Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring on-farm innovation, environmental change, and rural livelihoods in the US hop industry

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Agricultural technological development in North America has been largely directed by large companies controlling innovations in machinery, plant genetics, and agrichemicals. However, hop growing is one agricultural industry that confounds this model. Hops are an herb used in beer-making applications and many of the large Yakima Valley hop growers have invested both in local breeding programs and on-farm infrastructure innovations. The goal of this project is to understand the conditions under which some farmers research and develop their own agricultural technologies while others rely on outside research and to examine the innovations yielded by these diverging approaches to agricultural technologies. Hop farming in the United States offers a natural experiment to understand these differences. This project collects data from hop farmers through on-farm visits and in-depth interviews with farm owners and operators to better understand the social and applied scientific worlds of hop growing in the Northwestern and Midwestern United States. Doing so has the potential to help enhance understanding of how including farmers as research contributors may yield a more vibrant and sustainable agricultural and environmental future for farming in the United States.Drawing on qualitative data collected through on-site interviews and on-farm participant observation, this project responds to two core research questions: (1) How do environmental and market pressures impact decisions about technologies used on the hop farm? (2) What comparative lessons do hop producers have for environmental and technical considerations in other agri-food regimes? Responding to these questions in the context of hop farmers’ novel agricultural practices yields insights into broad societal concerns about labor, culture, and environment at the human-technology frontier. This is especially evident when studying agricultural practices where genetic and mechanical technological innovation has widely been employed to the detriment of farmer profits and the social health of farming communities. The unique position of hop farmers as on-farm innovators yields insights for alternative futures for agricultural technologies in cognate industries. This project contributes to research discourses in both STS and environmental sociology by critically considering where expert agricultural scientific knowledge is produced and maintained, and by questioning who may be considered an expert in agricultural science, particularly plant science. The implications of these queries are important for science-based policy in agricultural and environmental sectors if such policies are to be both inclusive as well as evidence-based. This original research provides novel insights into potential environmental alternatives to conventional models for other agricultures of scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.