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Inside the Black Box of the Agricultural Treadmill

其他書名	Organification, Cooptation, and Masculinity in the Organic Dairy Sector
出版	University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2019
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=B2GszgEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This dissertation uses the situated, rich, and contradictory stories of conventional dairy farmers to illustrate the barriers and opportunities the United States faces in transitioning our agricultural system into something sustainable. Sociological explanations of the agricultural treadmill - which describes the economic concentration and ecological degradation that has accompanied the rise of industrial and capital-intensive agriculture - often focus on political economy, prices, and market relations. This approach tends to conceive of farmers who are forced to "get big or get out" as rational actors caught in an unfortunate economic structure. This dissertation goes beyond rational explanations based on unequal power dynamics, or rather it goes deeper into these dynamics, exploring the black box of how and why farmers are complicit in their own exploitation. The rise of the organic dairy market presents an unusual opportunity to observe the mechanics of how ecologically destructive hierarchies of advantage are reproduced. In a second dissertation, for a PhD in Environment and Resources, I tell the story of sector-level "conventionalization" of organic dairy, driven by profit-hungry investors and a complicit state. In this Sociology dissertation, I describe the social-psychological barriers that many American farmers face, preventing them from embracing, or even being aware of, a sustainable vision of agriculture that may be congenial to farmers but not to agribusiness. Through several particularly stark mismatches between farmers' economic incentives and the choices they actually make, I explore the meanings that farmers attach to the epistemic objects of "good farming," organic, and environmentalist, and where those meanings come from. I first explore the mismatch between conventional dairy farmers' stigma against and fear of organic before they convert to organic for the price premium, and their subsequent ideological embrace of sustainable agricultural practices once they try it - a process I call "organification." The second mismatch is between converted farmers' new enthusiastic embrace of agroecological principles, and their continued resistance to environmentalism more generally, in particular their continued denial of climate change, which disproportionately impacts organic farmers. Using data from farmer interviews and participant observation at putatively "grassroots" farm associations, I illustrate how anti-environmentalism among farmers is cultivated by agribusiness and fossil fuel trans-national corporations that have coopted the institutions and civic totems of agricultural life. Furthermore, the stigma with which "environmental" has been endowed, together with industrial agriculture's valorization of dog-eat-dog competition and steep social hierarchies, produce a context in which performing anti-environmentalism has become a way of signaling the kinds of masculinity that are valuable for maintaining one's position in social hierarchies.