Agriculture and Human Values 19: 99–106, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Creating space for sustainable food systems: Lessons from the field Gail Feenstra UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program, University of California, Davis, California, USA
Accepted in revised form November 4, 2001
Abstract. In response to growing trends in the current food system toward global integration, economic consolidation, and environmental degradation, communities have initiated alternative, more sustainable food and agricultural systems. Lessons may now be learned about the development and maintenance of local, sustainable food systems projects – those that attempt to integrate the environmental, economic, and social health of their food systems in particular places. Four kinds of space need to be created and protected – social space, political space, intellectual space, and economic space. Three important themes emerge from these community spaces: public participation, new partnerships, and a commitment to social, economic, and environmental justice principles. Key words: Community food security, Democratic participation, Food policy, Local food systems, Public scholarship, Sustainable agriculture, Sustainable food systems Gail Feenstra is the food systems analyst at the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP). She coordinates SAREP’s Community Development and Public Policy grants program and does outreach and education to academic and community-based groups to build their capacity and leadership skills in building sustainable community food systems.
Introduction Over the last several decades, researchers, and practitioners associated with the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and others have articulated the complex nature of the food system – its local and global dimensions, the opportunities and challenges of democratic participation, the economic and community development possibilities, the policy dimensions, the nutrition and community food security aspects, and, of course, the enjoyment that comes from sharing locally grown, sustainably produced, and lovingly and tastefully prepared food. This article will integrate these dimensions into a practical understanding of what it takes to create and sustain successful, sustainable food systems. This perspective comes from observing demonstrations of community food systems supported by the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) throughout California and from working with community members to try to understand how these systems function. It includes working with practitioners on the applied solutions to food system problems, the opportunities for change, and the implementation strategies communities are experimenting with. So, first, this article will share insights from the experi-
ences of food systems practitioners we have worked with for the past decade. Second, sustainable food systems research and practice has already benefited from the many contributions and theoretical analyses from the fields of nutrition, sociology, philosophy, community development, education, economics, and the agricultural sciences. My hope is that we will continue to find ways of integrating the theoretical work with the applied and the pragmatic. This article will suggest some additional possibilities for integration that have surfaced from some of our recent work at SAREP. And finally, in order to talk about these first two – insights and integration – a third thing is needed – common language. It is essential that food systems researchers and practioners attempt to use a common, understandable language in which to talk about food systems work – between academics of different disciplines and between researchers, practitioners, and community residents. In this article, I will attempt to use simple, jargon-free language in sharing the ideas and lessons from our compatriots in the field. Now, I will explore the applied side of sustainable community food systems. It is the gritty, unpredictable, in some ways frustrating, but ultimately, exciting and entirely satisfying dimension of our work. The
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article will not provide a thorough analysis of the current food system as a rationale for these food systems projects. Suffice it to say that the dominant food and agricultural system in which we all live, work, and eat, produces the bulk of our food and fiber in an incredibly efficient manner by at least one criterion of efficiency. It is highly energy and capital-intensive, globally integrated, and increasingly economically consolidated. Unfortunately, it has also resulted in environmental degradation and economic disaster for scores of small family farmers, community processors, and other local businesses tied to food and fiber production, and community residents who do not have access to an adequate, healthful food supply. And, it has led to the disintegration of the social and spiritual fabric – critical connections – that are part of a community’s food system. People have become disconnected from the sources of their sustenance – the land, the people who grow and harvest their food and fiber, and from the taste and quality of the food itself. They have become passive recipients in a rather homogenous system of nutrient distribution in which real food is almost considered a luxury – for upper and middleclass eaters. For these and other reasons, the longterm sustainability of the current food system is in question. I will start then with the assumption that many of these characteristics have registered as concerns and have motivated communities throughout North America and other parts of the globe, to consider alternative, more sustainable food and fiber systems. These alternative systems may be characterized as more environmentally sound, more economically viable for a larger percentage of community members, and more socially, culturally, and spiritually healthful. They tend to be more decentralized, and invite the democratic participation of community residents in their food systems. They encourage more direct and authentic connections between all parties in the food system, particularly between farmers and those who enjoy the fruits of their labor – consumers or eaters. They attempt to recognize, respect, and more adequately compensate the laborers we often take for granted – farmworkers, food service workers, and laborers in food processing facilities, for example. And they tend to be place-based, drawing on the unique attributes of a particular bioregion and its population to define and support themselves. These sustainable community food systems are also few in number, unevenly distributed, often small – generally involving less than the majority of a community; they are precarious and many fail to sustain themselves over time. If we are looking to these community food systems initiatives as solutions to the current unsustainable state of affairs in the dominant food system,
one might wonder whether we can really depend on them. Are they really making a difference? The answer from my perspective is . . . yes, although perhaps not in the ways we might have expected. I will begin at the point at which alternative, sustainable food system activities are already in existence. Specifically, I will discuss what we are learning about the development and maintenance of local, sustainable food systems projects – those that attempt to integrate the environmental, economic, and social health of their food systems in particular places. What have these initiatives actually been able to accomplish? What elements account for their successes or lack thereof? Why do some flourish and others wither? What allows some to build their capacities over time and others to stagnate? How do these initiatives catalyze active citizenship and sustain it over time? What are, or could be, the roles of researchers, practitioners, and community organizers in this ebb and flow of food system activity? How might we better integrate researchers’ and practitioners’ needs and activities? Although I do not have all the answers to these questions, I do have some insights about what it takes for sustainable community food systems to sustain themselves and the challenges and opportunities facing those of us in universities who seek to work with them. Defining a sustainable community food system For the last decade or so, we at SAREP, have funded, supported and provided guidance to sustainable community food systems projects throughout California with a competitive grants program, and elsewhere through staff research, technical assistance, and outreach (see www.sarep.ucdavis.edu). These are the concrete projects that are attempting to respond to changes in the global economy and food system in unconventional ways, for the most part. SAREP’s request for proposals defines a community food system as: “A collaborative effort to build more locally based, selfreliant food economies – one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place.” Its goals include: • • • •
improved access by all community members to an adequate, nutritious diet; a stable base of family farms that use more sustainable production practices; marketing and processing practices that create more direct links between farmers and consumers; food and agriculture-related businesses that create jobs and recirculate financial capital;
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improved working and living conditions for farm and other food system labor, and food and agriculture policies that promote local food production, processing, and consumption.
In the shorter term, our work at SAREP continues to revolve around creating more choices or alternatives for communities to engage in these issues. We believe that part of the solution involves citizens in particular places putting their creative energies together to come up with their own solutions. And what kinds of solutions have they been? They are, as Tom Lyson (1999) says, “civic agriculture” at its best – cooperative agricultural marketing programs that educate consumers about eating regionally and seasonally while building the supply of locally produced and processed foods; school districts that purchase foods from local farms using sustainable farming practices and teach children about eating fresh, local foods, composting, and recycling through school meals and gardening; entrepreneurial community gardens or CSAs (community supported agriculture projects) that teach youth about growing and marketing foods to low-income communities; a CSA community farm run by community members and sustainable ag students at a local university; and local food policy councils that link community food security with local, sustainable farming systems. An opportunity to reflect: community food systems and public scholarship For the first five to seven years or so at SAREP, we happily funded projects and promoted their benefits and successes, small as they sometimes were. We launched many and let them go, keeping in touch loosely; in a few cases, more regularly. But we never had an opportunity to really reflect on or document what impacts they were having (or not) until about a year ago. At that time, SAREP was invited, along with my colleague David Campbell,1 community studies extension specialist and director of the California Communities Program at UC Davis, to be part of a national team of researchers led by Scott Peters at Cornell University, to look at the role of “public scholarship” at land grant institutions, specifically in the arena of food systems research and practice. We were asked, along with seven other groups, to prepare a case study of a university–community partnership that demonstrated public scholarship at work. The entire group is still in the process of defining “public scholarship” and all its implications, but for now I’ll use one definition that came out of our meeting last summer: “Public scholarship is intellectual activity that organizes and/or supports groups of active citizens as they reflect on
