Agrarian Transformation in the Age of Corporate Agriculture: Beginning Alternative Farmers in Iowa Restricted; Files Only
Rissing, Andrea (Spring 2019)
Abstract
Most of Iowa’s farms embody the mechanization, industrialization, and sheer
productivity that came to characterize American agriculture during the 20th century. This
ethnographic project examines the livelihood strategies of beginning farmers establishing small,
diversified, direct-market farms on Iowa’s industrial agricultural landscape. Some previous
literatures, as well as certain contemporary stakeholders, antagonistically frame industrial and
alternative agricultures. Yet shared resources, values, and relationships stretch across this
landscape to connect ostensibly distinct production systems. Based on 16 months of fieldwork,
this study explores the ways in which alternative farmers negotiate and contest elements of
industrial agriculture even as their work remains enmeshed in its institutions, social worlds, and
histories. Drawing upon the agrarian question framework, the study seeks to balance the
simultaneous opportunities and exclusions engendered by the web of actors composing the
industrial agricultural system and to attend to farmers’ own efforts to resist its mandates.
As the industrial system implements new technologies and policies, beginning alternative
farmers emerge in its interstices. Their work is simultaneously sparked by their own and
consumers’ oppositions to the effects of industrial agriculture; limited by their exclusions from
industrial agriculture’s public and private webs of support; and enabled by industrial farms’
surpluses. Furthermore, beginning alternative farmers’ ability to imagine themselves as farmers
exists in dialogue with ideas of agricultural success rooted in and promoted by industrial
agricultural actors. Shaped by these forces, a new type of smallholder experience is appearing in
Iowa. The agrarian question conceptual framework holds these overlapping influences in tension
and inquires into how Iowa’s specific political and ecological histories have informed them. In
Iowa, foregrounding the blurrier spaces of overlap and points of contact connecting the
livelihoods of producers working under different institutional and market contexts facilitates a
more dynamic and accurate understanding of alternative farmers’ lives and livelihoods.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: “WHY IOWA?” .......................................................................................... 1
WHY IOWA? ................................................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER SUMMARIES ............................................................................................................... 10
METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCHER POSITIONALITY .................................................................. 12
Background in Iowa agriculture ........................................................................................... 16
Project Design ...................................................................................................................... 17
Beginning Alternative Farmers ............................................................................................. 20
Fieldwork activities ............................................................................................................... 23
Researcher positionality ....................................................................................................... 26
On doing Americanist anthropology ..................................................................................... 27
CHAPTER 1: THE AGRARIAN QUESTION ON AN INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE ....... 32
HISTORIES OF IOWA AGRICULTURE ........................................................................................... 34
From Tallgrass Prairie to Family Farms ............................................................................. 34
Iowa’s Processes of Industrialization: Technologies and Regimes ...................................... 42
THE AGRARIAN QUESTION ......................................................................................................... 61
Classic approaches ............................................................................................................... 61
The Agrarian Question Today .............................................................................................. 72
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 75
CHAPTER 2: THE ALTERITY OF IOWA’S ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURE ........... 78
ALTERITY THROUGH LAND, KNOWLEDGE, AND IDENTITY ........................................................ 82
Tenancy ................................................................................................................................. 82
Learning Curves.................................................................................................................... 93
Farmer identities: Real Farmers vs. Hobby Farmers .......................................................... 99
WE FEED THE WORLD ............................................................................................................. 105
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 122
CHAPTER 3: GENERATIVE POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN ALTERNATIVE
AND INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURES ................................................................................ 125
PATH DEPENDENCE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF CONVENTIONAL AGRICULTURE ..................... 128
BEGINNING ALTERNATIVE FARMERS ON CONVENTIONAL FARMS ............................................. 134
Jared ................................................................................................................................... 134
Amanda ............................................................................................................................... 138
Bobby .................................................................................................................................. 140
IDEOLOGICAL SPACES OF CONTACT .......................................................................................... 146
Beginning alternative farmers understanding their work in reference to the industrial .... 146
Consumers understanding alternative food purchases in reference to the industrial ........ 151
INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE’S CAST-OFFS, REPURPOSED: LAND AND EQUIPMENT ACCESS ...... 155
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 160
CHAPTER 4: PROFITABILITY VS. MAKING IT ............................................................. 163
“FARMING IS A BUSINESS” AS A PROJECT OF DISEMBEDDING .................................................. 167
PATHWAYS OF INDOCTRINATION: HISTORIES, POLICIES, AND EXAMPLES OF AGRICULTURAL
ECONOMICS IN FARMERS’ LIVES .............................................................................................. 175
PROFITABILITY DOES NOT ENSURE SUCCESS: BURNOUT, RELATIONSHIPS, AND COUNTRY LIFE ..... 189
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 195
CHAPTER 5: HOW DO THEY MAKE IT? ILLEGIBLE STRATEGIES OF
RECIPROCITY, COOPERATION, AND MENTORSHIP ................................................. 197
RECIPROCITY IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND AGRARIANISM ............................................................ 202
BARTERING .............................................................................................................................. 208
SHARING EQUIPMENT ............................................................................................................... 215
RECIPROCAL LABOR EXCHANGE ............................................................................................... 218
THRIFT, FRUGALITY, AND DEBT AVOIDANCE .......................................................................... 222
MENTORSHIP ............................................................................................................................ 228
INFORMAL STRATEGIES ON CONVENTIONAL FARMS ................................................................. 235
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 237
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSIONS .................................................................................. 240
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 251
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