Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

This research focuses on prison garden and green re-entry jobs programs to understand the benefits their participants can receive. The United States continues to have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Yet, penal tactics shift over time to placate modern sensibilities and meet ideas around the role prisons should play in broader society. Most recently, some prisons are shifting their focus from discipline to reform and rehabilitation, implementing and working with reintegration industries like prison gardens and green jobs training programs. The success of these programs is often solely measured in recidivism rates, which I argue are limiting and serve to legitimize the prison-industrial complex. This ethnographic research examines these programs to argue that they impact participants beyond what the recidivism rates show, including providing: a sense of purpose, a safe space, new senses of selfhood, and a sense of belonging and community. However, not all garden and green jobs programs are inherently successful and positive. Rather, there must be careful consideration to the structure, formatting, implementation, and execution of the programs in order for them to make a meaningful impact on participants.

Marketing ‘sustainable and humane’ super-premium dog kibble emerged alongside alternative food movements interested in sustainability, transparency, and welfare. To demonstrate the trends and implications of the alternative pet food movement, I selected Open Farm for a case study. Open Farm was the first certified humane and sustainable dog food on the market with a ‘transparent’ supply chain. Through interviews, autoethnography, and semiotic analysis, I demonstrate that certification represents a series of nested relationships in the dog food supply chain, from the dog through to the nonhumans used as ingredients. With the transparency tool, these relationships are commodified to increase the exchange value of the product. The added premium is meant to signal an intimate and improved food system, but I argue that the certification and representation of these specific relationships obscures the industrial scale of alternative pet foods and the consequential impact for humans and nonhumans within food systems. This research contributes to food and animal geographies by applying alternative food literature to the alternative pet food industry, and by researching a novel intersection in pet-farmed animal-human relationships: the pet store.

Human actions and interactions drive agri-food system outcomes. Sustainability transitions of such systems are shaped by changes in social relations encompassing new ways of doing, framing, knowing, organizing—largely understood as social innovations (SI). Previous SI conceptualizations in transition research draw substantially on energy studies. Hence, we address the recent appeal to expand SI research to other realms and specifically refer to the developed typology of SI in energy that we apply and adapt to the agri-food system. Guided by transition theory and SI research, this paper investigates the manifold activities of socially innovative agri-food initiatives engaged in challenging the dominant regime, the mechanisms through which these activities are realized and the barriers and drivers initiatives face. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with 17 initiatives engaged in making the local food system more sustainable from five territorial cases in Europe (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland) and Northern Africa (Morocco) in rural and urban areas. We derived a cluster structuring the socially innovative activities according to first, social (interaction) processes and second, agri-food fields. The initiatives assert these agri-food related social innovations (FSI) through four social (interaction) processes: cooperation, sharing, enabling, knowledge generation. We found that the socially innovative initiatives anchor their new ways through networks, practices and materials and institutions to six agri-food regime domains. Local political actors are perceived as conducive to their development. Governance for transition may take this into account as these political actors are better intertwined with the local area, capable of adapting policies to local needs.

Regenerative agriculture has been proposed as a sustainable approach that balances environmental and economic trade-offs in farming. However, regenerative agriculture lacks a consistent definition and implementation, and there is a need for context-specific information on adoption. In our study, we evaluated farmer perceptions in an economically depressed region on the Indiana-Ohio border. Guided by diffusion theory, we explored definitions of regenerative agriculture and motivations and barriers to adoption using an online pre-survey (n = 49) and exploratory, in-depth interviews with early adopters (n = 16) who identified themselves as using regenerative agriculture. Early adopters defined regenerative agriculture as principles and practices that support healthier soils, with an emphasis on livestock and cover cropping. Interviewees noted that environmental and economic priorities were more strongly linked in regenerative agriculture versus conventional agriculture. Motivations were primarily environmental (e.g., soil, water, biodiversity), whereas barriers were primarily economic (e.g., start-up costs, marketing). However, community benefits, such as healthier food and farmer wellbeing, were other motivators. Regenerative practices were perceived as highly observable but lacking in support from the broader community. Further, in economically depressed communities, costs were seen as limiting, especially for livestock integration, which was perceived to have lower trialability versus practices like cover crops. Our analysis reveals that although many farmers would not say they use regenerative agriculture, there is increasing engagement with some associated practices. Financial and marketing support and facilitating information sharing between early adopters and other farmers may increase regenerative practices in economically depressed regions of the Corn Belt.

Scaling up agroecology raises the question of how to relate to institutions. While the institutionalization of agroecology at national and international scales has raised concerns among activists and researchers, municipalities are increasingly envisioned as potential entry points for thinking about the reorganization of food systems. Using participatory and non-participatory observation, semi-directed interviews and documentary research, we explore the encounter between the agroecological movement and new municipalism in Madrid and interrogate the institutionalization of agroecology under the government of Ahora Madrid (2015–2019). The analysis of various arrangements through which agroecology has been operationalized highlights the fragile nature of the advances made as well as the constraints to the full integration of the agroecological project within the local government. These constraints, linked to how people relate to food and agriculture, to the forms of nature promoted by agroecology, and to collaborative approaches, suggest a need to consider the way experiments are lived and embedded in everyday life in order to promote learning and subjectivation processes.

