2 pages, via Online journal, Every morning I wake up like thousands of others wondering if what I am experiencing is just a bad dream. As I move into the day I am acutely aware that it is not a bad dream and that I as a farmer and an activist have a responsibility to make this devastating situation better.
13 pages, via Online Journal, This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved.
14 pages, via Online Journal, The aim of this article is to show the relevance of the sociology of market agencements (an offshoot of actor–network theory) for studying the creation of alternative agri-food networks. The authors start with their finding that most research into alternative agri-food networks takes a strictly informative, cursory look at the conditions under which these networks are gradually created. They then explain how the sociology of market agencements analyzes the construction of innovative markets and how it can be used in agri-food studies. The relevance of this theoretical frame is shown based on an experiment aimed at creating a local trade scheme between manure from livestock farms and alfalfa grown by grain farmers. By using the concepts of the sociology of market agencements, the authors reveal the operations that are required to create an alternative agri-food network and underscore the difficulties that attend each one of these operations. This enables them to see the phenomena of lock-ins and sociotechnical transition in a new light.
2 pages, For years agroecologists have warned that industrial agri-culture became too narrow ecologically, highly dependent on outside inputs, and extremely vulnerable to insect pests, diseases, climate change and now as demonstrated by the COVID19 pandemic prone to a complete shut down by unforeseen crisis.Like never before, COVID19 has revealed how closely linked human, animal and ecological health are. As a power-ful systemic approach, agroecology reveals that the way we practice agriculture can provide opportunities for improv-ing environmental and human health, but if done wrongly, agriculture can cause major risks to health.
24 pages, Alternative food networks (AFN) are argued to provide platforms to re-socialize and re-spacealize food, establish and contribute to democratic participation in local food chains, and foster producer–consumer relations and trust. As one of the most recent examples of AFN, Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) have gained notable traction in attempting to redefine consumer-producer relations in the organic value chain. The participation of stakeholders, such as consumers, has been a key element theoretically differentiating PGS from other organic verification systems. While research on farmer participation in PGS is attracting interest, consumer participation is still widely overlooked. Using a mixed methods approach, this paper describes five PGS markets in Mexico, Chile and Bolivia. A survey was conducted with consumers in the PGS markets to explore their awareness of the PGS, how consumers participate in the PGS, and their level of trust in the respective PGS and its certified products. Results showed a low level of awareness of PGS among market consumers, few participation possibilities, and minimal consumer participation overall. Nevertheless, trust in organic quality was generally high. Consumers primarily relied on the direct relationship with producers and the PGS market itself as sources of trust. These results provide novel insight into PGS consumer-market interactions, and contribute to discussions concerning social embeddedness, awareness and participation within AFN.