Industrial agriculture is generally characterized as either the salvation of a growing, hungry, global population or as socially and environmentally irresponsible. Despite elements of truth in this polarization, it fails to focus on the particular vulnerabilities and potentials of industrial agriculture. Both representations obscure individual farmers, their families, their communities, and the risks they face from unpredictable local, national, and global conditions: fluctuating and often volatile production costs and crop prices; extreme weather exacerbated by climate change; complicated and changing farm policies; new production technologies and practices; water availability; inflation and debt; and rural community decline. Yet the future of industrial agriculture depends fundamentally on farmers’ decisions.
In Defense of Farmers illuminates anew the critical role that farmers play in the future of agriculture and examines the social, economic, and envir
Trade Review“Valuable for food system leaders and policy-makers and in graduate seminars. . . . [Analyses] highlight unsustainable methods and suggest improvements that could serve as a starting point for dialogues and decisions on changing the food system framework.”—Stacey F. Stearns,
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development "
In Defense of Farmers delivers a timely contribution to helping us better understand how we got to the corporate-hijacked food system we have today and how farm managers navigate this framework as they simultaneously promote and resist it. This edited volume is sharp in its critique while careful in its delivery, making it an important book for both scholars in the humanities and practitioners in the agricultural sciences. Through its successful disciplinary bridging, certainly contributing to its considerate tone,
In Defense of Farmers will prove a useful foundation for practical conversations about the future of food production."—Nicole Welk-Joerger, H-Environment
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In Defense of Farmers provides a solid overview of the current moment in industrialized agriculture and its human costs."—Megan Birk,
New Mexico Historical Review“Feeding the world’s population in a sustainable manner is a topic of critical importance for all humankind. Those of us living in the developed world need to be cognizant of the perils of the industrialized model of agricultural production and the consequences of its adoption around the world. . . . Farmers’ voices are rarely heard, but this book now allows them to be heard with respect to the challenges of groundwater depletion, ‘big chicken,’ climate change, or the consequences of adopting new precision farming technologies.”—Michael J. Broadway, professor of geography at Northern Michigan University and coauthor of
Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America“
In Defense of Farmers is critical from the empirical standpoint of those disturbing processes that have taken us to a standardized place where too few corporate actors make too many decisions about what we eat, where we eat it, and who reaps food production’s benefits while others bear the costs of compromising animal welfare, the environment, and the quality of food. Gibson and Alexander have assembled an impressive, interdisciplinary volume of authors who know their subjects so well that their disgust at capital concentration, environmental destruction, and routine violations of human and animal rights is palpable.”—David Griffith, professor of anthropology at East Carolina University and author of
American Guestworkers: Jamaicans and Mexicans in the U.S. Labor MarketTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword by John K. Hansen
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Food System Imperiled
Jane W. Gibson
1. Power, Food, and Agriculture: Implications for Farmers, Consumers, and Communities
Mary K. Hendrickson, Philip H. Howard, and Douglas H. Constance
2. Chickenizing American Farmers
Donald D. Stull
3. Industrial Chicken Meat and the Good Life in Bolivia
Sarah Kollnig
4. Automating Agriculture: Precision Technologies, Agbots, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Jane W. Gibson
5. Water to Wine: Industrial Agriculture and Groundwater Regulation in California
Casey Walsh
6. Forecasting the Challenges of Climate Change for West Texas Wheat Farmers
Sara E. Alexander
7. From Partner to Consumer: The Changing Role of Farmers in the Public Agricultural Research Process on the Canadian Prairies
Katherine Strand
8. Transmission of the Brazil Model of Industrial Soybean Production: A Comparative Study of Two Migrant Farming Communities in the Brazilian Cerrado
Andrew Ofstehage
9. The Price of Success: Population Decline and Community Transformation in Western Kansas
Jane W. Gibson and Benjamin J. Gray
10. An Alternative Future for Food and Farming
John Ikerd
List of Contributors
Index
