Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Comparative Study of Skilling Institutions in U.S. Alternative Agriculture

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Agriculture is increasingly identified as a key contributor to a variety of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century including environmental change, rural outmigration, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, traditional knowledge loss, and epidemics of obesity and malnutrition. Against the well-documented decline of the traditional American farm, the emergent alternative agriculture sector offers a potentially promising solution. But alternative farmers, the short-commodity-chain producers that have proliferated in the past two decades in the United States, frequently find that a lack of knowledge and farm management skill is an enormous obstacle to running a sustainable operation. This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, will study how differing skilling institutions for alternative agriculture are used by farmers to develop, exchange, and apply knowledge necessary for alternative agriculture. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in discovering more effective means for improving American agricultural development. Bradley Jones, under the supervision of Dr. Glenn Stone of Washington University, will explore how farmers invested in smaller-scale alternative agriculture navigate skilling institutions (the institutions through which agricultural management information is disseminated) to create and sustain viable farming operations. The investigator will comparatively study the emerging landscape of knowledge production and exchange in Central Appalachia and the Hudson Valley of New York. Both regions have seen recent dramatic increases in the number of alternative farmers but have important demographic, historical, economic, and environmental differences that offer unique challenges and opportunities. The study asks: How do alternative farmers construct and engage with institutions to acquire agricultural skill? How do institutions mediate flows of information and knowledge transmission? What actors are involved and how do they operate in relation to one another and broader structures of power? Answering these questions has important implications for both our substantive understanding of alternative farmers and their skilling strategies, as well as our broader theoretical understandings of the way institutions are formed and used by individuals to fulfill socially determined needs and to reorient the social relations of production and expertise. Data will be collected from farmers, agricultural experts, and program staff at a variety of sites including alternative farms, beginning farmer training programs, and non-profit food and agriculture advocacy organizations, as well as at an array of training events, farm conferences, and seminars. This study of knowledge development and dissemination responds to a practical need to better understand how alternative farmers are navigating a major challenge in their long-term economic and ecological sustainability. In both study regions, summaries of the results will be provided to various stakeholders, including farmers, advocacy organizations, agricultural extension, and policy makers so strategies can be developed for mitigating obstacles to farmer success. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.