Conclusion: An Alternative Agriculture for Our Time

Without abandoning the practical idea of farming as a business, the small-scale farmers in this book foster connections between consumer experiences and expectations and farming practices that support their visions of organic. They try to build new, alternative markets to challenge the watering down of “organic” that the full-force entrance of corporate market logics ushered in. However, there are limitations to how sustainable such farming operations can be without further changing the relationships the modern food system is based upon. This chapter begins by recognizing the many limitations of localism, including the potentially neoliberal aspects of such efforts. However, the neoliberal notion that individuals can and should bring forth their own interests and engage in political contestation could (paradoxically) be the very kernel that further popularizes small-scale food production networks that provide safer, more healthful food and a better sense of community than the isolating conventional shopping experience. Finally, the chapter considers how deepening consumer involvement in the process of agriculture, incorporating concerns about social justice into local food systems, and addressing the inefficiencies of decentralized food production could push local agriculture to be even more alternative.

Who Farms?

This chapter examines how the individuals working at Scenic View Farm, along with the fifteen other farmers and farm workers interviewed in this book, ended up pursuing jobs in agriculture. The chapter situates these farmers in comparison to national averages in terms of age, education, and political ideology. Lifestyle concerns dominated their career decisions, and they overwhelmingly wanted a career that would keep them out of the office and in the outdoors. For them, farming was the best way to achieve the lifestyle they desired. Most also wanted to farm organically, or at least sustainably, fearing that pesticides would prevent their full enjoyment of the lifestyle. Some drew on themes of agrarianism to frame their work as a solution to the problems of modern life. The chapter also examines how the diverse lifestyle concerns of these individuals shaped concrete farming and business practices, such as whether to pursue wholesale arrangements with large market actors like Whole Foods. As a whole, these farmers made choices to maintain practices and identities through which they could live lives consonant with their visions of good, honest work.

Prelude: A Sense of Place

The conventionalization of the organic sector has led many to be skeptical about the possibility of organic in and of itself promoting a meaningfully sustainable alternative to the modern agricultural paradigm. However, the bifurcation of the organic market into both mainstream and alternative spheres provides places within the food system where investigating the work involved in creating new economic and social relations of farming practice makes sense. We may very well have come to an era in which most organic products pass through the same types of industrial commodity chains as organic initially set out to challenge. But more and more people desire a new type of economy, one that fosters social connection, meaning, and new relationships of exchange (...

Organic Hits the Mainstream

With the passage of the U.S. Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990, organic food left the fringes of America’s agricultural economy and received federal recognition— and regulation. But how did organic farming become a niche market governed by regulations aimed at limiting the use of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers, rather than by more holistic concerns about society and ecology? This chapter provides an overview of the regulatory processes that yielded both the OFPA and the final USDA organic standards implemented in 2000. While the federal government’s approach to organic farming began with a holistic, process-based definition of organic agriculture in the USDA’s 1980 “Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming,” the final standards came to focus on issues surrounding chemical inputs. This process served to settle the organic market by providing commensurability, offering a consistent basis for consumer choice, not broad agricultural sustainability.

A Sea of Brown Bags and the Organic Label: Organic Marketing Strategies in Practice

John and Katie’s choice to use the CSA as their primary sales strategy and their decision to keep their farm certified organic are both central to how they market crops and run their business. This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges of both. CSA marketing strategies overwhelmingly helped the farmers we studied run their businesses: providing cash in hand early in the season, easing the financial strain when crops failed, and promoting a sense of community connection—at least with the few volunteers who visited their farms. Likewise, while many critics see organic certification as costly, burdensome, and watered-down, certification still fits with the business practices of some small farmers. But neither CSA programs nor organic certification were a cure-all. Many of the CSA farmers we spoke with still struggled, and continued to shoulder most of the risk of crop failure. Meanwhile, for the majority of the noncertified farmers we spoke with, the choice to forgo certification was a practical decision. The bureaucratic regulations of certification were incompatible with the real world of agrarian life—a life where a year’s worth of literal blood, sweat, and tears can be undone in nearly an instant by unforeseeable pestilence, disease, or weather.

