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

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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.