge have on farmers’ perceptions of the land, and demonstrate that these narratives and ways of knowing predicate farmers’ understandings of sustainable development.     

The Uplands after neoliberalism? – The role of the small farm in rural sustainability

The modernist project foresaw no role for small farms, but this can no longer be regarded as axiomatic as neoliberalism enters what Peck et al. call its “zombie phase”. This paper asks what contribution small farms in the uplands can make to societies’ goals, what role they might play in the sustainability of rural communities in such regions, and how this contribution might be supported by state policies. In Scotland and in Norway these questions have recently been the subject of policy debates which appear to offer exceptions or alternatives to neoliberal universalism, and these are considered specifically in this paper. In each case support for small farms is seen as necessary to maintain ‘lights in the windows’ of remoter rural areas. Moreover, each highlights the vital role of the state in offering not only financial support but also in regulating land transfers and occupancy. It is argued that the dismantling of such regulatory powers depletes the state’s ability to manage the tensions between continuity and change which are at the heart of sustainable rural development. The paper concludes that small farms can persist and can contribute to rural sustainability in ways that have been infrequently recognised under neoliberalism.     

The politics of marginality in Wallowa County,Oregon: Contesting the production of landscapes of consumption

The state of Oregon’s (USA) land use planning framework has long been characterized by tensions between state and local authority, between traditionally-defined “urban” and “rural” concerns, and between the competing interests of various landowners. An examination of Wallowa County, Oregon’s implementation of House Bill 3326, a 2001 law giving counties the power to define certain agricultural lands as “marginal,” and therefore exempt from restrictions on subdivision and development, illustrates the ways in which these tensions become magnified as rural communities attempt to govern private land use in the context of rural restructuring. Implementation of HB3326 highlighted the tensions between landowners interested in capitalizing on development opportunities afforded by HB3326, neighboring producers concerned about interference from future amenity migrants, and existing amenity migrants with interests in protecting their rural idyll. Contestations over nonfarm development took place in the context of a strong agricultural community identity, concerns about the effects of economic restructuring on producers, and local resistance to the rural gentrification process. The process of defining marginality came to encompass not only technical issues of land productivity, but also broader community contestations over the continuation of traditional land uses and the legitimacy of various actors to govern private land.     

A conceptual framework for the strategic urban project approach for the sustainable redevelopment of “villages in the city” in Guangzhou

China’s recent wave of rapid urbanization generated a specific form of urban development called the “village in the city” (ViC). It is characterized by the dual urban-rural structure and it accommodates, to begin with, the monumental housing needs of rural migrants. Although the issues of ViCs are very specific and enormous, they evidently have a lot in common with those of slum areas and dilapidated urban areas in developed and developing contexts, in which there already is a long experience with upgrading or urban renewal operations. Also in this specific context of upgrading and urban renewal, the strategic urban project approach is generally being advocated. It emphasizes vision development, the coproduction by stakeholders and the implementation of actions. Strategic urban projects are the cornerstone of this approach. This paper sketches a conceptual framework for the strategic urban project approach for the sustainable redevelopment of “villages in the city” (ViCs) in Guangzhou. It makes an attempt to translate the methodologies of the strategic urban project approach to the Chinese context. Adapting the method to deal with the multi-stakeholder environment and complex issues in ViCs is indeed necessary in order to obtain a sustainable redevelopment of ViCs. Consideration is given to the roles and partnerships of key stakeholders, visions at different levels, and specific actions that deal with opportunities and issues in strategic locations.     

Crafting Mass Dairy Production: Immigration and Community in Rural America

In many parts of rural America, agrofood producers compete for a larger share of global markets by mechanizing, deskilling, and flexibly relocating to reduce labor costs. They recruit new immigrant workers but sow transience rather than sustainable rural growth. The industrialization of U.S. dairy farming appears to be aligned with these processes, and yet the large‐scale dairy farmers who have replaced small craft producers face a paradox: The more they rationalize production on their farms, the more vulnerable their herds become to stress and illness, compromising production. Focusing on three competing dairies in Kansas, I examine how farmers variously organize work among immigrant employees to promote herd health while expanding their operations. Evidence from 22 months of ethnographic research and repeated interviews with farm owners, managers, employees, and extension agents suggests that enhancing production requires promoting employee citizenship at work—especially among immigrant employees possessing the fewest citizenship rights outside of work. In contrast to the high labor turnover endemic to other forms of industrialized food production, the distinctive human‐animal relations central to dairying encourage farm owners and employees to cooperate, with promising results for farms and rural communities.     

