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Interview with Dr. Helen Curry (University of Cambridge), editor of CAFE Special Issue on “The Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources” (December 2019)

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Written by Tanya Matthan

1. Can you tell us how the special issue came about? What prompted this inquiry into the history and sociology of seed banking?

A few summers ago, we held a workshop on this topic at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. The workshop, which was part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project “A Global History of Seed Banking,” brought together historians, ethnographers, philosophers, plant scientists, and other scholars interested in why and how we conserve plant genetic diversity. Each of the papers in this special issue was first presented at that event (along with others not in this issue). The papers, like the workshop, reflect the increased attention to conservation of plant genetic diversity and also seek to widen the horizons of this scholarship – for example, by bringing the ethnographic tradition that’s been used so successfully to understand gardeners who save and share seeds to explore technicians working in seed banks, or by tracing the politics of cold storage practices as a complement to existing institutional histories of cold storage facilities.

Bags of seed await further processing by gene bank staff at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa. Photo by Helen Anne Curry.

2. What explains the tremendous popular attention to seed banking currently?

Undoubtedly, some of this attention has been a response to the now iconic Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and its wild plant corollary, Kew Millennium Seed Bank. Svalbard’s frosty façade in particular, and the dramatic vision of security it projects, has captured the imaginations of many. It seems safe to assume that most people would not otherwise have encountered the science of seed saving, despite its being an internationally coordinated activity since the 1970s.

But there are other important influences that help explain a current fascination with seed banks. Against the heightened drama of seeds sequestered in ice, there are those who locate salvation in seed saving of a more ordinary kind. Anthropologists have been documenting the intricacies of local seed exchange for at least four decades, a span that’s also seen grassroots organizations promote this form of seed keeping, rather than seed banking, as the solution to dwindling crop diversity. As with the attention to seed banking, and perhaps in part because of it, these bottom-up modes of conservation are receiving ever-more notice.

The dynamic relationship between internationally organized and professionally managed seed storage, on the one hand, and grassroots seed exchange and cultivation, on the other, traces to a still more fundamental concern, also dating to the 1970s: intellectual property rights in crop varieties and the consolidation of the seed industry that this has enabled. I suspect that attention to seed keeping, whether in banks, on farms, or via exchanges, will continue to draw attention as long as people remain concerned about the power that a handful of corporations exercise over global seed supply.

3. The seed itself is a critical point of connection between environmental pasts and futures. What kind of ecological, political, and ethical questions does seed banking raise in the current moment?

Scientists have estimated that one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture.[i] It will be no surprise to readers of CAFE that this outsized contribution to humanity’s pre-eminent existential threat is just one among many undesirable environmental consequences of capital intensive farming, from depleted water tables to ocean dead zones to poisoned farm workers. Confronting these environmental concerns demands changes in the varieties we grow, both to adapt to a changing climate and, ideally, to develop less destructive modes of agricultural production. In this sense, the seeds kept in seed and gene banks could indeed be the thread that connects environments past and future, with landraces created over millennia and collected over decades as the source material for crop varieties that leapfrog us over those of the blighted present. That’s certainly the story that advocates of crop seed banking tell us. And the tale that’s told with respect to wild seed banking is strikingly similar: the seed bank is an ark that will carry fragile species safely through the treacherous present to safer shores in the future.

Much as I hope that very story plays out, there is good reason to be skeptical, and not just because seed banks are chronically underfunded. It’s more to do with longstanding concerns about ex situ Most obvious is the danger that a safely stored variety or species can justify its abandonment or neglect beyond the walls of the bank. In this way, diversity in cold store can sustain monocultures in the field and forest. More subtle is the danger of trusting too much in our knowledge and technical capacities to save and restore living things—in this case, seeds, shoots, tubers, and other plant materials—once they’ve been separated from the cultural and ecological contexts that shaped them. It’s crucial that we interrogate the seed conservation systems that we’ve put in place, to understand whether they are in fact suited to the purposes set out for them.

This Seed Library Cabinet facilitates community seed exchange at the Native Seeds/SEARCH store in Tucson, Arizona. Photo by Helen Anne Curry.

4. The authors in the special issue draw from history, anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and allied fields in their papers. What is the value of an interdisciplinary approach to this theme?

As with many aspects of conservation, most seed banking is a narrow technical response intended to quell broader social and economic concerns. It attempts to solve the question “What if our current ways of growing food or using land destroy plants we might need in the future?” without demanding that we change (or even examine!) how we pursue agricultural or industrial production. If, as scholars, we want to open up that neat technological fix to see where it came from and how it works, and especially to ask whether it really resolves the social concerns that created it in the first place, then we need tools to understand the science and politics behind it. And if we are committed to the project of creating a more livable world, then we have to be ready to address the potential consequences of our questioning. These tasks require bringing together different kinds of knowledge and different tools of analysis.

