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

农业继续为全美人民提供生计基础。然而，开办和维护新农场的成本和复杂性越来越高，这要求农民适应当地和全球市场、金融机构、不断变化的环境和大量的技术创新。新手农民是如何理解这些复杂性的呢？他们可以利用什么资源来学习在日益全球化的背景下成功地驾驭农业景观？不同的行为者如何利用他们获得的信息来作出影响其努力可持续性的经济和环境决策？该项目培训一名科学文化人类学研究生，并阐明这些问题，以全面了解南佛罗里达州新手移民农民的农业创业。具体地说，该研究质疑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，适应新的耕作做法和技术，以及由此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州农业区经营小农场的移民中进行，那里的农业是许多新移民生计的核心。使用人种学和定量相结合的方法，调查人员将从农场、市场、会议、培训和非正式聚会等不同地点的农民和农业专家那里收集数据。了解移民农民使用的跨国资源将提高我们对知识如何在国内和跨境流动的理论理解，进而有助于推广代理、外展团体和政策制定者在解决农业和当地食品系统不断变化的制约因素时的计划努力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.