| Chapter 1: | ADM, A Tomato Named Local Lucy, and Small Farms: The Ecology and Reemergence of Farmers’ Markets |
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Farmers’ markets also respond to national and global influences. These include such widely disparate issues as the impact of international trade agreements on market opportunities for farmers, the provision of funds by the federal government for low-income seniors to shop at farmers’ markets, and even the appearance of mad cow disease in beef or E. coli in spinach—which drives a segment of the population to seek beef that is raised on grass and spinach that is not processed under industrialized conditions.
In addition, the environment as rural landscape is threatened by the politics of corporatization and commoditization of agriculture and food. If there are no viable markets for small farms, there will be no small farms. How, then, will rural areas appear, and what will be done there? Farmers’ markets are one route to viability for small farms. In this way, this research is related to preventing the degradation of markets and livelihoods for some farmers and the potential degradation of community linkages with rural hinterlands resulting from the power of some corporations and public policy. Thus, farmers’ markets symbolize resistance, an important component of political ecology.
Embracing Robbins’ (2004) “seed” category of political ecology, this book uses political ecology to provide farmers’ market organizers and those who work with them a view of their goals, the multiple-level challenges and barriers to reaching their goals, and how market organizers successfully adapt to challenges and barriers. This moves political ecology beyond critique, to become a problem-solving tool within localized organizations. It becomes a means for organizations to see the big picture and potentially to make decisions that maintain their long-term viability.
Two Food Streams Redux: “What if We Looked at The World as one Giant Farm Field?”
During 1996, while the memory of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s was still fresh, the USDA appointed National Commission on Small Farms held hearings around the country. The Commission was interested in the issues facing small farmers in the United States and was particularly concerned with a long-established national trend of declining numbers of small farms and the increasing size of a smaller number of large farms.