Diverse varieties of maize are stored for tomorrow’s plant breeders in a seed bank run by the Mexican government. Photo by Helen Anne Curry.

5. What future directions do you envision for research on this issue?

When I started working on agricultural seed banks, I was really surprised at the patchiness of existing accounts of these institutions, especially in light of the claims made for how important they are to the future of food. Back then, I would have told you that we need more detailed histories of the science and technology associated with conserving crop and wild plant genetic diversity, and sociological and ethnographic accounts to accompany these. Now that I’m immersed in this area, and have looked into the histories of various local, national, and international institutions, I can see more clearly that it doesn’t help to think of seed banks without taking into account the broader systems in which they are embedded.

Conservation, whether it takes place off-site in cold storage or via cultivation on farms, is just one part of the investment that many societies make in crop diversity. We also train collectors and develop maps and methods for locating diversity in the field, we have sophisticated systems for monitoring plant health at borders and tracking the spread of crop diseases, we invest in database development and standardize crop descriptors, and we subsidize “pre-breeding” to make seed bank materials more useable. We do all of this to put genetic diversity at the disposal of breeders. That’s quite an investment. And if professional breeding is dominated by private interests, then we might rightly ask who benefits from it. Do our investments in crop diversity contribute to more robust and resilient food systems? If they don’t, how could and should they be rethought? I hope the next chapter will see researchers (myself included) move past a curiosity about seed banks to grapple with the broader landscape of publicly funded agricultural research in which these are situated.

6. What drew you to publish this special issue in the CAFE journal?

CAFE was the first choice of all the contributors when it came to publishing some of the workshop papers as a collection—and not just because recent issues of CAFE have featured accounts of seed banking and genetic conservation that complement our own. The research we contributors had to share concerned both agricultural crops and wild landscapes, and followed actors at every level from grassroots organizations up through international scientific bodies. In addition, we identified with different disciplinary backgrounds: ethnobotany, anthropology, history, geography, and STS. It is no doubt obvious to anyone who follows CAFE why the journal would appeal to a group of researchers at this intersection of agriculture and environment. I’d go so far as to hazard that it is the one journal where, even with our mix of interests and methods, we would all be confident of discovering innovative research that speaks to our own projects and interests. So we’re happy our collected work has found a home here.

[i] https://www.nature.com/news/one-third-of-our-greenhouse-gas-emissions-come-from-agriculture-1.11708

February 4, 2020 0 comment

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Interview with Sarah Davenport, lead author (with Joanna Mishtal) of ‘Whose Sustainability? An Analysis of a Community Farming Program’s Food Justice and Environmental Sustainability Agenda’, published in the latest issue of the journal.

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1. What led you to study sustainable farming, and the City Gardens program in particular?

Before I moved to Orlando in 2016, I was deeply involved in agroecology/forest gardening in Southwest Florida, where I grew up. I gravitated toward the environmental sustainability scene in Orlando where people who do all kinds of sustainable farming and environmental work in the Central Florida area, gather to learn about farming techniques, trade plants and food, network, and promote their causes. It was through this that I learnt about and eventually met people from City Gardens. At the time, I was volunteering with a grassroots nutrition education program in West Orlando (founded by black women and utilized mostly by black residents), and was beginning to learn about the long history of oppression of black Orlando residents through food and environmental injustice. I had started to work with Joanna, my faculty advisor at the time, on a project that critically examined the environmental sustainability movement in Orlando. When I heard that City Gardens was planning to expand their sustainability project to West Orlando, I felt an imperative to think deeply about what that expansion might mean for black people in the area.

2. How does this article tie into your broader research agenda?

My research agenda is broadly concerned with black and brown liberation, food and environmental justice, and agroecology. This article is part of the foundation of my research agenda; it scrutinizes that which is taken for granted as “good” (sustainability) and brings light to issues which have long been neglected in black and brown communities across the United States. My research agenda is also based on an engaged approach. Through this project, Joanna helped me develop an engaged methodological approach, which I have continued to refine and employ in my current research.

An aerial shot of a community garden run by the City Gardens program in West Orlando. Between the rows are volunteers and interns working on the plot.

3. Your critique of food sustainability initiatives builds on historical data about segregation and gentrification in one particular neighborhood. Why did you find this context to be overlooked, despite its significance?

There are plenty of reasons why violence against people of color is consistently ignored throughout the U.S. In Orlando, ignorance of this violence has allowed for developers to easily facilitate the demolition of black residences, businesses, places of worship, and to expand costly housing, entertainment and eating establishments, and leisure spaces for predominantly white and upper-middle class residents and tourists.