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experience and reason collectively.” We decided to use this invitation from Scott as an opportunity to explore the whole suite of community food systems projects SAREP had funded and worked with over the last decade. Focusing on these community food systems initiatives allows us to see broader themes or patterns and develop insights based on a number of projects. At the same time, because these initiatives have been carried out under a single program rubric that has been fairly stable over the last decade, we had rich longitudinal data to ground our reflections and insights. Our focus for the California case study was to identify the manner and extent to which public scholarship has been integrated in the design, development and transformation of these food systems initiatives and the ways they have impacted public scholars both within and outside of the university. To gather information for our case study, we reviewed SAREP’s program documents over the last 10 years. In the fall of 2000, we conducted 22 openended interviews (7 in person, 15 by phone) with food system practitioners who received SAREP grants, with SAREP staff, and with SAREP’s program and technical advisory committee members. And finally, we held a community food systems forum in November 2000, which gathered a small group of some of our best food systems project leaders to reflect on outcomes, learnings, the nature of university–community partnerships and the role of community food systems as a vehicle for engaging “public scholarship.”2 The entire case study lays out a bigger picture from the perspective of the land grant university than will be discussed in this article. I will be focusing more specifically on the community food systems projects themselves – voices from the field – so to speak, and how we are making sense of their stories. Creating and protecting space While all of these projects were experimental in nature and most are still in their formative stages, one key theme we heard again and again was that community leaders had to “create space” for the germination of these admittedly risky projects in their communities, and protect space for their continuation. What kind of space are they speaking about? Let me briefly describe four kinds of space, how it was created and protected, and then give you examples of what I mean. Social space From their inception, the successful food systems projects encouraged communities to create new social spaces. This might have included actual physical places, like new farmers’ markets or community gar-
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dens, where rich social interactions took place. More often, it meant the multiple opportunities these projects created for diverse people in communities to come together to talk, listen to each other’s concerns and views, plan together, problem-solve, question, argue and come to agreement, compromise, learn another’s language and how to speak so someone else can hear you, and to get to know and trust one another in the context of a common purpose or vision. This is where “social capital”3 is created. Here is also where democratic theory and practice come together, as Harry Boyt and Nancy Kari have described in Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (1996). It is where regular citizens and residents have the opportunity to participate in their food systems in new ways. This happens in the context of food policy councils such as the Marin Food Policy Council, or the Berkeley Food Policy Council; in grassroots organizations devoted to improving community food security such as the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners or the Pomona Inland Valley Council of Churches; in Slow Food Movement convivia; in farmer-community breakfast meetings in the heart of California’s Central Valley; in farm-to-school committees in Davis, Winters, and Santa Monica, California, in Ithaca, New York, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Hartford, Connecticut. However, building relationships of trust in a participatory food system is not always easy; in fact, sometimes it can be frustrating. I am beginning to learn to expect some friction in the development of the social spaces. If there is not any, I am suspicious. It seems to be necessary for solid social relationships to be established in community food systems projects. On the other hand, when a group learns to know itself, a lot of possibilities emerge. For example, one of the first projects SAREP funded in this area was the Ventura County Food Safety Group. This diverse group of community leaders came together with the help of a UC Cooperative Extension specialist and county director in the aftermath of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s report about apple growers’ use of Alar, a growth regulator that the EPA had declared carcinogenic. There was a lot of tension among the agricultural community, consumer advocates, and regulators. Passions ran high. It was not hard to draw the group together, but it did take, according to one participant, at least five or six meetings before people could stop yelling and begin to listen to one another. Then, they began to take “field trips” to each others’ place of work so each participant could describe their perspective more thoroughly. By the end of the process, the group had established a constructive dialogue. It was this experience that later led some of the leaders to seed a new group representing diverse interests, called the Ag Futures
Alliance, that is developing a shared vision of how to sustain agriculture in the county. Social spaces are also for celebrating, for enjoying each other’s company, for learning how to support one another. These gatherings include harvest fairs (the Garlic, Mandarin, or Eggplant festivals), CSAcommunity celebrations on farms, farmers’ markets, school garden day celebrations, and local food banquets like the ones regularly held in Iowa. I think of the social spaces as filling the interstices – the nooks and crannies of a community food system. They are the glue that allows the new community food system to hang together or not. The stronger the glue, the more solidly rooted the community food system. Celebrations help to grow roots. Lesson #1 on creating and sustaining social spaces: Take it seriously. Create multiple opportunities for residents to come together and talk about food system concerns, visions, and activities. Learn to speak a common language. Do not forget to celebrate. Allow time to grow roots. Political space Closely related to social space is political space. Every community food systems project we talked with spoke of their involvement in policymaking at some level – from the school district or local institution of higher education, to city, county, or state government. This kind of space almost needs to be carved. Each project leader managed to carve out his or her own political spaces to do things like craft a local school food policy, add a local food component to the city’s or county’s General Plan, or put ballot measures on a local ballot to preserve open space and farmland. One project we funded in northern California did an analysis of land use patterns, focusing on vineyards, and got very involved in the policy process, helping residents evaluate current land use policy and vineyard development and understand how they might want to change policies to preserve oak woodland habitats. Carving political spaces often involves community organizing. All of the project leaders we spoke with were involved in organizing local residents for the purpose of improving their food system in some way. The Rural Development Center educated and organized farmworkers to grow organic produce and sell it to low-income neighborhoods in Salinas; the Pomona Inland Valley Council of Churches organized farmers to set up a farmers’ market in Pomona; the Berkeley Youth Alternatives Garden Patch Project organized community volunteers to start a community garden and later a CSA, employing local youth (see www.berkeleyyouthalternatives.org; www.pedalexpress.com/BYA); the Park Village CSA
