The “good farmer” literature, grounded in Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital, has provided researchers with a socio-cultural approach to understanding conservation adoption behavior. The good farmer literature suggests that conservation practices may not be widely accepted because they do not allow farmers to demonstrate symbols of good farming. This lens has not been applied to the adoption of conservation tillage, a practice increasingly used to improve conservation outcomes, farming efficiency and crop productivity. Drawing from in-depth interviews with dryland (...) wheat farmers in the US inland Pacific Northwest, this research seeks to understand how farmers’ engagement with CT is shaped by identity as a good farmer. Some farmers also sought to bolster social capital through CT by maintaining and strengthening relationships with peers, landowners, and future generations. We further found that engagement with CT provided a link for some participants between productivist values and stewardship values within the good farming identity. The findings from this research may help contextualize the barriers and opportunities to the adoption of agricultural conservation practices within farmer-specific social, cultural, and economic forms of capital. (shrink)

Carbon capture and storage technologies are increasingly part of society’s multi-pronged approach to climate change mitigation. Sequestering soil organic carbon (SOC) through credits for voluntary markets has received recent attention as an avenue for carbon storage on agricultural lands. Similar to other payment for ecosystem services programs, technical and market uncertainties—in particular, estimating and measuring how much carbon is sequestered in a given location—create challenges for farm operators and investors. In the last five years, numerous startups, agricultural corporations, and nonprofit (...) organizations have emerged as project developers aiming to enroll farmers in their programs to create and sell SOC credits via the adoption of soil conservation practices on farms. In this evolving context, we examine how project developers conceptualize the importance and validity of voluntary markets for SOC as a tool to address climate change. Drawing on interviews with 22 actors across 19 different organizations, with a primary focus on carbon sequestration project developers in the United States, we find that some respondents acknowledge concerns over cost, quality of carbon measurements, and barriers to inclusion. However, the majority invoke neoliberal market assumptions regarding market maturation and technology innovation to justify and reinforce the importance of voluntary carbon markets for SOC. We employ neo-Polanyian theory to argue that these responses demonstrate competing environmental discourses through which project developers promote market solutions while simultaneously providing points of resistance against them. Taken together, these perspectives are critical to highlight the contradictions within voluntary markets. Further, our results suggest that as constructed, voluntary carbon markets are unlikely to internally resolve issues of credit uncertainty and inequity in resource access. (shrink)

Urban and agricultural communities are interdependent but often differ on approaches for improving water quality impaired by nutrient runoff waterbodies worldwide. Current water quality governance involves an overlapping array of policy tools implemented by governments, civil society organizations, and corporate supply chains. The choice of regulatory and voluntary tools is likely to influence many dimensions of the relationship between urban and agricultural actors. These relationships then influence future conditions for collective decision-making since many actors participate for multiple years in water (...) quality improvement. In this policy analysis, we draw on our professional experiences and research, as well as academic and practitioner literatures, to investigate how different types of water quality interventions influence urban-agricultural relationships, specifically examining policy tools on a regulatory to voluntary spectrum. Interactions between farmers and other rural agricultural interests on one hand, and urban residents and their stormwater managers and wastewater treatment plants on the other, influence dynamics relevant for water quality improvement. We suggest that the selection of policy tools within complex governance contexts influence urban–agricultural relationships through financial exchange, political coalitions, knowledge exchange, interpersonal relationships, and shared sense of place. Policy tools that provide a means to build relationships and engage with people’s emotions and identities have potential to influence personal and community change and adaptive capacity, while processes such as lawsuits can catalyze structural change. Engaging these relationships is particularly critical given the need to move out of polarized positions to solve collective problems. (shrink)