Some people in City Gardens did come to recognize the significance of the displacement of black communities in Orlando later in the development of their project. However, this knowledge did not impact the way the organization, as a whole, addressed food insecurity in the community. The reality is that they depend on support (land and funding) from some of the very entities that have displaced thousands of black people, disrupted the social fabric of West Orlando communities, and neglected to serve black and low-income resident’s basic needs. They would be taking a huge risk if they were to directly address food insecurity as a historically racial issue.

4. Several scholars have pointed to the neglect of racial and class inequalities in sustainable and organic food movements. Did your research reveal any progressive counter-examples?

This was the question that I ended on when I completed this project and what I’m now addressing in my current research project in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. Lynn Nicholson, a longtime resident of Parramore in West Orlando, founded the Parramore Community Garden in 2008 and helped run the Parramore Farmer’s Market. Aminah Hamidullah, another resident of Parramore, is the founder of Knowledge for Living, a community economic resource and education center, which houses a garden. Hebni Nutrition Consultants is another local organization that addresses food insecurity and nutritional inequalities, among other issues, in Orlando. These are some of the many examples of black-led, grassroots organizations who address food injustices within the West Orlando community.

As my research endeavors have grown, I have begun to draw upon black feminist ideas to frame my work. Through this, I’m finding that there exist counter examples all around me, particularly in the everyday lives of black women and queer people of color.

Sarah reaches into one of the raised beds created by City Gardens to harvest sorrel to share with her co-author, Joanna.

5. What role can anthropological research play in ensuring more effective and socially just sustainability initiatives?

First, it is imperative that we engage in serious discussions regarding how the discipline itself has/has not supported research and knowledge by people of color who have inspired and sustained radical discourses and action surrounding food and environmental justice, environmental sustainability, sovereignty, liberation, racial justice, and the like. If we wish to have a legitimate impact through our research, we must engage in critical self-reflection that forces us to confront our own intentions in doing the research we do. Our role could be more engaged and we could start by asking ourselves: to whom is our research accountable and how might we make it so; if we are gathering knowledge to create more sustainable and socially just initiatives, to what extent/how could it be put into action; what are the real and long-term effects of the work we do; to what extent can we control this impact; and how willing are we to do the work of creating socially just, environmentally sustainable communities?

6. What can environmental studies programs – such as the ones many interns and employees of the program attend/ed – do to better address questions of race and class in their pedagogical approach? What scholarly work would you recommend?

This is a difficult question because it is not necessarily about what environmental studies, specifically, can do but what institutions of higher education, in general, can do. For example, every institution that the participants of City Gardens attended, including my own at the time of this study, is playing a part in the gentrification of predominantly black Orlando neighborhoods. Furthermore, institutions of higher education have historically denied educational opportunities to black and brown people. Perhaps what any academic program in higher education can do to better address questions of race and class is to begin with creating more space for underrepresented scholars in their programs and curriculums. Only from there can we begin to genuinely address questions surrounding race, class, and the environment.

Some texts I have been reading recently that have significantly altered how I think about food sustainability and access in my current research are by black women authors: Katherine Mckittrick’s Demonic Grounds, Ashanté Reese’s Black Food Geographies, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers, and Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black.

7. Why did you choose to publish the results of this important study in CAFE?

We published in CAFE because we wished to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about this topic and contribute to the advancement of CAFE’s mission by offering a critical race perspective on food, agriculture, and the urban environment. I believe that this publication also contributes to a growing body of research in CAFE that is politicizing sustainability work and addressing race, class, and gender issues within the environmental movement.

October 21, 2019 0 comment

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Interview with Ashley Stinnett and Jennifer Jo Thompson, organizers of the recent CAFE special issue, Agriculture of the Middle

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1. How did this special issue come about? What was the impetus for exploring the “middle ground” in agriculture?

This issue came out of a AAA panel that we organized in 2016. That panel came out of conversations/collaboration in which we both found ourselves working on agriculture/food issues that fell “betwixt and between.” Anthropological studies of food systems have largely focused on the two ends of the spectrum: either studies of small-scale, household production of food as culture and identity or examinations of the consequences of large-scale, industrial agrifood systems. In contrast, Jenn’s work on farm to school initiatives and Ashley’s work on heritage butchers, demanded us to focus on the “middle ground”—on disjunctures in scale, policy, and markets—but we found that there was little anthropological theory to support it. We figured that if we were encountering this, others probably were too. Thus, we put together the 2016 AAA panel calling for ethnographic and theoretical papers that could help conceptualize the middle from an anthropological perspective. The panel stimulated dynamic conversations among the authors—including a recognition that our collective work would be of value to the broader community of scholars. This motivated us to put together the special issue for CAFE.