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Project organized low-income residents of a Cambodian housing development to farm local land and sell their produce through a CSA and farmstand. Eventually, some of these projects were able to leverage these organized groups to push for policy changes at local or regional levels. One important element of creating political spaces and policies is that it can help food system pilot projects or models institutionalize their efforts within a community. This stabilizes the activities and allows them to mature in place. Probably the best example of this for me is the Berkeley Food System Project – a project to introduce fresh, locally grown, organic foods into the school meals program, to integrate a garden in every school with food systems-oriented curricula, and to start a citywide food policy council to address community food security (see www.berkeleyfood.org). Within the last three years, this project has accomplished many of its goals, due in no small part to insightful project leaders. From the outset, they began thinking about how to institutionalize their work through policies. They have created an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with the city’s Health Department to help staff the new food policy council; written a districtwide school food policy and a citywide food policy, and passed a ballot measure in the last general election allocating money to purchase new equipment for many of the school district’s kitchens. It helps that one of the project leaders is a former state representative. In any event, much of the work of this project will continue with or without these particular people or the level of funding they currently enjoy because of the policies that have institutionalized their efforts. So what is it that convinces policymakers? We learned from our project leaders and policymakers we interviewed that they like stories. Data are nice; stories are better. The importance of a compelling narrative cannot be underestimated. It is what convinced the County Board of Supervisors in Placer County to award a small group of citizens close to $100,000 for their novel local agricultural marketing program (PlacerGROWN). It is what convinced Rodney Taylor, head of Santa Monica/Malibu school food service to try a farmer’s market salad bar in his lunch program. It is what convinced the Arcata City Council to preserve the Arcata Community Farm as a working urban farm on city property. Having said that, I also want to make a case for collecting solid data that show the impacts of a new initiative. Decision-makers also need to know how and when these models can become economically viable and how they contribute to community health. So, in the end, both qualitative and quantitative information is needed.
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Lesson #2 on political spaces: Think about carving out political spaces from the outset. Community organizing is a critical component of this work if you believe in democratic participation in the food system. Work toward institutionalizing sustainable food systems efforts through local policies. Learn the language of policymakers. Tell good stories. Measure impacts. Intellectual space Intellectual space includes several related elements: articulating the vision of a sustainable food system and then conceptualizing a community food system initiative within the local context. It also involves reflecting on progress and future plans with local residents. Successful projects all included at least one person who had a clear vision and could share the “big picture” with the rest. It helped ground the project when the inevitable personnel, economic, policy, or other changes occurred. In SAREP’s case, our staff helped create the intellectual space that allowed community food system partnerships to find a voice to describe their activities. We helped conceptualize the elements of a community food system and worked with these projects as they sought to build concrete expressions of these ideas. We also linked them to published work and to a larger network of other projects across the state, and in fact, the country, which involved similar activities. In 1996, we hosted a community food systems conference to showcase the efforts of some of our projects, to strengthen the network, and to build the intellectual rationale for food systems work. All of this was important to these initiatives and allowed us and them to expand our efforts. Although this might all sound great, it was not easy – for us or for the community food systems projects we worked with. Creating intellectual space is risky. Within a land grant institution that is focused on the technological solutions to food and agricultural issues – particularly for the largest players – trying to support small-scale initiatives that include a decidedly social component, frankly was not well understood by SAREP’s Program and Technical Advisory Committees. The projects we wanted to fund were not traditional research projects with which committee members were familiar. They represented blends of social science, community organizing, and pragmatic change. A lot of education and justification was and continues to be necessary to show the connections between the biological and social sciences, between food production and food consumption, and between research projects and community demonstrations. Because of increasing specialization in disciplines, these connections have been seriously
