Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

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.

As we go to print with this issue at the end of October 2020, the November 3rd presidential election and the indeterminate end of the COVID-19 pandemic weigh heavily on our minds. The results of this election and decisions about how to deal with the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic will affect us all for years to come. In a moment when essential workers are honored as heroes, perhaps the most essential workers in our labor system—immigrant workers who cultivate, pick, and pack food—are made more vulnerable by policies and rhetoric designed to dehumanize them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the U.S. Justice Department recently announced that the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from family members by officials at the U.S. border between 2017 and 2018 cannot be found. We would like to think that a change in administration in the White House could result in a dramatically different approach to immigration policy in the United States, but this result is not guaranteed. Consistent and relentless pressure for reform will always be necessary.

The articles in this special issue reflect the central role played by anthropologists and social theorists in bringing to light the issues facing immigrants, especially farmworkers, during (before, and likely, after) the Trump era. In her introduction, guest editor Teresa M. Mares pulls together the central threads that run through these articles—the forms of fear, isolation, and oppression exacerbated under Trump but also the work of various actors involved in caring for those made more vulnerable in this moment and actively resisting immigration enforcement tactics. We hope that the insights provided in this special issue collection will inform the creation of better policies that honor the critical importance of immigrants in our labor system and our communities.

Also in this issue, Nicole Peterson and Andrea Freidus investigate in detail what food security looks and feels like for American university students in More than Money: Barriers to Food Security on a College Campus. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork involving undergraduate research assistants and food bank staff, Peterson and Freidus explore the many barriers that make it difficult for students to secure adequate amounts and types of food. They argue that conventional analyses of food security often overlook these non-financial barriers, which include time, transportation, and other factors described by the students participating in the study. Together with the articles in this special issue, this contribution reminds us of the many forms of precarity within the U.S. food system.

Latina farmworkers in rural Idaho live with geographic isolation, fear of deportation, gender disparities, and income inequalities. While economic and social challenges have existed for decades, fear and isolation have become more acute during the Trump administration. Utilizing interview, survey, and focus group data, we identify multiple ways in which Latina farmworkers struggle with policy-exacerbated isolation. We find that experiences of isolation intersect with gender disparities and economic inequalities, and this ultimately affects women’s well-being.

The political health ecology of Vermont is shaped by its status as a rural, borderland state and its dependence upon dairy for agricultural revenue in a fluctuating neoliberal market. The Care Center, a free clinic serving uninsured patients in Cherry County, is the primary medical provider for the growing Latinx migrant worker population that supports the majority of Vermont dairy farms. My findings demonstrate the gendered nature of how Latinx migrant dairy workers and healthcare professionals navigate the compounding precarities in Vermont that make safety and wellness difficult to establish. I contend that the layered use of structural vulnerability, political health ecology, and ecofeminist situated sustainability offers a perspective on the hidden interconnectedness between healthcare work and sustainability, ultimately providing directions for collaboration.

The Trump administration’s policies have created a climate of heightened hostility in the U.S. northern borderlands that exacerbates im/migrant farmworkers’ anxieties surrounding deportation and family separation. At the same time, Trump’s enforcement initiatives have inspired resistance efforts aimed at mitigating these threats. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic research with Mexican and Guatemalan farmworkers in New York, we explore these interrelated, countervalent trends. First, we show how farmworkers’ heightened fears and social isolation since the outset of Trump’s presidency negatively impact their emotional and mental health. Second, we trace an opposing force of state-level political shifts and local activities that may be mitigating these detrimental effects for im/migrant farmworkers. In particular, we focus on pro-immigrant advocacy efforts in New York. We refer to this pro-immigrant turn as contramigra, a phenomenon of intentional pushback against immigration detention and polimigra cooperation tactics between nonfederal law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

Gender is a key lens through which to understand industrial agricultural production in rural twenty-first century communities. Here, I examine the gendered imaginaries of dairy production that perpetuate the meaning of “farmer” as masculine and white. The expertise of Mexican immigrant workers, and particularly that of women on spousal visas, challenges such assumptions and highlights the role of unremunerated labor in sustaining the industrial food chain. Everyday experiences of gender and race are shaped not only by local-level assumptions but also by federal-level immigration policies and employer recruitment practices that result in a mostly male immigrant agricultural workforce. In this article, I draw on interviews with rural Minnesota community members, as well as local and regional news coverage, to examine how gender and race intersect to marginalize the work and expertise of Mexican immigrants in the rural Midwest. In this case, Mexican immigrant mothers frame their labor as part of a complex calculus of immigration benefits and sacrifices.