2. Why do you think “the middle” is so absent in both anthropology and in policy circles?

Although our focus is on “the middle” in agrifood systems, we suspect that “the middle” is missing in anthropology more broadly because historically, anthropologists have focused on using close, deep, “thick,” and highly localized ethnographic work to bring us insight into the broader, more universal elements of what it means to be human. Beginning with the critical turn in the 1970s, anthropologists, including agrifood scholars like Sydney Mintz, have also focused on the sociocultural consequences of industrialism and globalism—in essence, leapfrogging over “the middle.”

To some degree, the same thing is true of policy: Economic and regulatory policies (e.g., the Food Safety and Modernization Act) are designed to address the demands of large-scale operations, and very small-scale producers are often exempt. Mid-scale actors, however, are often forced to absorb all the costs of policies designed to manage large-scale producers. Why is this? We suspect it has to do with the “disappearing middle” in agriculture: the reduction in numbers of “small commercial” and “midsize” farms, and the growth in the number of massive farms on one hand and very small, very low sales, farms on the other hand (Burns & Kuhns 2016).

All that said, our work and the work of the other authors in this Special Issue suggest that “the middle” is an incredibly rich domain in which heterogeneous actors are navigating systems and policies (designed for the two ends of the spectrum) in novel and creative ways.

3. Are there unique challenges for farmers inhabiting or attempting to inhabit this middle ground?

What we do know is that farming and food production in the United States has been challenging, especially in the last few decades, given the farm crisis (1980’s and current), the impacts of globalization on food production and labor, the continued loss of rural community, coupled with the rapid bifurcation in scale. We can see traditional rural lifeways being deeply challenged, with rippling effects across communities. As a result of this we see high suicide rates among rural farmers, we also see the average age of farmers increasing, and of course the continued challenge of balancing the rising costs of production and market price.

This means that the pressures on farmers and ranchers to shift to the poles is much greater (e.g. “get big or get out”). Mid-scale food and commodity producers often find themselves too big to engage in direct market sales (farmer’s markets and the like), but not big enough to capitalize on volume. This means that innovation and creativity are indispensable in the middle. This can often result in the need to shift models of production, craft novel ways of building community, or experimenting with alternative crops or breeds.

4. What’s next for this concept? In other words, what don’t we know about food systems in the middle?

The special issue was intended to begin a conversation about agricultural food systems of the middle, and point to both the value and challenges of the middle. By shedding light on the middle, conceptually and from an ethnographic viewpoint, we hope to illuminate alternative ways of thinking about agriculture production from a multi-scalar context.

The special issue begins to bring an ethnographic eye to mid-scale agriculture specific to the United States, but there is plenty more to do. We also know that other agricultural regions across the globe are also shifting, with some regions experiencing increasing bifurcation as well (Bokusheva and Kimura 2016). So we might ask how are farmers from other cultural contexts making decisions in these regions of increasing polarization? What are some of the structural components driving bifurcation of scale in agricultural production across the globe? And in what ways do we see culture affecting agricultural policies and experiences with regards to scale?

Photos

Proponents of “farm to school” programs often argue that it can provide stronger, more reliable markets for local, small-scale farmers — and perhaps relieve them of some of the work of selling through direct markets, like farmers markets. What is fairly typical about this scene is that small farmers – those farming just a few acres and largely selling directly through consumers through farmers markets – often end up participating in farm to school activities like fieldtrips to farms, or selling small quantities for the purposes of taste tests and other culinary activities, but they generally aren’t producing a high enough quantity to sell to schools for their nutrition programs, and generally not at a price that fits within the tight budgets of federally-funded school nutrition programs. In short, there are still significant barriers to small scale farmers capitalizing on school nutrition programs for purchases at scale, which generally still go to large (nominally local) farms. Thus there is an urgent need for intermediaries, like local distributors or food hubs, to help small farmers more effectively capitalize on institutional markets like school nutrition programs — and for anthropologist to pay attention to the creative ways that farmers and schools are navigating this uncharted “middle ground.”

Barrow County, GA, teachers visiting the Wimberly’s Roots Farm during the Grow It Know It Training Program, a USDA-NIFA-funded Farm to School training program.

Grow It Know It staff and Barrow County, GA, teachers discussing pest management at Wimberly’s Roots Farm.

Grow It Know It VISTA and Barrow County, GA, teachers practicing a culinary nutrition lesson using kale harvest from Wimberly’s Roots Farm

References

Bokusheva, Raushan, and Shingo Kimura. 2016. “Cross-Country Comparison of Farm Size Distribution.” OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers 94.
Burns, Christopher, and Ryan Kuhns. 2016. “The Changing Organization and Well-Being of Midsize U.S. Farms, 1992-2014.” Accessed Mar 28, 2017, https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=80691.

