Infrastructure can make or break a farm’s economic viability. Farmers’ ownership and ability to invest in infrastructure is often arranged through the family farm model, where farmers are typically married to their business partners. In this paper, we analyze the implications of organizing infrastructure access through the family farm model. Through interviews with 66 farmers and key informants in New England, U.S., we identify a treadmill of infrastructure accumulation for farmers with family capital and a treadmill of high labor and (...) low profitability for farmers without the family capital to acquire needed infrastructure. Infrastructure accumulation in the family farm model builds farms that are difficult to adapt to new systems and markets, challenging to retire from without selling to developers, and hard for beginning farmers to afford. The economic tendencies of organizing infrastructure through the family farm model can make it difficult for farmers of all social backgrounds to access farmland and infrastructure. Moreover, continued inequities in family wealth and wages, credit access, and social capital means that the family farm model systematically disadvantages farmers of color, LGBTQ + farmers, limited resource, and women farmers. We argue that infrastructure accumulation through the family farm model is a process that intensifies inequities in farm viability, exacerbates the challenges of transitioning farms to new farmers and ways of farming, and fuels land injustice. (shrink)

As a group, LGBTQ+ people experience food insecurity at a disproportionately high rate, yet food security scholars and practitioners are only beginning to uncover patterns in how food insecurity varies by subgroups of this diverse community. In this paper, we use data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey—which added measures of gender identity and sexuality for the first time in 2021—to analyze New Englanders’ food insufficiency rates by gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. We find that (1) in the (...) past seven days, 13.0 percent of LGB + (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other non-heterosexual) New Englanders experience food insufficiency—which is nearly twice the rate of heterosexual people—and 19.8 percent of transgender+ (transgender, genderqueer, gender non-binary, and other non-cisgender people) New Englanders experience food insufficiency—which is two to three times the rate of cisgender men and women. (2) Whereas cisgender New Englanders experience food insufficiency at a _lower_ rate than their counterparts in the rest of the nation (about two percentage points lower for both cisgender men and women), transgender+ New Englanders experience no such New England advantage compared to transgender+ people in the country as a whole. (3) LGBTQ+ New Englanders of color experience devastatingly high rates of food insufficiency, with, for example, one in three Black transgender+ New Englanders not having enough food to eat in the past seven days. These findings suggest that addressing food insecurity in New England demands approaching the problem with an intersectional queer lens, with attention to the ways in which racism, cissexism, and heterosexism are creating a systemic, ongoing food crisis for LGBTQ+ New Englanders, especially those who are transgender+ and/or people of color. (shrink)

The way farm viability is defined and conceptualized has become increasingly incongruent with the way that small-scale farmers make a living, as their livelihood strategies have evolved and changed in response to broad structural changes over the past several decades. Farm viability is typically defined as meeting the income needs of the farm family as well as supporting the farm’s operating costs. However, our study shows that New England farmers define farm viability as their ability to stay in business and (...) to keep the land in agriculture. In this paper, we bring together the agricultural economics and rural sociological research literature on farm viability and persistence as well as food justice scholarship to advance the development of a more relevant and integrated approach to evaluating the viability of small and mid-sized farms. We present farmers’ own conceptions of farm viability, drawn from 37 interviews with the operators of small farms in New England. While most of the farmers we interviewed conceptualize farm viability as their ability to stay in business, many of them shared broader views of farm viability that integrated the social and environmental sustainability of their enterprises in the face of financial pressures and increased weather extremes from climate change. These were described as their ability to continue farming year after year and keep their land in agriculture, and their ability to maintain their own health and wellbeing as integral to a viable farm enterprise. Farmers emphasized their (in)ability to continue farming from a social sustainability standpoint as directly impacting the viability of their farms. We argue for a shift away from narrow measures of farm viability that are solely based on farm owners’ household income to a broader, multidimensional approach to defining and measuring farm viability that could enable analyses that are relevant to critical sustainability concerns for US agriculture. (shrink)