Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

Contemporary indigenous Zapotec rural villages of the northern sierra region of Oaxaca state exhibit profound transformations in their agricultural strategies. Since the mid-twentieth century, its agricultural lands have suffered a gradual process of abandonment. As a consequence, forest transition is occurring around the villages, and the cultivar portfolio seems to be dominated by cash crops. This article examines these landscape transformations through a multicausal explanatory framework: these mountains have experienced intense outbound migratory processes since the 1980s; the communities have cash available to buy certain labor-intensive crops as a result of the remittances sent back by the migrants; and the area has been recently integrated to road-connected regional markets thanks to an intense development of its infrastructures. This article discusses some the changes experienced by the landscape of the village of Santiago Zoochila (Oaxaca), as a result of the interaction demographic and economic factors (migration, availability of remittances, and market integration).

Drawing on farmers’ lived experiences, I explore factors that shape agricultural persistence in the Parry Sound District, Ontario, Canada. Local farming is embedded in broader contexts and is place-based and specific. Agricultural persistence and resilience are shaped in part through individual factors, such as flexibility in response to change, the valuing of local agricultural heritage, and the determination to farm. However, attention to specific agricultural needs is critically necessary to help ensure agricultural futures in the district. I demonstrate the ways that attention to place-based experiences pinpoints the need for localized understandings and supports to ensure agricultural viability and contribute to diverse and valued visions of agriculture and food production within the province.

The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired novel strategies for keeping worksites operational and workers safe, with varying degrees of success. In southern Chile, where more than a third of the world’s farmed salmon is produced, the industrial aquaculture sector has been largely successful at avoiding major disruptions and financial losses by mobilizing strategies developed during previous sanitary crises that threatened the health of fish and the industry itself. Here, I engage with the literature on crises and disasters to evaluate these strategies as well as their unintended consequences. I contend that many of the strategies developed to address COVID-19 as a sanitary crisis and prevent the spread of the virus have deepened the divisions between aquaculture firms and the remote coastal communities where they operate. These social and economic divisions have the potential to undermine the industry’s long-term viability.

Understandings of the terroir concept range from recognizing “the environment” as being largely responsible for affecting the taste of a place-based product like wine to considering the intervening role of social actors in its production. This article takes the perspective that non-human life forms, as well as non-living entities, are more than just ecologically embedded observers. They also have active roles in the terroir system itself. Here, I use multispecies framings and multisensory approaches to analyze data gathered from interviews and participant observation with winegrowers in central Ohio and eastern France over a period of 18 months. I contend that non-human actants contribute various forms of labor throughout the terroir system, as understood through semiotic relationships with human counterparts. Attending to more-than-human workers is important for understanding changes to the “taste of place” in times of climatic, political, and socio-cultural change.

To address problems of soil degradation, industrial farmers across the United States have converted to no-till agriculture, which can mitigate the effects of soil erosion and reduce operating costs without necessarily compromising agricultural output. However, producers still debate the benefits of this practice. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 14 row-crop farmers in central Indiana, this study examines farmer perceptions of no-till as a soil conservation practice. Ethnographic findings reveal that adopters highlight no-till’s benefits for improving soil quality while also minimizing operating costs, including labor and fuel. However, both adopters and critics alike acknowledge trade-offs; for example, no-till disrupts entrenched management practices and norms—from the aesthetics of “clean” fields to the timing of spring planting. Furthermore, some non-adopters argue that no-till’s heightened reliance on herbicide contradicts the broader goals of conservation. This study thus shows that while a compelling case can be made for no-till as an environmental and economic “win-win,” this narrative also elides ongoing disagreements and trade-offs linked to its adoption. No-till’s appeal for many producers is that it advances soil conservation without fundamentally challenging industrial farming’s aspiration for ever-increasing efficiency and profitability.

In recent decades, global and regional pastoralist development initiatives have articulated their project goals within the broader objective of climate change adaptation. Development programs in the high Andes have sought to diminish pastoralist vulnerability to the impacts of shifting seasonal weather patterns and glacial retreat. Despite the increase in attention to the gendered distribution of climate change risks and strategies globally, women alpaca herders in the Andes continue to be sidelined in discussions around animal health and pasture management. I argue that women’s marginalization reflects the ways that pastoralist expertise is ascribed and reproduced in interactional encounters. Andean women herders lack access to the social, political, and economic resources necessary to perform expertise in a ratified way, and as a consequence are left out of critical decision-making processes around climate change adaptation. An attention to women’s herding work yields insight into pastoralist knowledge and skill as distributive, relational, and embedded within social networks that are at increasing risk of fragmentation.