IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/agrhuv/v23y2006i1p75-88.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Farmer-Community Connections and the Future of Ecological Agriculture in California

Author

Listed:
  • Sonja Brodt
  • Gail Feenstra
  • Robin Kozloff
  • Karen Klonsky
  • Laura Tourte

Abstract

While questions about the environmental sustainability of contemporary farming practices and the socioeconomic viability of rural communities are attracting increasing attention throughout the US, these two issues are rarely considered together. This paper explores the current and potential connections between these two aspects of sustainability, using data on community members’ and farmers’ views of agricultural issues in California’s Central Valley. These views were collected from a series of individual and group interviews with biologically oriented and conventional farmers as well as community stakeholders. Local marketing, farmland preservation, and perceptions of sustainable agriculture comprised the primary topics of discussion. The mixed results indicate that, while many farmers and community members have a strong interest in these topics, sustainable community development and the use of sustainable farming practices are seldom explicitly linked. On the other hand, many separate efforts around the Valley to increase local marketing and agritourism, improve public education about agriculture, and organize grassroots farmland preservation initiatives were documented. We conclude that linking these efforts more explicitly to sustainable agriculture and promoting more engagement between ecologically oriented farmers and their communities could engender more economic and political support for these farmers, helping them and their communities to achieve greater sustainability in the long run. Copyright Springer 2006

Suggested Citation

  • Sonja Brodt & Gail Feenstra & Robin Kozloff & Karen Klonsky & Laura Tourte, 2006. "Farmer-Community Connections and the Future of Ecological Agriculture in California," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 23(1), pages 75-88, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:23:y:2006:i:1:p:75-88
    DOI: 10.1007/s10460-004-5870-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10460-004-5870-y
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10460-004-5870-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Douglas H. Constance, 2023. "The doctors of agrifood studies," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 40(1), pages 31-43, March.
    2. Amy Trauger & Carolyn Sachs & Mary Barbercheck & Kathy Brasier & Nancy Kiernan, 2010. "“Our market is our community”: women farmers and civic agriculture in Pennsylvania, USA," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 27(1), pages 43-55, March.
    3. Dicle Dönmez & Musab A. Isak & Tolga İzgü & Özhan Şimşek, 2024. "Green Horizons: Navigating the Future of Agriculture through Sustainable Practices," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(8), pages 1-20, April.
    4. Khanal, Aditya R. & Mishra, Ashok K. & Omobitan, Omobolaji, 2019. "Examining organic, agritourism,and agri-environmental diversification decisions of American farms: are these decisions interlinked?," Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), vol. 100(1-4), October.
    5. Scott, Steffanie & Si, Zhenzhong & Schumilas, Theresa & Chen, Aijuan, 2014. "Contradictions in state- and civil society-driven developments in China’s ecological agriculture sector," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 158-166.
    6. Megan Swindal & Gilbert Gillespie & Rick Welsh, 2010. "Community digester operations and dairy farmer perspectives," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 27(4), pages 461-474, December.
    7. Filippa Pyk & Assem Abu Hatab, 2018. "Fairtrade and Sustainability: Motivations for Fairtrade Certification among Smallholder Coffee Growers in Tanzania," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-18, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:23:y:2006:i:1:p:75-88. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.