Agricultural landscapes and producers face the complex challenge of producing food while preserving and improving environmental health. For some producers, alternative practices such as regenerative agriculture offer opportunities to meet environmental, economic, and social goals. Often, studies following these producers focus on the period of practice adoption, which limits our understanding of landscape-human relationships in these systems to an early and unsettled stage. In this study, we revisit Australian livestock producers and landscapes fifteen years after initial interviews to observe longitudinal relational “co-becomings.” We use arts-based methods of photo-based interviews, repeat photography, and poetic analysis using I-Poems to capture these co-becomings through the eyes and words of the participants. Our findings demonstrate patterns of long-term strengthening of relational trust and healing between grazier and landscape, which we present in paired photography and poetry. These graziers’ stories provide insight into the relationships between graziers and landscapes in the years post-adoption, challenging linear and short-term narratives of practice persistence in the alternative agriculture space. The findings extend our understanding of grazier experiences with regenerative practices beyond the initial transition period. Through our innovative use of arts-based methods, we also explore new ways of knowing and communicating the human-landscape experience.
The socio-biodiversity economy is widely regarded as an alternative agrarian pathway to agro-extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon, capable of reconciling conservation, social inclusion, and income generation. Recent research challenges this promise. Agro-extractivist dynamics have been documented in socio-biodiversity markets, while the farming households that sustain this economy remain largely overlooked, and often idealized. This study examines the livelihood configurations and agrarian trajectories of two groups of cocoa farmers in the Transamazon region—one organic, one conventional—affiliated with two regional cooperatives. It adopts a mixed-method design that extends the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach beyond its traditional focus on material assets by integrating values as a key dimension of livelihood strategies. Data were gathered between March and September 2024 through structured questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observations. Findings show historically produced asset asymmetries between the two groups, alongside a shared condition as petty commodity producers. Divergent agrarian trajectories emerge not only from material conditions but also from the interplay between assets and the values that guide how farmers mobilize their resources. Conventional farmers pursue emancipation from commodity dependence through economic diversification and market upgrading, while their cooperative channels individual pragmatism toward place-based value aggregation. Organic farmers secure their livelihoods through agroecological farming, but their cooperative operates from a weaker position that hinders the translation of these values into economic practice. Both these trajectories reveal the entanglement of agro-extractivist and socio-biodiversity dynamics within the same households, a condition this study terms structural hybridization. More broadly, the study calls for greater analytical attention to the agrarian dynamics unfolding among the smallholders who sustain the socio-biodiversity economy.
In 2024 registration of all captive bird flocks became mandatory in Great Britain to improve disease surveillance at a time of increasing avian influenza outbreaks. However, little is known about how health and welfare practices are shaped by the diversity of relationships that characterise UK backyard birdkeeping. We use this moment of change to (1) examine the relationships between backyard keepers, their birds, and the poultry industry, and, (2) explore how registration legislation is responded to by backyard keepers. We use a netnographic approach, investigating activity on four public Facebook pages, and draw on the ‘animal turn’ in geography to guide interpretation of the findings. Most keepers valued their birds as companions, and as embodying aesthetic qualities. A minority of keepers kept birds for food production. Keepers of companion birds were more concerned about registration and the potential for birds to be classified as farmed animals than those who valued birds for their (re)productive roles. Social media acted as a tool to build relationships with other keepers and share health and welfare advice. The lack of consensus around birds’ roles contributed to the diverse reactions to registration and distrust in public authorities was implicated in low uptake of flock registration. Our findings suggest that registration legislation does not fully consider the diversity of backyard keepers’ relationships with their birds, each other, and the poultry industry. We suggest that for registration to be widely accepted more needs to be done to acknowledge different ways of living with birds.
