The new farmer problem in five minutes

A few months ago, I presented research at a conference in a “lightning session” that forced me to condense an argument in a five minute talk. The presentation is based on a paper entitled New Entrant Farming Policy as Predatory Inclusion, written with Roz Corbett. The resulting summary is what I am calling “the new entrant problem in five minutes.”

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The new farmer problem in five minutes

Across many national policy contexts and non profit activity, there's a near consensus that there is a “new farming” problem. The idea is as farmers average age rises and more young people leave the countryside into urban centers, A a question of “who will do the work of farming?” comes to the fore.

In the US context this is often referred to as the beginning farmer or young farmer question with policy responses like the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. And in Europe, we hear goals of generational renewal, including new entrant farmer programs within the Common Agricultural Policy or main EU agricultural subsidy program.

The dominant logic of these programs is to figure out how to reproduce the agricultural system by filling holes in the labor force that is slowly withering away. The main goals are increasing the number of young or new farmers to stem the tide of rural depreciation.

But this response, of merely trying to reproduce or regenerate the agricultural system, when we know that the same system is a driver of such social and ecological harm—is an often overlooked contradiction.

In our research, we aim to push those working on new entrant policy to go beyond technical solutions that may help struggling new farmers get a toehold on the farming ladder.  We aim to ask if an uncritical rural regeneration program is doing more harm than good.

So when we analyze new entrant farmer policy programs we see a consistent agrarian vision that drives the shape of policy. This vision imagines farming as a family affair, where new farmers start small, but then use progressively efficient business models and hard grit to slowly increase in landholding security, to eventually sit at the top rung of a farming ladder, owning property and making a profit. The policy imagination here is built on these unspoken values of family, of hard work without complaint, and of economic productivism.

And when we compare this with new farmer experiences, we see an incredible disconnect, where new farmers are relying on significant self-exploitation in order to meet their vision to food production. This occurs as they search for land, contort themselves to maintain their land tenure, struggle to improve marginal lands that they've been able to access and through pouring in off-farm financial resources. And all the while the force of the agrarian ideal expressed in policy encourages them to expand and streamline, even if it is against their ideals.  

So what explains this?

We draw on the key insight of social reproduction theory which argues that capital production relies on a “free” subsidy of labor from the social sphere. It's farmers providing childcare while doing their agricultural labor. It's farmers relying on exploited family labor. It's farmers negotiating their identity to match an ideal of a certain landlord who might rent them a piece of the farm. We argue that it’s this slow ratcheting up of a reliance on labor in the social sphere that creates this feeling of time poverty, a feeling of overwhelm, and the real reason why agricultural labor feels like drudgery.  

These are the types of social labor that capital production must rely on in order to make new entrant farming a success story. The paradox here is that the more frayed the social realm becomes, the more it threatens to destroy the labor force that capital depends on … the very problem new entrant farming policy seeks to resolve.

Therefore, the dominant new entrant policy aims to merely reproduce the current model of agriculture. A policy that incentivizes producing new laborers into a land market and agricultural system that mostly chews and spits them out is a form of “predatory inclusion.”

This concept is introduced by Keeanga Yamatta Taylor's book Race for Profit.

It describes the way policies aimed at enrolling new groups of previously minoritized Black American home seekers ultimately undermined the ideal of more diversified homeownership. Inclusionary policies become predatory when they are based on the same exclusionary dynamics that drive the original need for policy intervention. For Black home seekers, being able to gain access to credit for homeownership facilitated a wave of debt burdens, when for example, black families were “funneled” to buy homes of substandard quality that demanded immediate and long-term repair.

Taylor argues that inclusion into US housing policy was only possible on exploitative terms. Taylor writes;

“When public policies are guided by the objectives of private enterprise, they are clinched in a dance of conflict.”

New entrant policy could be tremendously powerful and transformative. But its not. The way forward is not just to reproduce the food system, tethered to a stubborn agrarian vision, but to actually create policy that incentivizes different ways of farming and different labor relations. Our paper suggests designing policy around a system that would support the labor in the social sphere and make that dignified. Policy should draw upon the strengths of social labor rather than relying on its exploitation. Until then, new entrant policy should be seen as a force that is maintaining the status quo and should be contested. If we don’t challenge this seemingly consensus goal of making new farmers, new entrant policy will continue to be predatory on many of the new farmers whose labor we will depend on to transform the food system.