Agrarian Transformation in the Age of Corporate Agriculture: Beginning Alternative Farmers in Iowa Restricted; Files Only

Rissing, Andrea (Spring 2019)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/70795866t?locale=es
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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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