Flower production is Ecuador’s third-largest industrial sector, but its rapid expansion has entailed precarious employment, low wages, extended working hours, and intensive pesticide use. Fairtrade certification seeks to mitigate these problems through labour protections, environmental safeguards, and mechanisms for formalisation. However, in the floriculture sector the scheme provides no standard for smallholder producers, who constitute a significant share of production in the Ecuadorian highlands. Drawing on fieldwork in the Sierra region, including visits to certified and non-certified farms and interviews with managers, workers, and smallholders, this study shows that the initiative has delivered notable improvements in labour conditions, occupational safety, and traceability on large plantations able to comply with hired-labour requirements. Yet these gains coexist with exclusions. The absence of a framework tailored to small-scale producers, combined with limited attention to royalty arrangements that disproportionately burden smaller farms, prevents many growers from accessing certification despite facing similar labour, environmental, and market risks. As a result, the standard reinforces an uneven governance landscape in which benefits accrue primarily to larger, better-capitalised enterprises. The findings highlight the limited capacity of Fairtrade certification to address sectoral inequalities in the flower sector and suggest the need for stronger coordination between private standards and national regulation to overcome the structural barriers constraining smallholder participation in global floriculture value chains.
Researchers have addressed agroenvironmental challenges by analyzing changes in agroecosystem management practices and looking closely at the mindset of humans in their interactions with nonhumans. Diverse modes of human/nonhuman interactions are at play in agroecological systems. Yet these changes lack sufficient theoretical grounding and would require conceptual clarification and further in-depth analysis. Here we propose an approach to specify these interactions, while outlining the agronomic analytical frameworks that currently do not fully capture the multitude of different human/nonhuman interaction modalities. We also present an analytical grounding for the different ways of approaching non-human agency. Finally, our combined agronomy-anthropology approach offers four possible interaction stances between humans and nonhumans: doing, getting something done, doing with and letting do, and here we address the following question: what does each stance technically and ontologically entail? We illustrate these stances relative to different vineyard weed management strategies so as to compare examples with the same agronomic target outcome.
Definitions and frameworks for governing food systems point to the highly complex nature of holistically governing food-related activities from production through to consumption, and from local to global scales. Beyond this, there remains a shortage of insights into the practical dimensions of implementing holistic food system governance in practice. This study provides such an on-the-ground perspective, employing ethnographic methods to explore food governance implementation efforts by public and private actors and food practitioners in a case study in Sweden. The study draws on the conceptual lens of resilience to explore these efforts, placing focus on the way 1) food practitioners enact resilience capacities while filtering (i.e. persisting with, adapting, transforming) their practices during governance change processes, and 2) public and private actors govern for resilience by facilitating practitioner capacities to work with change. Insights drawn from the study illustrate the value of bringing together theory and concepts from social-ecological resilience and a practice perspective to study change for integrated food system governance. In particular, a focus on capacities for resilience enacted in practice highlights the importance of paying attention to interacting social, ecological and material conditions in considering potential pathways for food system governance implementation.
It is increasingly being recognised that tackling the problems of the current food system requires active involvement of ordinary citizens. Such engagement has also been linked to the emerging concept of food citizenship, entailing greater mobilisation on the part of citizens, although how this is observed varies in the literature. This scoping review mapped a range of activities associated with food citizenship and the definitions used in conjunction with them. This was done by examining peer-reviewed published articles and theses making direct reference to the operationalisation of food citizenship in 5 databases (n = 420). The analysis of the final sample of 45 studies suggested that recurring elements – including behaviours (such as participation in alternative food practices and agency in decision-making), a sense of community and increased knowledge or awareness – are often used in connection with the operationalisation of food citizenship. It additionally highlights that despite a limited number of studies available on the how food citizenship is being empirically captured, it cannot be measured through attitudes/values alone and exclude behaviours or vice-versa – each reinforces the other. Finally, nuances are apparent in the way food citizenship is being observed and defined, with measurements of participation in collective decision-making around food lagging behind references to this activity in definitions of food citizenship.
In times of tumultuous contest over the value of agriculture and food systems, care and repair in bureaucratic evaluation processes are particularly important. Infrastructure to support repair and care can be built and maintained to respond substantively to what has been injurious for people in their interactions with agriculture and food systems. Sharing stories for the purpose of evaluating agri-food maintenance and improvement projects can nourish agriculture and food systems, and can demonstrate the role of care and repair in nourishing agri-food systems. Two brief case stories about how people evaluate and negotiate values show how explicit attention to power dynamics, especially around the terms by which success is determined – for example, beyond a reductive focus on crop yields, and with attention to dynamics of dispossession and disenfranchisement in agriculture. They also show how relationally negotiated evaluation practices can help us understand agri-food issues with rigor and across potentially conflicting perspectives. This use of participatory evaluation frameworks in practical narration can help keep what’s meaningful included in the conversation, and in the actions and infrastructure we support to maintain and improve food systems.