Ashley Stinnett is a Professor of Anthropology at Bowling Green University and Jennifer Jo Thompson is an Assistant Research Scientists at University of Georgia. They organized the recently published special issue in CAFE titled, Agriculture of the Middle. The articles in the special issue seek to move beyond the binary logics that dominate how we understand about food systems (e.g. large-scale/small-scale, local/global, organic/industrial) and take seriously the radical potential of agriculture of “the middle.”

Ashley Stinnett and Jennifer Jo Thomson were interviewed by Emma McDonell, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Indiana University.

February 19, 2019 0 comment

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Interview with Emily McKee: Entrepreneurial Treadmills and the Scalar Challenges of Sustainable Agriculture

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This interview is part of CAFE’s series of interviews with authors of past CAFE articles. By conversing with authors about the ways their article came about, the challenges they faced in the research and/or writing process, and the ways the issue the article addresses has changed or shifted since publication we aim to provide a space for more informal discussion of the issues human/environment scholars face in research and writing while learning about how specific issues have changes in recent years. Interviews are conducted by CAFE’s editorial assistant, Emma McDonell, and you can direct any questions about the series to her at ekmcdone@iu.edu.

This interview is with Emily McKee, who wrote “It’s the Amazon World: Small-scale Farmers on an Entrepreneurial Treadmill”

Discussing marketing and partnership opportunities for heritage grains during a MOSES Field Day at Hazzard Free Farm

1. What is your concept of the “entrepreneurial treadmill” and how does it differ from the agricultural treadmill we’re accustomed to hearing about?

The “agricultural treadmill” describes how commodity crop farmers are compelled by broader economic and agricultural trends to intensify their operations. Facing thin profit margins, farmers must consistently increase acreage and investments in new technologies and inputs to stay afloat as competitors’ crop yields rise. Smaller-scale farmers wanting to avoid that treadmill opt instead for lower yields of higher-value crops. This provides farmers more freedom to tailor growing practices towards high quality and other ecological and social goals. But a food system politically and economically designed for industrial agriculture pushes these farmers onto an “entrepreneurial treadmill.” Without the ready markets of commodity crops, farmers face steep marketing and distribution hurdles to reach customers. To stay relevant in a marketplace not built for them, farmers must continually invest in education and outreach (about sustainable agriculture, CSA, etc.), innovate social media campaigns, and meet rising expectations for customization and speedy delivery fueled by the age of e-commerce.

2. Is this a new phenomenon? If so, why has it emerged in recent years?

In one sense, this treadmill is as old as small businesses and market competition. It’s nothing new for small-scale farmers to wear many hats. But the popularity of local, organic, and artisanal foods brought qualitatively different competition. As large, technologically sophisticated, and well-capitalized competitors offer these foods, they stretch and dilute the meanings of labels that have given high value to small-scale farmers’ products. To protect these labels’ value farmers try ever more innovative and intensive marketing, outreach, and education about what constitutes local and sustainable food. In addition, the same technological advancements that help Facebook to predict which ads you’ll like and Amazon to deliver “field fresh” kale to your door, allow distant corporations to approximate the personalization that used to be the domain of direct market farms. All this quickens pace of the entrepreneurial treadmill.

3. How does your recent CAFE article fit into a broader research agenda?

This research is part of a broader commitment to using anthropology to foster vibrant and resilient food systems. For several years, I have worked with small-scale, mostly direct market farmers to understand the challenges and opportunities they face. Through collaborative research design with these producers, I am focusing upcoming research on investigating opportunities for aggregation and distribution that may help small-scale farmers bridge the gap between the scale at which they farm (which allows them to maintain the agricultural practices they value) and the scale at which our current food distribution systems operate.

4. What led you to inquire about these particular issues?

Since taking up anthropology, I’ve been invested in building nuanced understandings of how power relations play out in our everyday lives. In particular, how do we become political actors through our basic dwelling practices—claiming land, using water, and growing food? This project has been a welcome opportunity to combine these scholarly questions and anthropological methods that I’ve been developing elsewhere so far with the agricultural landscape I live in. We are losing the middle in U.S. agriculture, and while the corn and soybean fields of the Midwest make the dominance of industrial agriculture readily apparent, this is also an interesting site of innovations in local and regional food systems.

5. What do you see as the main challenges to sustainable agriculture in the US and what can anthropological research reveal about a path forward?

