The exploitative side of beginning farmer policy

New research on going beyond the technical framing of the new entrant farmer "problem"

The untapped labor and motivations of young people who want to farm could be transformative—it could be the key to a number of problems in the food system. Are industrial farmers causing social and environmental harm? Replace them slowly and justly with a new generation of ecologically minded landworkers. Agroecological techniques demand more labor? Satisfy that demand with a new wave of people wanting to work dignified and meaningful jobs.

But if we don’t create an ambitious new entrant policy that also addresses the reasons the food system is in trouble, then we are inviting a potential transformative force to crash and burn. Worse, we may be reproducing the very system new entrant policy aims to solve. I wrote an old post summarizing this problem here:

Years later, working with farmer/scholar Roz Corbett, we’ve published a new paper* in Agriculture in Human Values on this theme. If you like reading reading academic articles, it is open access and you can just read the whole thing:

Calo, Adam, and Rosalind Corbett. 2024. New entrant farming policy as predatory inclusion: (Re)production of the farm through generational renewal policy programs in Scotland. Agriculture and Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10557-4.

I’ve always had a critical view towards the “beginning farmer” theory of change. Farmers graduate from training programs that build up their horticultural and collaborative skills, but it never seemed to translate a system based on high land markets, productivist logics, and market competition.

My reaction to the uncritical goal of creating new farmers is to ask two follow-up questions:

What happened to the old farmers?

What should we be creating new farmers for?

These questions signify that for new entrant farmer policy to be meaningful it ought to be about more than mere replacement of farmers.

It must go beyond renewal and 1) address the reasons why farmers have been steadily exiting the sector for decades and 2) tip the scales towards the form of agriculture that is needed for social and ecological flourishing. Everywhere I looked, these two aspects of new farmer policy were absent. The danger here is creating incentives to push people into farming into the same conditions that have chewed up and spit out their predecessors. The result is an appearance of farmers not being able to hack it, but actually there is a deep policy failure underwriting these dynamics.

This is not just a problem of policy coherence. This is an exploitative relationship between policy and labor. New farmers get funneled into marginal lands and precarious situations all the while being told that if they apply the right business mindset they will slowly climb “the farming ladder” into a position of security and profitability.

In the paper, we draw on a key concept from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s work in Race for Profit. There, Taylor develops the concept of predatory inclusion to describe how US housing policy was structured in such a way that when it claimed to give Black home seekers access to mortgages and advice, it only deepened housing insecurity. Home seekers where funneled into properties of the lowest quality or in need of extensive renovations. Rather than provide security through inclusive housing policies, a policy with implicit racism introduced more precarity than before.

Taylor concludes that inclusion into the federal housing programs was only possible on “exploitative terms.” The concept of predatory inclusion thus describes a policy effort that invites outsiders into the supposed benefits that they have been previously excluded, but where short term access measures are attached to long term detriments. Here, we liken the way new entrant policy invites newcomers into farming without attending to the reasons that they may fail as predatory.

Social reproduction of the farmer

What’s going on here? One way of explaining this perverse outcome is through the lens of social reproduction. In our research, we document how new farmers must practice considerable social labor (negotiating with a landlord, improving marginal lands, relying on family labor) in order to do the work of food production. The capitalist system, in general, relies on this “free” labor as a form of subsidy. Capital also seeks to exploit this social sphere of labor in order to maintain the rate of profit. The classic example is uncompensated care labor that must be performed in order to ready a workforce for production. Capitalist production cannot exist without this labor while it paradoxically threatens its extinction.

And so while new entrant policies promote agrarianist values and virtues like the nuclear family, entrepreneurism and self sufficiency, it is implicitly counting on these farmers to draw from an increasingly hollowed out reserve of social resources. The result is a conflict, where new entrant capacities are pressured to conform to agrarian ideals embedded in policy design. This conflict funnels new entrants into a farming system reliant on exploited social labor. Such an incentive to maintain the flow of “free” labor from the social sphere to subsidize the production sphere is a core insight of social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya and Vogel 2017).

Beyond new entrants as a technical problem

We suggest that policy makers and researchers worried about trying to bring new entrants into agriculture should attend to the potential for predatory inclusion. It is not enough to apolitically call for more bodies into farming. Broad policy goals like “generational renewal” obscure how formal support mechanisms discipline social labor in service of agricultural production. The herculean efforts that new entrants take on to prepare the land for agricultural production may prop up the renewal of farming to some extent. Yet, this comes at great reliance on a fraying labor reserve in the social sphere, like dependence on family members with a tractor to lend, constant massaging of relations with landlords, or working to put a child to sleep in order to do other farm work. As Katz (2001, p. 710) warns, when “social reproduction gets unhinged from production,” continued reliance on social labor threatens the reproduction of agriculture, the very problem targeted by the stated aims of new entrant policy.

Policy interventions to re-populate the farming sector have great potential to align with broader food system transformation ambitions. This site of intervention must be a target for more brave and creative visions of what we are creating a new generation of farmers for. A new entrant policy that lifts up and strengthens the social sphere is one way to begin the process of policy reframing. Unfortunately, it seems like a stubborn agrarianism is still the driving force of farming today.

*some of the wording of the blog has been adapted from the published article.