This paper contextualises regenerative agriculture (RA) in Switzerland and Austria through qualitative interviews with farmers in order to explore how Humusaufbau (soil organic matter increase) acts as a boundary object, unifying diverse discourses and practices. We show that in this context, RA by centring on Humusaufbau actively addresses the challenges posed by the climate crisis to agriculture while simultaneously providing farmers with accessible solutions that enhance their sense of self-efficacy. The farmers interviewed articulate strong expectations of Humusaufbau regarding climate adaptation and mitigation potentials at the farm level. Regenerative farmers individually combine practices out of a larger set of regenerative farming practices (RFPs), with the goal of facilitating Humusaufbau. Many of these RFPs stem from other sustainable farming approaches. RA thereby challenges prior existing distinctions between established sustainable farming approaches through the selective recombination of their practices. Our analysis identifies three distinct discourses farmers use to justify RFPs: organic, technical, and alternative RA. These discourses converge around Humusaufbau from different approaches, bridging organic and conventional farmers. We find that the direct transformative potential of RA in Switzerland and Austria is constrained across all three discourses by a focus on farm-level solutions, with limited engagement with broader social or systemic change. However, the unifying dimension of Humusaufbau and the role it plays in integrating organic and non-organic farmers in a community offering an alternative discourse to mainstream conventional farming, might lay the ground for future transformation.
This article explores younger farmers’ perspectives on how generational differences in values, beliefs and attitudes impact wellbeing and working relationships in agricultural settings. Generational theory contends that these differences are shaped by the sociocultural and historical contexts in which each generation has been raised. This research is situated within the New Zealand farming context and draws on 19 semi-structured interviews with young farmers and agricultural industry representatives. Informed by generational theory, we found that young farmers experience a generational divide between older and younger farmers’ values, beliefs and attitudes towards mental health and wellbeing, work ethic, relationships and roles on farm. While these generational differences are reflected in what the young farmers valued and prioritised, we discovered continuity in farming culture through prevailing ideas and attitudes passed through generations via intergenerational cultural transmission. This cultural transmission of predominantly stoic farmer attitudes contrasted with the generational beliefs of younger farmers. It resulted in perpetuating actions, behaviours and practices that did not align with their beliefs which affected their coping strategies and willingness to seek help in challenging times. The findings provide learnings and opportunities for better addressing mental health stigma in farming and improving intergenerational communication in agricultural workplace settings. Furthermore, the findings expand the literature on generational differences in farming through a focus on day to day working relationships on farm from the perspectives of young farmers, including those working on non-family members’ farms.
Sustainability policies in U.S. agriculture increasingly employ various incentives—such as financial payments, market signals, technical assistance, and recognition systems—to motivate farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices, though their effectiveness varies widely. This paper argues that incentives, broadly defined, cannot be fully understood without considering the social and institutional structures that give them meaning. Through qualitative interviews, survey data, program documents (including meeting notes with administrators), and participant observation from the Colorado Soil Health Program, the study examines how different motivators are perceived and activated within farming communities. The paper introduces the concept of “recognition infrastructures” to describe the social, material, and organizational elements that give meaning to incentives. The analysis explains why incentives connected to well-established recognition infrastructures—such as financial payments integrated into familiar farm accounting and market practices—are easier for farmers to understand and more likely to influence their decisions. Conversely, symbolic incentives aimed at publicly acknowledging soil stewardship operate within more uncertain social infrastructures, as exemplified by farmers who are unsure whether symbols such as ratings or program signage carry significance among peers or in markets. Sometimes, making these incentives more visible even posed social risks. The results indicate that symbolic incentives circulate within uneven spaces where existing hierarchies of trust, reputation, and institutional ties determine who benefits from recognition. Overall, the paper suggests that lasting change depends not only on creating effective incentives but also on developing recognition infrastructures that help these incentives generate enduring social value.
Permaculture, originating in 1970s Australia, is an agroecological design system and movement founded on specific ethics and principles. It has since expanded globally, promoting agricultural systems that emulate natural processes and the communities that tend them. As we approach its 50th anniversary, we contend that permaculture provides a robust framework for global agroecological initiatives. However, permaculture is not without its critics. It has been argued that permaculture is largely influenced by Global North perspectives and inadvertently perpetuates obstacles to inclusivity, gender diversity, minority representation, and acknowledgment of traditional knowledge. Strategies to address these challenges are identified by re-examining permaculture’s foundational ethics and principles. Drawing on Global South perspectives, decolonising approaches, and holistic ecological frameworks, the paper illustrates the utility of southern theory for agroecological research to advance the essential North–South knowledge dialogue in agroecology scholarship.
Nutrition education often assumes a reductionist stance that overlooks structural inequity and marginalizes traditional food practices and knowledge. In response, critical food systems education (CFSE) seeks to form subjects who transform food systems. This article contributes to critical food systems education through an empirical study using participatory, arts-based research with rural secondary school students in Chiapas, Mexico. Employing photovoice as the central method, we explore youth narratives of food systems change, recognizing youth as active members of their communities who shape food systems materially and epistemologically. Youth expressed concern over the rise in diet-related disease and the decline in food traditions, situating these issues in broader transformations of rural life. Their narratives reveal how young people emotionally experience these changes while negotiating tensions between public health messaging, family food traditions, and the realities of everyday life. Across their reflections, care was a call to action that linked people, community, and environment in a relational understanding of health. These narratives point to the resilience of traditional foodways through affective connections to family and place. By centering care for family, land, and community, CFSE may contribute to community food sovereignty. The recent Nueva Escuela Mexicana curricular reforms create opportunities for creative, participatory approaches like photovoice to strengthen relationships between schools and communities and foster critical reflection.
Food citizenship (FC) offers a critical lens for reimagining food systems and advancing more sustainable, democratic forms of governance. Despite its normative appeal, FC remains conceptually underdeveloped and empirically untested. This study develops and validates a conceptual framework for understanding the psychological dimensions of food citizenship and operationalises it using standard psychometric procedures. We hypothesised that a sense of responsibility, personal values, food system-related knowledge, and food citizenship behaviours constitute four interrelated facets of FC multidimensional construct. Through an expert review study, lay cognitive interviews, and an online survey (N = 400), we identified four empirically distinct yet connected dimensions: citizen responsibilities, behaviours directed toward food system change, behaviours to reduce food waste, and a person valuing the sustainable food system. Each dimension captures a specific aspect of how individuals engage with food citizenship across contexts. By operationalising food citizenship as a measurable construct, this study advances understanding of its psychological foundations and highlights its policy relevance as both an individual characteristic and a mechanism for promoting food system change. It offers a means to assess public engagement with food systems, allowing policymakers to track shifts over time and across demographic contexts, and to inform the development of policy interventions.
The global food system faces intersecting challenges that have prompted calls for transformation. Central to this transformation is the management of trade-offs when balancing competing goals such as health, environmental sustainability, and equity. This qualitative study explores how food system actors navigate these trade-offs while working to shift local food systems in a positive direction. From January to April 2024, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 food system actors in U.S. and Canadian cities who had knowledge of food system transitions. Interviews were transcribed, iteratively coded, and thematically analyzed. While participants reported alignment between the various goals of food system transformation, conflicts frequently emerged. In cases where these conflicts could not be resolved, participants had to engage in trade-offs. Cost, acceptability, and food security emerged as dominant considerations in trade-offs, often constraining efforts to promote a more healthful, environmentally sustainable, and equitable food system. While grappling with these trade-offs, participants remained optimistic that food system reform was possible, suggesting that transformations are mostly hindered by narrowly framed objectives and structural features of the food system that make it difficult to enact or maintain transformative policies that challenge the status quo. We propose that transformation in the food system can be more readily achieved by reframing ineliminable trade-offs as an opportunity to balance the objectives of transformations more meaningfully.