One challenge is the lopsidedness of the scale at which food is produced, distributed, and marketed. Existing institutions, public policies, tax incentives, and consumer expectations all favor the industrial scale. And sustainable practices don’t work well at this scale. Second, too many ecological, economic, and social costs are externalized from the prices we pay for food. Both factors put farmers using sustainable practices at a real disadvantage in the marketplace. One of anthropology’s strengths is in understanding relationships. We need empirically grounded and fully peopled investigations of how different policy decisions, individual choices, cultural norms, and economic interests shape our food systems. Highlighting these relationships that bring us our food can help eaters, as a broader public, hold ourselves more accountable to each other.

Participants learn about pasture-raised laying hens during an In Her Boots workshop at Radical Root Farm

Emily McKee is an Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy. Specializing in environmental and Middle East anthropology, with a focus on political ecology, she conducts research in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and the United States. She is the author of Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging and journal articles in various venues, including Current Anthropology, IJMES, Antipode, and Nomadic Peoples.

July 27, 2018 0 comment

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Interview with Benjamin Gray and Jane Gibson: Actor-Networks, Farmer Decisions and Identity

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This interview is part of CAFE’s new series of interviews with authors of past CAFE articles. By conversing with authors about the ways their article came about, the challenges they faced in the research and/or writing process, and the ways the issue the article addresses has changed or shifted since publication we aim to provide a space for more informal discussion of the issues human/environment scholars face in research and writing while learning about how specific issues have changes in recent years.

This interview is with Benjamin J. Gray and Jane Gibson, who wrote “Actor–Networks, Farmer Decisions, and Identity.”

Can you briefly share your research interests and how this article fits into your broader research agenda as it stands today?

We share interests in social, economic, and ecological issues related to agriculture: the condition of the Ogallala Aquifer, climate change, food security for consumers and livelihood security for producers, agro-ecosystem health, and the future of rural communities. Gibson emphasizes political ecology and economic aspects of these issues while Gray tends to focus on the connections between the environment, technology, and culture. Gibson has recently broadened her research to the implications of precision agriculture and robotic technologies for the future of industrial agriculture. Gray is currently conducting research in Oklahoma where the economics of oil production are part of the analysis.

Are you currently working on anything that updates your 2013 article or have you worked on anything since that builds upon this work?

Gray is working on a paper which situates the Ogallala Aquifer as an actor. In the language of ANT, an actor does not imply moral agency such as that we expect of humans. Rather, an actor is any entity that makes a difference in the state of another entity to which it is connected. Gray is using this concept to explore how farmers’ experiences with the Ogallala can influence their preferences for aquifer management programs. Gibson and Gray co-authored a paper that theorizes the paradox of farmers’ need to draw down their groundwater supply to survive into a future without it. Gibson is also working on an edited volume that considers the future of industrial agriculture in North and South America, particularly as farmers constitute the market for increasingly concentrated, corporate agribusinesses who, like farmers, are caught in a never-ending pursuit of efficiencies.

How did you get interested in ANT?

Gray developed the theoretical framework for the article on ANT in CAFÉ. His first experience with ANT came in graduate school in Dr. Allan Hanson’s cultural anthropology seminar at the University of Kansas. Discussion focused on Hanson’s interest in extended (or distributed) cognition—the concept that, to paraphrase Gregory Bateson, information processing is not limited by the skin. That was Gray’s entry point, but he soon discovered that ANT provides a set of ideas (John Law calls ANT a “toolkit”; Gibson insists it is theory) for exploring how actors, the human kind, stabilize and reproduce social relations. ANT views stable relationships as requiring a great deal of effort to hold together. How these relationships are held together is what it seeks to explain. We find these ideas useful for thinking about stubborn, complex environmental problems, such as the depletion of the Ogallala or climate change, which can otherwise seem overwhelming. And we take it a step further in thinking about the unequal power dynamics of networks from which change can be induced and impelled.

What do you see as the potential of ANT for examining food and agriculture issues? Have you seen it taken up in interesting ways since your publication?

ANT concepts appear in research about environmental issues such as water and its infrastructure and management, rivers and other natural resources, mining, and multispecies ethnographies. Although ANT has not always been a centerpiece of the analysis, its ideas have proven useful in thinking about the intersection of nature and human actions and desires.

Your article asks about how industrial agriculture influences farmers and why they stay within the industrial agriculture paradigm despite mounting evidence, observed both by farmers and scientists, that it is not in their long-term best interests to do so. Have you seen any major shifts in this domain since your publication? Is there any hopeful examples of change?

We have not seen any major shifts in Kansas or Oklahoma, the two regions with which we have the most experience, nor do we expect to see redirection. The rewards that encourage farmers to participate in the industrial system are still largely in place though the number of farmers continues to decline, and most innovations in production practices—seed and irrigation technologies, for example—preserve the status quo, i.e. the market and commodity grains and soybeans, for corporate agribusiness firms. Yet awareness of the crisis in farming and concerns for the future drive some experimentation. Michael Mayerfeld Bell’s Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability, which predated our paper, is an example of attempts by some farmers to break out of the paradigm. In Kansas, the Land Institute is developing perennial grain crops such as wheat. This type of innovation could be a step toward farmers being able to break some of the ties that bind them to the network.

