Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Changing the Way America Farms
Knowledge and Community in the Sustainable Agriculture Movement
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/3714.html
By Neva Hassanein

“Readable, sympathetic, but objective, the study emphasizes positive
aspects of sustainability without fully addressing its role in contemporary
agriculture. An excellent bibliography focusing on the social rather than
the technical aspects of sustainable agriculture complements the history of
the movement.”—Choice.

"A strong contribution to the available literature on cooperative farmer
groups . . . The author describes with eloquence the challenges faced by
farmers who do not subscribe to the current conventional industrial
agriculture paradigm and their difficulty in finding recommendations for
improving their systems.”—Charles A. Francis, coeditor of Crop
Improvement for Sustainable Agriculture.

“Those into organic gardening will be thrilled with the positive news
Changing the Way America Farms…has to offer…. [Hassanein] documents how
the alternative farmers share their knowledge and experiences. In the
process, they’ve replaced the traditional hierarchy with a more
democratic one.”--Suite101.com

Changing the Way America Farms traces the manner in which alternative
farmers have developed and exchanged their own personal, local knowledge as
a basis for moving toward an agricultural system that is ecologically
sound, economically viable, and socially just. Neva Hassanein studies the
patterns of local and regional networks in Wisconsin that sprang up to
disseminate new and viable agricultural methods. She argues that these
networks have in many ways become the foundation of the sustainable
agriculture movement.

Hassanein focuses on two organizations: the Ocooch Grazers Network, a group
of dairy farmers who practice intensive rotational grazing, and the
Wisconsin Women’s Sustainable Farming Network. The different lived
experiences of particular members in each group shaped the ways local
knowledge was generated and exchanged.

Hassanein considers the broader implications of this kind of local-level,
collective activity centered around the creation and exchange of
agricultural knowledge. In rejecting the all-knowing expertise
characteristic of scientific reports and extension services, network
members instead created heterogeneous systems based on the exchange of
information among a community of farming practitioners. These informal
networks do not completely reject agricultural science, but they do suggest
ways of democratizing knowledge production for sustainable agriculture.

Neva Hassanein has a doctorate in environmental studies and is currently
teaching in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana.