“The Only Thing That Isn't Sustainable . . . Is the Farmer”: Social Sustainability and the Politics of Class among Pacific Northwest Farmers Engaged in Sustainable Farming

Using interviews and participant observation at Pacific Northwest sustainable farming operations, this article analyzes the complex ways that class privileges and labor practices impact the social sustainability of sustainable agriculture. While the farmers in this study were highly aware of and reflexive about the class politics of sustainable agriculture, they also participated in a classed system that restricts access to sustainable farming as an occupation even as it exploits the labor of the farmer in order to regulate prices. In particular, the farmers in the study benefited from educational privileges and often‐lucrative off‐farm income, they expressed a desire to make their goods more accessible and affordable even as they marketed their foods to their upper‐middle‐class consumers, and they used their own idealism as justification to exploit their own difficult labor on the farm. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, this research explores the negotiations between farmers' social ideals and the actual practice of sustainable agriculture in a capitalist system.     

Beyond “Inherit It or Marry It”: Exploring How Women Engaged in Sustainable Agriculture Access Farmland

Despite an overall decrease in new farm operations, the number of women farm operators grew 30 percent between 2002 and 2007, with 300 percent growth since 1978. This research suggests, however, that opportunities for women have unfolded unevenly. We argue that women's opportunities to farm are affected by their social location and life course, suggesting that as their lives unfold across specific cultural and economic moments, different cohorts of women experience divergent opportunities to farm. Using in‐depth interviews with women engaged in sustainable farming in the Inland Northwest, this article examines how women access farmland. Our findings suggest three methods for access: (1) access through the traditional means of marrying a male farmer and then carving out space for one's self as a farmer; (2) access later in life after a life‐altering event like divorce and using personal financial means, such as retirement income or selling appreciated property; (3) access at a young age through the pooling of marital resources with a husband who works off the farm. Our research suggests that women's land access should not be presumed a progressive narrative and suggests the need for a more complex understanding of the challenges that women in agriculture face today despite their increased presence in farming.     

GENDER AND OFF-FARM EMPLOYMENT IN TWO FARMING SYSTEMS: Responses to Farm Crisis in the Cornbelt and the Mississippi Delta

An important farm household survival strategy in the 1980s agricultural crisis was off-farm employment. Recent research shows that gender role expectations structure off-farm employment's effects on farm operations. However, this research does not evaluate off-farm employment's effects within different socioeconomic and cultural settings. This article explores case studies of two localities with different farming systems: family farming in the Cornbelt and capitalist (or wage labor) farming in the Mississippi Delta. Farmers in two counties representative of each system responded to mail questionnaires covering various topics including farm and household changes made during the 1980s financial crisis. Loglinear modèls estimating the relationship between changes in off-farm employment and selected changes in farm operations derive results for the Cornbelt that confirm previous studies. Women's off-farm employment, in particular, relates to a variety of changes in the farm enterprise and improves its capital position. As expected, given its historic separation of household and enterprise, the Mississippi Delta evinces no such pattern of change. These results indicate the need for additional research on this topic, comparing different agrarian class structures.     

Neither ‘family’ nor ‘corporate’ farming: Australian tomato growers as farm family entrepreneurs

For the past two decades there has been much debate about the future of family farming. The basic question on which this debate has turned is whether current pressures on family farm systems should be understood as symptomatic of a terminal condition, in which farmers are replaced progressively by corporate ownership; or whether family farms will persist as a social formation, albeit increasingly subsumed by off-farm interests. Using evidence from the Australian processing tomato sector, this article documents the changing social and economic formation of ‘family farming’. We argue that in this industry, the appropriate way to describe farmers is through the deployment of that a new category of farming; farm family entrepreneurs. This phrase is coined to describe the situation where family units remain at the social and economic heart of farm ownership and operation, but in the context where they relate to their land-based assets through legal and financial structures characteristic of the wider economy. As this article explores, this formation seems to represent an accommodating modus operandi for farm units within neo-liberal agricultural governance. Nevertheless, however, this duality of family-based structures and capitalist entrepreneurialism inevitably provokes a series of tensions, whose resolution requires a variety of organizational strategies to be put in place.     

Off‐farm Work among Rural Households: A Case Study in the Brazilian Amazon

This article analyzes off‐farm work among subsistence‐level farmers in the Santarém region of the Brazilian Amazon. We build on the literature on rural livelihoods in the Global South by exploring how the opportunity to work off the farm is embedded in social relationships. We additionally differentiate our analysis by type of off‐farm work, and examine how other characteristics such as human capital, the available labor supply, and access to infrastructure vary by work outcome. In general, the factors that contribute to more secure, relatively higher‐paying work differ from those important in understanding patterns of lower‐paying, daily wage work. We find that on‐farm social capital, measured as the presence of a co‐resident on the property who works off the farm, increases an individual's probability of working off the farm, but has a stronger effect for lower‐wage work. We also find that the farm owner's relationship to households on the farm property plays a significant role in predicting patterns of off‐farm work. These findings suggest that social capital plays an important role in providing access to employment and therefore to cash income, but that farm‐level social capital does not necessarily provide pathways to stable or high‐paying jobs outside agriculture.     

“Some Things Never Change,We’re Always Second in Line”: Gendered Experiences of Progress and the Agricultural Crisis in Almeria,Spain*

This article addresses sex‐gender relations within the context of changing class relations shaped by the historical formation of an intensive system of agricultural production in Almeria (Spain). The analysis of work, both on the farm and within the domestic unit, guides the research, which relates socio‐historical conditions and the subjective experiences and identities of men and women farmers. We begin from the theoretical premise that the change from being employed as wage laborers to becoming farm owners was a family project in which women and sex‐gender relations played an essential, though hidden, role. We use a qualitative methodology and an historical perspective focused on the different phases of the Almerian agricultural model: the origin and consolidation of the sector (1960–1970), a boom period (the decade of the 1980s) and the strangulation of the model (from the decade of the 2000s until today). The article discusses and concludes that despite the centrality of the participation of women farmers and the change in class position, the subordinate place they occupy—in both the domestic sphere and on the farm– has continued throughout the different phases of the model. Thus, we find that “Some things never change, we're always second in line.”     

Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door

Western U.S. agriculture is an industry that has shaped and been shaped by a peculiar labor policy: seasonal workers were outsiders who looked to agriculture for jobs, not careers. They did not plan to remain farm workers, and the industry and community in which they worked and lived did not see them as long‐term settlers. The immigration and integration policy, in effect, was to recruit new workers willing to accommodate themselves to seasonal employment, and to avoid their integration in agricultural areas. Thus, for most immigrant workers, economic mobility required geographic mobility. However, the major policy issue is not how to enhance the upward mobility of immigrant farm workers and their children; it is how U.S. agriculture should gain access to immigrant farm workers.     

“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

WAGE SECRECY AS A SOCIAL CONVENTION

Despite the general belie that a free flow of information enhances efficiency, social convention appears to call for secrecy regarding individuals' wages. This paper provides an explanation for this convention. We suggest that the role of wage secrecy is to reduce effective labor mobility, and thereby enhance the feasibility of risk-shifting contracts. Wage secrecy may yield a mix of mobility and risk shifting that is superior both to a spot market for labor and to a social convention that binds workers to their employers.     

Moral hazard in marriage: the use of domestic labor as an incentive device

This paper argues that some women in developing countries use domestic labor as a tool to incentivize husbands. A theoretical model is derived based on the traditions of rural Malawi, where men often supplement farm income with wage labor. As wage labor is not observed by the wife, this creates moral hazard: husbands may not make enough effort to bring home wages. The model predicts that women overcome this by using domestic labor as an incentive device: they increase their domestic labor and reduce their leisure in response to good consumption outcomes, but only if they cannot rely on divorce threat as an alternative source of incentives. This prediction is confirmed using survey data from Malawi. Identification is based on the fact that Malawi’s kinship traditions exogenously determine women’s accessibility to divorce. Where divorce is not an option, women make inefficient labor choices in order to provide incentives.     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

What factors attract and motivate dairy farm employees in their daily work?

This study examined attraction and motivation factors important for people choosing to work and remain in the profession of dairy farm worker. The study comprised 194 agricultural students, 197 employed dairy farm workers and 147 employers. The study was based on questionnaires in which the key questions were: What would attract you to choose dairy farming as a profession? What attracts and motivates you in your daily work? What would motivate you to remain employed in dairy farming? Furthermore, in order to elucidate the farm employer's view, they were asked what they believed were important factors to attract and motivate young people to the profession. In general, the students, employees and employers had similar opinions on factors that attract and motivate dairy farm workers in their daily work. Although the order of priorities was different, they agreed that having fun at work, good leadership, feeling pride in their work, job security, good team spirit, living in the countryside, meaningful and interesting work, safe and healthy workplace, flexible work tasks, the farm having a good reputation and feedback from supervisors were among the most important attraction and motivation factors.     

Farm Mechanization and Women's Life Pattern: —Changing Time Allocation—

Abstract  Farm mechanization in Japan could be understood as a process brought a bout in the constellation of economic and political milieus of high economic growth. Labor productivity was raised to a degree unproportionate to the size of farming and yielded large amount of surplus labor power. This inherent contradiction became quite apparent after 1970. The expansion of non-farm labor market absorbed the surplus labor power. Thus part-time farming spreaded. changing the life pattern of farm families toward differentiation and individuation. A panel study at a rural community at the south-western part of HONSHU enables us to compare the time allocation of family members before and after mechanization. After mechanization. time allocation pattern differentiated by generation and sex. Younger members have gained private spheres outside farming. The older are left at farm, working in the fields. However, the time allocation data collected at a rural community at the northeastern part of HONSHU tells that the differentiation and individuation was slow due to the under-development of non-farm labor market.     

Rural Agricultural Change and Fertility Transition in Nepal

Using longitudinal panel data from the Western Chitwan Valley of Nepal, this study examines the impact of the use of modern farm technologies on fertility transition—specifically, the number of births in a farm household. Previous explanations for the slow pace of fertility transition in rural agricultural settings often argued that the demand for farm labor is the primary driver of high fertility. If this argument holds true, the use of modern farm technologies that are designed to carry out labor‐intensive farm activities ought to substitute for farm labor and discourage births in farm families. However, little empirical evidence is available on the potential influence of the use of modern farm technologies on the fertility transition. To fill this gap, the panel data examined in this study provide an unusual opportunity to test this long‐standing, but unexplored, argument. The results demonstrate that the use of modern farm technologies, particularly the use of a tractor and other modern farm implements, reduce subsequent births in farm households. This offers important insight for understanding the fertility transition in Nepal, a setting that is experiencing high population growth and rapidly changing farming practices.     

Agricultural Paradigms and the Practice of Agriculture1

Abstract This research examines the relationship between endorsement of agricultural paradigms and reported farming practices. An agricultural behavior index is constructed from measures of pesticide use, source of nitrogen fertilizer, farm diversity, and whether or not people grow a home garden. This index and the individual measures of farming practices are then analyzed to determine how they relate to an alternative-conventional agricultural paradigm scale and several of its items. As expected, alternative and conventional agriculturalists differ dramatically on the behavior index. And also as expected, the scale is more closely related to the composite agricultural behavior index than to the individual measures of farming practices, while these more specific agricultural behavior measures tend to be more strongly correlated with the scale items that correspond most closely to them. The major implication is that individuals' agricultural paradigms do impact the way they practice agriculture.     

The structural disempowerment of Eastern European migrant farm workers in Norwegian agriculture

Since the 2004 EU enlargement established one European common labour market, a large number of Eastern Europeans have taken up seasonal employment as hired farm workers in Norwegian agriculture. Much attention in the public has been given to the potential for ‘social dumping’ of these migrating workers, as they are considered prone to exploitation by farmers looking for cheap and docile labour, and subject to low-wages and poor labour conditions. In response to these threats, Norway implemented labour regulations (‘transitional rules’) that established minimum standards for wage levels and labour conditions, combined with registration and supervision of the incoming labour force. Nevertheless, reports from the field indicate that many of the westward migrating labour force experience work conditions that are far poorer than prescribed by the labour regulations, as these are not implemented at the farm level. In this paper, we discuss the social processes that result in this mismatch between state regulations (e.g. transition rules) and the actual experiences of migrant workers building on dual labour market theory. Analysing qualitative in-depth interviews with 54 farm migrants, we argue that there are two sets of factors underlying the poorer working conditions observed on the farms: Firstly, the structural disempowerment of migrant workers, which gives them weak negotiating positions vis-à-vis their employers (farmers); and secondly, the migrant workers' frame of reference for wage levels, in which poor payment levels by Norwegian standards are found acceptable or even good when judged by Eastern European wage levels. While a number of works have described the exploitation of farm migrant labour, we demonstrate in this paper how national immigration and agricultural histories, structures and present policies configure the labour–capital relations at farm level in the Norwegian case.     

Soil as Social‐Ecological Feedback: Examining the “Ethic” of Soil Stewardship among Corn Belt Farmers

In this article we examine in‐depth interviews with farmers (n = 159) from nine Corn Belt states. Using a grounded theory approach, we identified a “soil stewardship ethic,” which exemplifies how farmers are talking about building the long‐term sustainability of their farm operation in light of more variable and extreme weather events. Findings suggest that farmers' shifting relationship with their soil resources may act as a kind of social‐ecological feedback that enables farmers to implement adaptive strategies (e.g., no‐till farming, cover crops) that build resilience in the face of increasingly variable and extreme weather, in contrast to emphasizing short‐term adjustments to production that may lead to greater vulnerability over time. The development of a soil stewardship ethic may help farmers to resolve the problem of an apparent trade‐off between short‐term productivist goals and long‐term conservation goals and in doing so may point toward an emergent aspect of a conservationist identity. Focusing on the message of managing soil health to mitigate weather‐related risks and preserving soil resources for future generations may provide a pragmatic solution for helping farmers to reorient farm production practices, which would have soil building and soil saving at their center.     

The geography of Washington's world apple: global expressions in a local landscape

This article explores how the globalization of food and agriculture is linked to local processes of agrarian transformation in the case of the apple industry in the United States. The local, regional history concerning environmental, technological and social change in the apple industry reveals the ways in which the local landscape has changed as this agro-industry has developed and globalized over the last century. Our focus embraces three themes: the social construction of value in fresh apples, the changing structure of the apple industry, and the changing social relations of production as they concern transnational wageworkers. The social constructions of value ascribed to apples in the industry's advertisements aimed at national and international consumers exist in sharp contrast with the local level intensification of farming practices. Changes in farm structure, production technology, labor process and relations, and the composition and settlement patterns of farm labor reflect both the industry's regional development as well as how the globalized apple industry is manifested in the region's development history and geography.