You analyze farmers as embedded within a network of human and non-human actors. How does this change the way we see farmer decisions and how would this in turn change how we think about potential for intervention and change?

The inclusion of non-human actors does not necessitate a special treatment of decision-making. Farmers decide to participate in the industrial farming network because it offers a system of enticements they find rewarding, but also because the network reinforces, materially and ideologically, the ties that bind them to that system. Farmers maintain their agency, even as they participate in an arrangement in which they are not the dominant actors, but they do not have power as individuals to alter the arrangement. They could decide to do something else with their land, but most would need to adapt existing equipment, find a new market for whatever they grew, figure out how to get it there, and manage the risks. Many of those decisions are already taken care of in the industrial commodity network by existing infrastructure, policies, and material support. The importance of including non-human actors is that they condition the human actors with which we are most concerned. A description of industrial grain and soybean farming is incomplete without them. Regarding change, if you understand how a social arrangement is maintained, then the system becomes legible. Even with legibility, the challenge for someone wanting to change agriculture on the Great Plains is that they will have to make changes to the network—technologies, practices, policies, markets, interdependent industries and so on—and offer something farmers believe to be viable. Perhaps experiments in small-scale, local production and the Land Institute’s work on perennial grains will spur such transformation.

What might this approach reveal about farm policy, and specifically the role of the Farm Bill in changing how farmers make decisions, that other approaches elide?

First, ANT directs our thinking to how network development through interessement and enrolment locks actors into particular roles and promotes their success, and how mobilization reinforces commitment to network goals (Callon 1986, cited in our article). Second, through examination of network development and integration, we can see how agents within the network exercise influence over others. Farm policies in general, and the Farm Bill in particular, speak to the question of unequal power in the industrial agricultural network. The structure of agriculture, the evolution of “best practices,” agricultural research initiatives, and technological innovation reflect the influence of the advocates for commodity programs and crop insurance, for example, as well as the elimination of production management, and rejection of proposals such as the labeling of products that contain genetically modified ingredients and COOL (Country of Origin Labeling). Farmers and agribusiness corporations both can have voice and influence, but farmers’ interests that conflict with those of powerful global concerns have fallen on deaf ears.

If you could rewrite the article today, is there anything you would change?

We would make it clearer that farmers maintain their agency, even as they interact with dominant actors and see their choices constrained. In spite of the fact that farmers’ agency is intact, we would emphasize how individual agency is insufficient to compensate for unequal power in the industrial agricultural network. USDA, Congress, and the FTC serve corporate agribusiness where extraordinary concentration of power has left farmers vulnerable to social Darwinian culling.

Callon, Michel. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” Pp. 196-233 in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, edited by J. Law. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Benjamin J. Gray received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Kansas and is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include agricultural and water sustainability, energy production, resilience to natural and anthropogenic hazards, and the transformation of rural communities on the Great Plains.

Jane Gibson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas. Her interests lie at the intersection of economic and ecological anthropology, and her work has taken up subjects such as alligator hunting, commercial fishing, ecotourism, parks and protected areas, and agriculture.

March 9, 2018 0 comment

Journal Extras Online Features

Interview with Thomas Pearson: Frac Sand Mining in Wisconsin

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This first interview is with Thomas Pearson, an Associate Professor in the Social Sciences Department at University of Wisconsin-Stout, who wrote “Frac Sand Mining in Wisconsin: Understanding Emerging Conflicts and Community Organizing.”

Can you briefly share your research interests and how this article fits into your broader research agenda as it stands today?

For the past decade, I have been drawn to questions about environmental conflicts and their relationship to shifting meanings of place and democracy, themes I first explored through my doctoral research in Costa Rica, which focused on environmental activism around genetically modified seeds, intellectual property rights, and free trade agreements. When I began researching frac sand mining in Wisconsin, I initially sought to document grassroots organizing in response to a new extractive industry. At the time, it felt tremendously different from my experiences in Costa Rica. Looking back, I’m struck by how themes of activism, place, and democracy have been prominent in both projects.

How did you get interested in this topic?

In 2009 I began teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, located in rural western Wisconsin. During my first couple years I periodically heard about sand mining, but I knew nothing of its connection to hydraulic fracturing. In May 2011, a good friend of mine who lives in Morgantown, WV, sent me a picture of himself and his daughter at a demonstration against fracking. Then that fall, Gasland was screened at my university. I attended out of curiosity and afterwards several community members spoke passionately about frac sand mining and a proposed mining operation in my community. I began attending town meetings, initially as a concerned citizen, and it quickly evolved into a research project lasting nearly five years.

Are you currently working on anything that updates your 2013 article or have you worked on anything since that builds upon this work?

Yes, definitely. In 2013, I was trying mostly to wrap my mind around an unprecedented and explosive issue and contribute an anthropological perspective to the ongoing public discussion. As activism in my community evolved and declined, my ethnographic research broadened to look at how people cope with industrial mining activity near their home, which I talk about in “Frac Sand Mining and the Disruption of Place, Landscape, and Community in Wisconsin,” published in Human Organization. I have also written a book titled When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community, due out this November with the University of Minnesota Press.

Your article examines the emergent conflicts surrounding frac sand mining in western Wisconsin. Since the publication of your CAFE article in 2013, have there been any major developments or shifts in frac sand politics in the region or more broadly?

The industry continued to expand rapidly until about 2015. Many towns adopted ordinances asserting local regulatory control and in response the industry has pushed for state preemption of local authority, a phenomenon that has occurred in many states in relation to hydraulic fracturing and other issues. In 2016, the continued decline of oil prices erased demand for Wisconsin frac sand, sending the industry into a tailspin. Many operations stalled or went under. Things are beginning to come back this year, however, as oil prices tic upward and demand grows. After one boom and bust cycle, we appear to be on the cusp of another phase of frac sand mining development.

You explain that one of your central concerns is that “the pace, scale, and powerful interests behind frac sand mining have created a structural imbalance that favors private companies involved in energy and resource extraction at the expense of local communities.” Has the power balance between local communities and private companies shifted at all? If so, how has this affected the negotiations between landowners, corporations, and government officials – and with what result?

In my forthcoming book, I try to show that very complex struggles play out at the local level. In general, towns where residents are organized have been more successful in stopping mining, or at least asserting regulatory control. I also examine, however, how the industry has cultivated sometimes problematic ties with town officials and community leaders, as well as engineering firms, university centers, and law offices. To circumvent local opposition, mining companies have pursued strategies that include everything from lobbying and financial donations to lawsuits and annexation. Changes at the state level are also having a significant impact. Governor Scott Walker has consistently eroded the regulatory capacity of the DNR and the Republican-dominated legislature has moved to reduce local control over land use decisions, though state preemption has been controversial and piecemeal.

In the article conclusion, you make suggestions for future activist efforts around frac sand mining activism in Wisconsin. Have any of these prescriptions been taken up by activists?

They were not so much “prescriptions” as observations of promising trends. Concerned citizens have definitely rallied around the defense of local control, largely in response to industry lobbying for state preemption. Several groups have also developed ties to the community rights movement, which seeks to move beyond reactionary, single-issue organizing and frames activities such as frac sand mining within a larger critique of corporate power. Local groups such as the Save the Hills Alliance have also broadened their focus, and connections with national anti-fracking, alternative energy, and democracy movements are being made through organizations such as FracTracker Alliance and activities such as the Democracy Convention.

If you could rewrite the article today, is there anything you would change?

The article became a jumping off point for my forthcoming book, which allowed me to delve more deeply into stories about grassroots organizing, conflicts over place identity, the experiences of people whose lives have been upended, the tactics used by mining companies to overcome local opposition, and the frustrations of concerned citizens who try to confront corporate power within local democratic decision-making bodies. I think other stories could be told about this issue, especially stories about the experiences of people who work in the industry and benefit from mining. Their voices and perspectives do appear in the book, but they are not a central focus.

Addendum

I would like to add some backstory to this article’s appearance in CAFE. The article originated with a 2012 AAA panel organized by Anna Willow and chaired by Jeanne Simonelli, who along with Stephane Paladino encouraged panelists to submit papers to CAFE to be published as editor-reviewed research reports: short pieces that comment on ongoing research and current issues. The idea was to get anthropological analysis, backed by the status of an academic journal, out into the public domain in a timely fashion. I wrote this article with a general audience in mind and sought to minimize the theory sloganeering and nonsensical scholarly dribble that spoils so much of academic anthropology today. According to various metrics, this article is the most impactful academic piece I’ve ever written, circulating widely in western Wisconsin. Despite also being freely available on other websites, it has garnered nearly 2,000 views on Academia.edu, largely from non-academics. (By contrast, an article I published in American Anthropologist in 2013 on my Costa Rica research has achieved a measly 46 views.) That’s not to say academics have ignored my work. According to Google Scholar, it is also my most cited piece, and AnthroSource indicates it is the most cited article in CAFE over the past five years.

Thomas Pearson’s website is Contested Landscapes

June 18, 2017 0 comment