Freedom Farmers Redmond, LaDonna; White, Monica M
01/2019
eBook
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and ...economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.Freedom Farmersexpands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
Letter to the Editor Anderson, Kurt M
American Bankruptcy Institute journal,
02/2018, Letnik:
37, Številka:
2
Journal Article
...I urge great vigilance, and a presumptive answer of "no," whenever anyone advocates for expanded eligibility for a federal farm benefit. The test compares farm gross income (the top half of 1040 ...Schedule F, before expenses) with all other sources of income.3 Therefore, a farm family losing $50,000 per year from farming, but subsidizing that with $100,000 of off-farm income, would almost certainly pass the test.
An examination of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners that offers a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming.
Although the majority of ...farms in the United States have US-born owners who identify as white, a growing number of new farmers are immigrants, many of them from Mexico, who originally came to the United States looking for work in agriculture. In The New American Farmer, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern explores the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners, offering a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming. She finds that many of these new farmers rely on farming practices from their home countries—including growing multiple crops simultaneously, using integrated pest management, maintaining small-scale production, and employing family labor—most of which are considered alternative farming techniques in the United States.
Drawing on extensive interviews with farmers and organizers, Minkoff-Zern describes the social, economic, and political barriers immigrant farmers must overcome, from navigating USDA bureaucracy to racialized exclusion from opportunities. She discusses, among other topics, the history of discrimination against farm laborers in the United States; the invisibility of Latino/a farmers to government and universities; new farmers' sense of agrarian and racial identity; and the future of the agrarian class system.
Minkoff-Zern argues that immigrant farmers, with their knowledge and experience of alternative farming practices, are—despite a range of challenges—actively and substantially contributing to the movement for an ecological and sustainable food system. Scholars and food activists should take notice.
Are the rural poor excluded from supermarket channels in developing countries? We analyzed the farm-level impact of supermarket growth on Kenya’s horticulture sector, which is dominated by ...smallholders. The analysis reveals a threshold capital vector for entrance in the supermarket channel, which hinders small, rainfed farms. Most of the growers participating as direct suppliers to that channel are a new group of medium-sized, fast-growing commercial farms managed by well-educated farmers and focused on the domestic supermarket market. Their heavy reliance on hired workers benefits small farmers
via the labor market.
•Farmers’ willingness to pay for traits determines adoption of improved varieties.•Maize breeding efforts need to consider trait preferences of farmers.•Farmers are willing to pay more for drought ...tolerance than any other maize trait.•Trait-based promotion and marketing of improved maize varieties is recommended.
Maize plays a leading role in the food security of millions in southern Africa, yet it is highly vulnerable to the moisture stress brought about by the erratic rainfall patterns that characterize weather systems in the area. Developing and making drought-tolerant maize varieties available to farmers in the region has thus long been a key goal on the regional development agenda. Farm-level adoption of these varieties, however, depends on local perceptions of the value they add, along with willingness to pay (WTP) for it. Focusing on Zimbabwe, this research aimed at estimating the implicit prices farmers are willing to pay for drought tolerance in maize compared to other preferred traits. Using a choice experiment framework, we generated 12,600 observations from a random sample of 1,400 households in communal areas within 14 districts of Zimbabwe. Taste parameters and heterogeneities were estimated using the generalized multinomial logit model (G-MNL). The results reveal drought tolerance, grain yield, covered cob tip, cob size, and semi-flint texture to be the most preferred traits by farm households in Zimbabwe. The WTP estimates show that farmers are willing to pay a premium for drought tolerance equal to 2.56, 7, 3.2, and 5 times higher than for an additional ton of yield per acre, bigger cob size, larger grain size, and covered cob tip, respectively. We suggest designing and implementing innovative ways of promoting DT maize along with awareness-raising activities to enhance contextual understandings of drought and drought risk to speed adoption of new DT maize varieties by risk-prone farming communities. Given the high level of rural literacy and the high rate of adoption of improved maize, trait-based promotion and marketing of varieties constitutes the right strategy.
•Mobile phone ownership positively related to wealth, education, and electricity.•Mobile phone ownership has very little effect on spatial and temporal arbitrage.•Mobile phone increases the quantity ...of output supplied to the market.•Of the seven crops, farmers with mobile phone receive higher price only for wheat.•Lack of information source seems an important explanation for the weak impact.
This paper examines the impact of mobile phones on farmers’ marketing decisions and prices they receive based on household- and village-level information collected from rural Ethiopia. It explains the reason for the weak impact of mobile phones observed in this study as well as in previous studies in Africa. We argue that even though many farmers participate in information searching, the number of farmers who use mobile phones for information searching is very small. The reason for such low use of mobile phones for information searching seems to be lack of relevant information that can be accessed through mobile phones.
•Food safety has become a top concern for Chinese public and government.•Farmers’ cooperative is hypothesized to influence farmers’ production behaviors.•Cooperative significantly increases pig ...farmers’ safer production behaviors.•Effects vary with production scale, household characteristics, cooperative types.•PSM was used to address self-selection in cooperative participation.
This research studies the determinants of pig farmers’ participation in farmers’ cooperatives and the effects of farmers’ cooperatives on pig farmers’ behaviors in adopting safe production practices using data from a household survey of 540 cooperative farmers and 270 non-cooperative farmers from four main pig production provinces in China. The propensity score matching (PSM) method was adopted to deal with possible self-selection bias associated with farmers’ participation in farmers’ cooperatives due to observables, which is further supplemented by a sensitivity analysis to assess the degree to which the PSM results are robust to the presence of unobservables. The PSM results show that the cooperative membership has significant and positive influence on farmers’ propensity to adopt safe production practices and the effects are heterogeneous across a number of key cooperative, farm and household attributes. Specifically, the membership effects tend to be bigger for cooperatives led by Investor-owned firms (IOFs) and farms of small production scale. And the effects tend to be greater for households (1) of medium and high level of education, (2) of less than 10 years of pig production experience, (3) of no off-farm job experience, and (4) that are specialized in pig production. The sensitivity analysis further increases our confidence in the results for the feed use and the breed use, however, the results for vaccination, drug use and waste disposable are more sensitive to the influence of unobservables, therefore should be interpreted with caution.
In recent decades, the role of farmers' associations in developing countries has been increasing due to a number of projects promoted by local and international governmental and non-governmental ...institutions and organizations. This paper analyses the effectiveness of collective action in enhancing farmers' market performances in terms of production quantity, production quality and profit. Specifically, the study points out the role of associations in leveraging smallholder market performance by providing learning, production and network support. In-depth interviews with local sesame value chain actors and a structural equation model based on a survey involving 97 farmers in East Chad are implemented. The farmers involved are part of the EU Project “Peanut and sesame food chain support: from production to marketing” led by a governmental organization. Results show that collective action supportive activities can effectively leverage farmers' market performances. Some policy implications for research and development organizations are finally discussed.
•Training and learning support is the main trigger to enhance farmer performances.•Production inputs and facilities have positive effects on farmer performances.•An improvement of the relational network can support farmer performances.
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