Wood energy production,sustainable farming livelihood and multifunctionality in Finland

Climate change and the projected depletion of fossil energy resources pose multiple global challenges. Innovative technologies offer interesting possibilities to achieve more sustainable outcomes in the energy production sector. Local, decentralized alternatives have the potential to sustain livelihoods in rural areas. One example of such a venture has emerged around heating businesses in rural Finland, and is referred to as heat entrepreneurship. Heat entrepreneurship entails a system where a local forest owner, usually a farmer, provides heat to a small community or local building, such as a school. Heat is produced using local forest resources that would otherwise be unutilized. The purpose of this study is to examine heat entrepreneurship as a potential sustainable alternative for energy production and its multifunctionality. The data was collected by interviewing 15 heat entrepreneurs in the area of Central Finland. The study demonstrates how multifunctional farming-related energy production can provide more sustainable livelihoods for farmers by increasing social, economic and environmental sustainability. This is achieved by diversifying farmers' economic options, enhancing rural areas economically, increasing farmers' social networks and well-being and, to some extent, by boosting local environmental capital. However, the study also points to differences among the farmers and sustainability trade-offs, suggesting for the need to better acknowledge the local perceptions in policy-making.     

Legitimating impotence: Pyrrhic victories of the modern environmental movement

The strengths and limitations of the modern environmental movement are assessed, using a contextual analysis, with a framework drawn from pragmatic analysis. Empirical summaries from recent policy-making supported by the movement: in community-based recycling, local toxic waste movements, and water pollution control document the fact that the movement has indeed developed some sustainable resistance in policy-making in the U.S. and at the Rio Conference. But it has also ignored those consequences of environmental protection which degrade the living conditions for many people of color and other low-income groups. The movement's failure to form enduring coalitions for linking environmental protection to social justice limits the movement's power, by permitting disempowered groups to be mobilized in opposition to environmental protection. We outline an alternative strategy, built around sustainable legitimacy, which will require changes in the composition and program of environmental movement organizations.     

Fair Trade: Social regulation in global food markets

This article analyzes the theoretical and empirical parameters of social regulation in contemporary global food markets, focusing on the rapidly expanding Fair Trade initiative. Fair Trade seeks to transform North/South relations by fostering ethical consumption, producer empowerment, and certified commodity sales. This initiative joins an array of labor and environmental standard and certification systems which are often conceptualized as “private regulations” since they depend on the voluntary participation of firms. I argue that these new institutional arrangements are better understood as “social regulations” since they operate beyond the traditional bounds of private and public (corporate and state) domains and are animated by individual and collective actors. In the case of Fair Trade, I illuminate how relational and civic values are embedded in economic practices and institutions and how new quality assessments are promoted as much by social movement groups and loosely aligned consumers and producers as they are by market forces. This initiative's recent commercial success has deepened price competition and buyer control and eroded its traditional peasant base, yet it has simultaneously created new openings for progressive politics. The study reveals the complex and contested nature of social regulation in the global food market as movement efforts move beyond critique to institution building.     

The spaces and ethics of organic food

Initial assessments of the potential for organic food systems have offered an optimistic interpretation of the progressive political and ethical characteristics involved. This positive gloss has prompted a stream of critique emphasising the need to explore the ambiguities and disconnections inherent therein. In this paper, we consider the case of Riverford Organic Vegetables,¹ arguably the largest supplier of organic vegetables in the UK, and suggest that existing debates assume too much about the “goods” and “rights” of organic food and leave important questions about the spaces and ethics of organic food. We argue that, in the case of Riverford, the space of organic food production and distribution is neither the small, local, counter-cultural farm nor the large, transnational, corporate firm. Rather, simultaneously, the spaces of organic food production and distribution are the national network, the regional distribution system and the local farm. In addition, in the case of Riverford, the ethics of organic food exhibit few grand designs (of environmental sustainability, for example). Rather, the ethics of organic food are best characterised as: ordinary, since they relate to concerns about taste, value for money, care within the family and so on; diverse, since multiple practices steer the production and distribution of organic food; and graspable, in that both vegetables and box have material and symbolic presence for consumers.     

Understanding Collaborative Value Creation by Environmental Nonprofit and Renewable Energy Business Partnerships

Many environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) seek to create sustainability value by promoting environmental principles and influencing policymakers to support pro-environmental legislation. One strategy used by ENPOs to enhance the value creation process is the development of partnerships with businesses. Semi-structured interviews with leaders of six national ENPOs in the United States were conducted to examine the sources and types of value created by collaborations with renewable energy businesses, and the partnership processes and outcomes that are most desirable. The goal was to understand how and why ENPOs seek partnerships, what the potential benefits are, and whether or not ENPO leadership orientation, as characterized by their perceptions of the political opportunity structure, political ideology, and environmental philosophy, led to different views of partnerships for sustainability value creation. The finding that differences in the partnership perspectives of the ENPO leadership did not directly link to differences in the leadership orientations suggests that none of the orientations precluded partnering in general and may even have been enablers in some cases.     