Digital innovations can offer solutions to various food, water, and land systems challenges globally. However, there are concerns on the ethical and social inclusivity aspects of these innovations, particularly for marginalized groups of people in less industrialised countries. In this article, we describe the design and development of a digital inclusivity framework, which builds from a detailed synthesis of inclusivity in digital literature. Key insights from the review were collated into five dimensions: risk mitigation, accessibility, usability, benefits, and participation. These dimensions can be assessed by means of twenty-one concrete and measurable sub indicators. Our focus was to enable a more holistic approach to the usually technocentric design of digital innovations. The framework, including the associated indicators, lays the groundwork for the development of a digital inclusivity index, a tool for assessing and fostering the inclusivity of digital innovations in food, water, and land systems.

Local knowledges of farmers often remain marginalized in wider agricultural development interventions. Scholars, practitioners and non-profit organisations have stressed the importance of including farmers as veritable experts in their own right, and of recognising their knowledge. Yet these calls for epistemic pluralism have often focused on the interaction between academic knowledge and local knowledge, while the interaction amongst different local knowledges has received less attention. In this ethnographic study, we attempt to unravel dynamics amongst local knowledges by studying interactions amongst migrant and autochthonous farmers in Forikrom, Ghana. We show that migrant and autochthonous farmers form distinct epistemic communities as these farmers pursue different agricultural and epistemic aims. Epistemic diversity becomes most apparent regarding agricultural techniques and certain yam varieties. However, epistemic homogenisation threatens this diversity. For instance, indigenous yam varieties are being displaced in the community in favour of shorter maturing varieties. We provide insights into the ruling relations that guide the choices that migrant farmers make and how this leads to processes of epistemic homogenisation. These drivers include the land tenure system, economic imperatives and labour relations, socio-cultural norms, agricultural policy and local politics. Furthermore, we explore how a community-based “boundary” organisation in Forikrom, the Abrono Organic Farming Project (ABOFAP), counters such homogenisation by mediating pluralistic approaches.

Civic food networks increasingly seek to increase their impact in building fairer and more sustainable food systems through solidarity financing. This represents a counterpoint to financialisation in industrialised food systems through alignment with the values and practices of solidarity economy such as localisation, reciprocity, cooperation, resilience and food justice. Of growing interest is the potential for sourcing finance from the wider community; people who may be willing to contribute to civic initiatives’ goals and share in their risks and opportunities. Crowdfunding is one such approach in solidarity finance, appealing to both new and seasoned investors interested in supporting local sustainable food initiatives. This paper considers two case studies of equity crowdfunding in Australia to examine the relationships emerging between solidarity financing and food producers, consumers and investors in civic food networks, and the implications for progressing food democracy. Our findings describe the investors and their financial and non-financial motivations to participate in solidarity financing, and specifically to support crowdfunding; and the goals, strategies, and governance structures that characterise the experiments under study. These themes reveal how crowdfunding financiers assess the potential impacts of investments, especially on ecologies and food justice outcomes. We argue that these cases of solidarity financing are producing new forms of ‘citizen-financiers’, in parallel to the growing networks of ‘citizen-consumers’ and ‘citizen-producers’ that underscore shifts towards food democracy. Understanding the characteristics of this emerging category of civic actors contributes new understandings of the potential for food system transformation through solidarity economy, alternative finance and civil society.

The United States prison system and food system are both expansive and connected through shared histories of racial capitalism and human and environmental exploitation. This article reports on a qualitative case study of a sustainable food systems course taught in a Southern prison in which incarcerated students engage in gardening and food systems work. The study explores the potential for incarcerated individuals to contribute to food justice efforts, even within the constraints of the prison environment and despite their exclusion from formal democratic processes. The findings highlight challenges and tensions within the prison garden, including racial dynamics and administrative interference, which mirror challenges within the broader food system. The research suggests that while prison gardens and food systems education programs may benefit incarcerated individuals, universal food justice cannot be achieved without dismantling the underlying systems of oppression that make the prison industrial complex possible.

After almost a century of abandonment, in the last three decades the Western Italian Alps are witnessing a process of repopulation, urban-rural migration, and reactivation of agriculture and food production. However, ‘new highlanders’ moving to these Alpine valleys with the willingness to start farming find that fields and meadows have been claimed by shrubs, brambles, and trees, that locally adapted seeds and varieties have been largely lost, and that the transmission of the knowledge on how to farm these lands has been discontinued. This knowledge is even more important in such inner areas, where geographical and environmental conditions don’t allow conventional agriculture to be applied as such, and where the relationship with the surrounding ecosystems calls for knowledge intensive approaches to agriculture. Based on fieldwork in six valleys of the Western Italian Alps, in this study we focus on the dynamics surrounding agroecological knowledge, investigate the processes of its co-creation and sharing among new highlanders, and discuss the role of social collectives in this renewed knowledge transmission. We argue that, to inform their agricultural path, new highlanders rely on a plethora of sources of knowledge, which are local and global, in person and virtual. We also posit that the diverse social collectives linking locals with new and returning highlanders act as platforms for knowledge co-creation and sharing and for community building, where renewed agroecological knowledge and agrobiodiversity are mobilized. These platforms also support the revitalization of agrobiodiversity, the further adoption and adaptation of contextualized agroecological practices, acting as niches of innovation and fueling agroecological transitions and the back-to-the-land movement itself.