Amid the Chard: Cultivating the Diverse Landscapes and Practices of a New England Organic Farm

This chapter introduces Scenic View Farm and its owners and principal operators, John and Katie. After an overview of the farm’s history and characteristics relative to other New England farms, the chapter captures the sights and sounds of its picturesque landscape. Such natural beauty drew many of the farmers whose stories are included in this book into a life of farming. However, Scenic View’s landscape is commingled with countless decisions John and Katie have made, balancing their need to stay in business with countless other commitments, including the struggle to achieve sustainability. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, which many farmers like those at Scenic View depend upon for stable sales, require diverse crops to meet consumer demand. Flowers spruce up the property and yield consistent profits when other crops break even season after season. The chapter also introduces challenges organic farms face, like an outbreak of tomato blight that swept the region. Scenic View’s CSA helped them weather the blight and maintain their organic certification. However, the availability of supplemental income is critical. The chapter shows how farmers try to make good matches in their businesses allowing them to farm responsibly, even those who feel they cannot eschew pesticides completely.

No-Nonsense Organic: Negotiating Everyday Concerns about the Environment, Health, and the Aesthetics of Farming

This chapter addresses some of the big issues consumers and scholars assume, even implicitly, matter to committed organic movement farmers: the environment and health. Certainly, these concerns play a role in organic practices. However, this chapter shows that they are rarely explicitly addressed. Instead, such issues take on an instrumentalism and practicality in everyday experiences. Concerns about health and the environment were directly related to visceral experiences of farming, like experiencing the simple pleasure of eating a sun-warmed tomato off the vine. The big issues of sustainability acquire a taken-for-granted character, propagated in farmers’ networks of relationships. This chapter shows, once again, the centrality of lifestyle considerations in the making of organic practices. However, lifestyle concerns can also thwart more sustainable practices. For some farmers, the pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle required abandoning hallmarks of organic practice, like fallow periods for their fields in order to increase the amount of land under cultivation. As farmers struggle for livelihoods, they can become caught in a cycle of intensification that gradually erodes alternative practices. The chapter also discusses how the ability to remain alternative in light of such pressures is necessarily tied to forms of privilege—especially access to land and consumers.

Why Supermarket Organic Matters

In 2000, a radical shift occurred in the organic food system: the majority of organic food in the United States began to be sold in ordinary supermarkets. This chapter examines how the regulatory focus on chemical inputs facilitated the fragmentation and homogenization of organic farming, yielding a conventionalized organic industry capable of delivering food at a supermarket-sized scale. It also examines how these processes limit organic agriculture’s potential to represent a sustainable solution to the problems of modern food systems. This chapter begins with a discussion of what environmental, social, and economic sustainability in the food system would entail. It then examines the concentration of industrial influence in the organic sector in the wake of the federal organic standards, and looks critically at whether industrial organic practices can meet the challenges of sustainability. Finally, the chapter points to theories of bifurcation, which examine structural positions within capitalist agriculture that may offer spaces for alternative farming practices, particularly in places like New England. This chapter also notes, however, that such approaches focus on the political economy of agriculture, leaving the relational strategies alternative farmers use to take advantage of such structural holes unexplored.

Introduction: Conventionalization, Bifurcation, and Social Relationships on the Small Organic Farm

This chapter transports the reader into the aisles of a New England Whole Foods Market, through the stalls of a regional farmers’ market, and into the fields of Scenic View Farm to introduce the challenges faced when trying to understand small farmers’ practices in light of the contemporary agricultural economy. It then outlines dominant theories in the study of organic agriculture, such as conventionalization and bifurcation, which often focus centrally on the market conditions and regulatory environment of the organic sector at the expense of the everyday practices of organic farmers. The chapter then introduces theoretical constructs of good matches and relational work from economic sociology as a means of understanding how small farmers balance market conditions with a host of other concerns in their routine farming practices and economic decisions. Finally, the chapter outlines the organization of the book, which moves from the broader history and context of organic agriculture to the everyday experiences of the farmers at Scenic View, before looking to the future of sustainable farming practices.

Making Sense of Organics: A Brief History

The increasing popularity of organic agriculture has revolutionized American consumers’ access to organic products. However, the industrial scale of the modern organic sector has little in common with the goals of sustainability farmers and activists envisioned over the course of the organic movement’s history. This chapter charts that history. The story of the organic farming movement, and even the very definition of organic farming that today’s consumers have inherited, is a story of people—people pushing back against the perceived encroachment of industrialization into their lives and onto their dinner plates. It begins with the emergence of organic farming, from the 1920s to the 1940s, as a conservative response to the rationalization and industrialization of farming. It then charts organic’s incorporation into the rising tide of the counterculture during the 1960s and 70s, as society became aware of the environmental degradation being wrought by industrial agriculture. Finally, the chapter examines the ways consumer concerns about the health and safety of industrial foods began to move organic foods into the national spotlight as a safer consumer alternative.