Reflexive audiovisual methodology: The emergence of “minority practices” among pluriactive stock farmers

This paper proposes a new way for sociology, through both methodology and theory, to understand the reality of social groups and their “minority practices.” It is based on an experiment that concerns a very specific category of agriculturalists called “pluriactive” stock farmers. These stock farmers, who engage in raising livestock part-time alongside another full-time job, form a minority category within the agricultural profession.We address the question of how to analyze and represent the practices of this kind of “social” group or category through participatory filmmaking. Our research shows that beyond the collaborative production and screening of the film done in close cooperation with the stock farmers themselves, a second unexpected dynamic emerged around the sequences that were cut in the final editing round. These cut sequences reveal hesitations and disagreements among the breeders about their own practices in relation to their work and to animal welfare. These hesitations are not considered weaknesses, but rather as proof of the emergence of this group of stock farmers as “practitioners”. In the realm of intervention research, the participatory film-making process is attractive because it enables the farmers to raise new questions on their own, discuss them, and eventually resolve them, while also encouraging the researchers to identify the conditions that must be met in order to achieve this fragile linkage. This process and its outcomes force us to revisit the theoretical question of what constitutes a pragmatic definition of a “practice.”     

Environmental Sustainability in U.S. Assisted Living Facilities

Population aging and environmental sustainability appear to be on a collision course. Concurrent with the increasing needs of older adults for more goods, services, and housing, concern for the environmental impact of this population is growing. Environmental sustainability efforts by assisted living facilities (ALFs) were queried using an online survey focusing on the following four areas: facility information, sustainable practices, motivations to green, and views of sustainable certification. The survey was sent to 800 ALFs from 34 states. The results indicated movement toward environmental sustainability, primarily connection to community, interaction with nature, and quality of life improvement for residents and staff. This study also depicts the challenges of greening while keeping human well-being a top priority. Furthermore, administrators of ALFs were largely uninformed about greening but viewed the costs and paperwork as barriers to greening and certification. Suggestions for future research, education, and the promotion of greening in ALFs are proposed.     

Local Identity, Cultural Commodities, and Development in Rural Japan: The Potential as Viewed by Cultural Producers and Local Residents

Abstract:  This paper considers the development potential of rural and highly peripheral areas of Japan, focusing on local factors of development, together with local identity and cultural commodities, as these are incorporated into what has been called the culture economy. Based on a survey of informed local residents and another of local cultural commodities producers, the paper alludes to what constitutes a culture economy for rural settings and identifies several key aspects related to the process of such a cultural commodities-based approach to development. While confirming the importance of identity and cultural commodities in the local development profile of rural settings, the paper sets the groundwork for further research concerning the complex process for how such development can be achieved. The main themes identified for further research include both the nature and role of residents' solidarity together with the combinative nature of government support and local entrepreneurship in the local culture economy on the one hand, and the character of the advertising and media representation by which cultural commodities are created and maintained on the other.     

The social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit discipline: Initial insights from the ARGOS project in New Zealand

One of the most interesting recent developments in global agri-food systems has been the rapid emergence and elaboration of market audit systems claiming environmental qualities or sustainability. In New Zealand, as a strongly export-oriented, high-value food producer, these environmental market audit systems have emerged as an important pathway for producers to potentially move towards more sustainable production. There have, however, been only sporadic and fractured attempts to study the emerging social practice of sustainable agriculture - particularly in terms of the emergence of new audit disciplines in farming. The ARGOS project in New Zealand was established in 2003 as a longitudinal matched panel study of over 100 farms and orchards using different market audit systems (e.g., organic, integrated or GLOBALG.A.P.). This article reports on the results of social research into the social practice of sustainable agriculture in farm households within the ARGOS projects between 2003 and 2009. Results drawn from multiple social research instruments deployed over six years provide an unparalleled level of empirical data on the social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit disciplines. Using 12 criteria identified in prior literature as contributing a significant social dynamic around sustainable agriculture practices in other contexts, the analysis demonstrated that 9 of these 12 dimensions did demonstrate differences in social practices emerging between (or co-constituting) organic, integrated, or conventional audit disciplines. These differences clustered into three main areas: 1) social and learning/knowledge networks and expertise, 2) key elements of farmer subjectivity - particularly in relation to subjective positioning towards the environment and nature, and 3) the role and importance of environmental dynamics within farm management practices and systems. The findings of the project provide a strong challenge to some older framings of the social practice of sustainable agriculture: particularly those that rely on paradigm-driven evaluation of social motivations, strong determinism of sustainable practice driven by coherent farmer identity, or deploying overly categorical interpretations of what it means to be ’organic’ or ’conventional’. The complex patterning of the ARGOS data can only be understood if the social practice of organic, integrated or (even more loosely) conventional production is understood as being co-produced by four dynamics: subjectivity/identity, audit disciplines, industry cultures/structure and time. This reframing of how we might research the social practice of sustainable agriculture opens up important new opportunities for understanding the emergence and impact of new audit disciplines in agriculture.