Lobao, Linda M. (author), Wimberley, Ronald C. (author), and Thompson, Alton (author)
Format:
Book chapter
Publication Date:
2002
Published:
USA: Praeger, Westport, Connecticut.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: C37077
Notes:
See C37075 for original, Pages 15-30 in Ronald C. Wimberley, Craig K. Harris, Joseph J. Molnar and Terry J. Tomazic (eds.), The social risks of agriculture: Americans speak out on food, farming and the environment. Praeger, Westport, Connecticut. 163 pages.
31 pages, Imaginaries of empty, verdant lands have long motivated agricultural frontier expansion. Today, climate change, food insecurity, and economic promise are invigorating new agricultural frontiers across the circumpolar north. In this article, I draw on extensive archival and ethnographic evidence to analyze mid-twentieth-century and recent twenty-first-century narratives of agricultural development in the Northwest Territories, Canada. I argue that the early frontier imaginary is relatively intact in its present lifecycle. It is not simply climactic forces that are driving an emergent northern agricultural frontier, but rather the more diffuse and structural forces of capitalism, governmental power, settler colonialism, and resistance to those forces. I also show how social, political, and infrastructural limits continue to impede agricultural development in the Northwest Territories and discuss how smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities differently situate agricultural production within their local food systems. This paper contributes to critical debates in frontiers and northern agriculture literature by foregrounding the contested space between the state-driven and dominant public narratives underpinning frontier imaginaries, and the social, cultural, and material realities that constrain them on a Northwest Territories agricultural frontier.
Feller, Irwin (author / Professor of Economics, Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation, and Director of the M.S. Program in Policy Analysis, Pennsylvania State University) and Professor of Economics, Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation, and Director of the M.S. Program in Policy Analysis, Pennsylvania State University
Format:
Book chapter
Publication Date:
1987
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 72 Document Number: C03404
Notes:
See also C02116; revised version of author's "Technology transfer, public policy, and the cooperative extension service - OMB Imbroglio," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 6(3) (Spring 1987) : 1-21; AGRICOLA IND 92040430, In: Ruttan, Vernon W.; and Pray, Carl E., eds. Policy for agricultural research. Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 1987. p. 175-210
Claude W. Gifford Collection. Beyond his materials in the ACDC collection, the Claude W. Gifford Papers, 1919-2004, are deposited in the University of Illinois Archives. Serial Number 8/3/81. Locate finding aid at https://archives.library.illinois.edu/archon/, Claude W. Gifford Collection., "Its three major elements still hold the farmer's fate through their guidance of Congress; but faces, ideas change, solidarity is gone."
32 pages., via online journal., The phrase in the title is not mine. I am borrowing it here from syndicated
columnist and cowboy poet Baxter Black, who borrowed the title of one
of his own columns “Growth of Agricultural Ignorance” from the editor of
the Delmarva Farmer (a weekly agricultural publication serving the Delaware,
Maryland, and Virginia region). In many ways I agree with the term, and
believe it is accurate in part to describe American society in the late twentieth
century and into the twenty-first. Thus, I would like to take this opportunity
to discuss some trends in American agriculture, and for that matter, agricultural history, and some concerns that I have about them. Not all the trends are bad, of course, and perhaps in some ways, at least, American society is less agriculturally ignorant than Black and others suggest.
