Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Development of Farm Management Expertise in New Farming Communities

农业继续为美国各地提供生计基础。然而，开办新农场和维护农场的成本越来越高，也越来越复杂，这要求农民在当地和全球市场、金融机构、不断变化的环境以及大量的技术创新中摸索。新手农民如何理解这些复杂性？在日益全球化的背景下，他们有什么资源可以学习如何成功地驾驭农业景观？不同的参与者如何利用他们获得的信息做出影响其努力可持续性的经济和环境决策？该项目培养了一名科学文化人类学研究生，并阐明了这些问题，以全面了解南佛罗里达州新移民农民的农业创业精神。具体而言，该研究询问了与农民家庭社区的联系如何促进或阻碍新的社会、生态和制度环境的导航，适应新的农业实践和技术，以及由此延伸，对他们做出的经济和环境决策的影响。研究将在南佛罗里达农业地区经营小农场的移民中进行，在那里，农业是许多新移民的主要生计。调查人员将结合民族志和定量方法，从农民和农业专家那里收集数据，地点包括农场、市场、会议、培训和非正式聚会。了解移民农民使用的跨国资源将提高我们对知识如何在境内和跨境流动的理论理解，从而有助于推广机构、外联团体和政策制定者在解决农业和当地粮食系统中不断变化的制约因素时做出有计划的努力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Farming continues to provide the basis of livelihoods across the United States. Starting new farms and maintaining them has become increasingly costly and complex, however, requiring farmers to navigate local and global markets, financial institutions, changing environments, and a profusion of technological innovations. How do novice farmers make sense of these complexities? What resources are available to them to learn to successfully navigate farming landscapes in an increasingly global context? How do different actors use the information they acquire to make economic and environmental decisions that affect the sustainability of their efforts? This project trains a graduate student in scientific cultural anthropology and sheds light on these issues to provide a holistic understanding of farming entrepreneurship among novice immigrant farmers in South Florida.Specifically, the research queries how ties to farmers' home communities facilitate or hinder navigation of new social, ecological, and institutional environments, adaptation to new farming practices and technologies, and, by extension, impacts on the economic and environmental decisions they make. Research will be conducted among immigrants who operate small farms in agricultural areas of South Florida where farming is central to livelihoods for many new immigrants. Using a combination of ethnographic and quantitative methodologies, investigators will collect data from farmers and agricultural experts at a variety of sites including farms, markets, meetings, trainings, and informal gatherings. Understanding the transnational resources immigrant farmers use will improve our theoretical understanding of how knowledge moves within and across borders, in turn contributing to programmatic efforts of extension agents, outreach groups, and policy-makers as they address evolving constraints in agriculture and local food systems.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.