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weakened. Community food systems projects, however, can provide an occasion, an opportunity to revitalize and strengthen these interdisciplinary connections. The other part of intellectual space has to do with reflection and evaluation. We have tried to ensure in each of SAREP’s community food systems projects that each project includes a reflective or analytic component so that community action and communitybased inquiry are integrated. Unfortunately, this does not always work out as well as it is supposed to. We are learning about different kinds of evaluation in different circumstances. For example, initially, we tried to encourage an evaluation of the newly established PlacerGROWN using quantitative outputs (membership numbers, annual funding levels). These indicators did not look particularly strong after three years. Later, however, we learned about the important impact that the leadership in PlacerGROWN had in the formation of a countywide agriculture and open space initiative called Placer Legacy. A narrow focus on particular evaluative criteria would have kept us from seeing the longer-term impacts. Evaluation is definitely an area that needs more attention and resources. Lesson #3 on intellectual spaces: Despite the difficulties and riskiness, persevere in bringing multiple disciplines and community perspectives together in creating intellectual space – the rationale, the vision for community food systems. Be flexible and creative in finding opportunities for reflection and evaluation. Economic space Most of the projects we worked with included some connection with the local economy – they attempted to find ways to recirculate local financial capital within the region. We saw three or four kinds of CSAs from “market baskets” in low-income neighborhoods of L.A., to neighborhood flower CSAs in Berkeley and Sacramento, to community-wide CSAs in rural Arcata, California. We also had projects that examined year-round and extended employment for agricultural workers who could then eventually afford to live in the community. And we had a project looking at how community members could share the costs of land tenure and stewardship. All of the project leaders we spoke with said that some outside funding was absolutely necessary to really allow them to get off the ground. Extra startup or seed funding was critical. SAREP provided many seed grants for these projects. Other sources were county boards of supervisors that provided startup funds to PlacerGROWN, the local ag marketing program in Placer County; city governments like the one in Los Angeles that provided funds to the Los
Angeles Security and Hunger Partnership (an advisory body to the city on food policy); or the USDA, which provided start-up funds for Berkeley’s Food System Project. Funds can come from national, state, county, city, or private foundation sources, but without them, it is hard to get going. Once a project has started and been in existence for awhile, the next challenge is keeping it going – the maintenance phase. There seems to be a vulnerable time between start-up and stability, between initiation and institutionalization, in which the project needs particular nurturing. Continued funding is very helpful at this stage of project development; it buys time for new paradigms to solidify. However, successful projects must also have project managers who know how to manage funds well – who are fiscally responsible and creative. Lesson #4 about economic space. Recirculating local financial capital is a key element in successful community food system projects. However, projects should also be proactive in seeking additional economic resources, which will probably be needed for some time. Successful projects learned how to leverage local resources and managed funds creatively, yet responsibly.
What have these community food systems initiatives accomplished? Despite these projects, a very small percentage of growers or consumers are interested in marketing or buying or growing local or organic produce. The sales volume at farmers’ markets is a tiny fraction of food sales through huge retail chains like Safeway, Albertson’s, or WalMart. Acres set aside for farmland protection in conservation easements or trusts are few by comparison to those being sold for development. However, I prefer to use analogies from nature – like icebergs and butterflies – when I think of these community food systems initiatives. From one perspective, you just see a little bit of the whole, or only the quiet chrysalis stage of development, and it might appear that not much is happening. The reality is, however, that there is a lot of largely invisible development going on – the formation of new local economic or social relationships, the understandings of new ways of seeing the food system, the background politicking required for the formation of new policies, the training or mentoring of new civic entrepreneurs, the creation of new food system infrastructures, and the growing body of research analyzing and evaluating new alternatives. I think of all of these activities as constituting an invisible web that underlies the development of alternative, sustainable food systems. It takes time to develop this web – two to three years minimum
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– and unless it is supported it grows weaker. As a grantor, I was originally intent upon seeing tangible, visible results within a year, if not sooner. In time, I listened and learned about this invisible web from project participants. And I saw, over time, that they were right. Lesson #5: Be patient (especially if you are a funder); think of accomplishments or outcomes in different ways and support the invisible dimensions to the extent that you can.
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What overriding themes emerge from these community voices and spaces? Three themes seem to underlie all these spaces. They are the three “Ps” – public participation, partnerships, and principles. Public participation Public participation is key to all of these community food systems projects. The public must have genuine decision-making power. This is even more significant when we realize that project participants frequently represent marginal or disenfranchised groups. They have included farmworkers, small-scale organic producers, low-income community residents, and limited resource/ethnic farmers. Community food systems projects offer them real opportunities to develop leadership from among their ranks. We have seen that, in particular, with some of the youth-oriented projects. Young people are learning to grow, harvest, and process food for their communities at the same time as they learn business and marketing skills, community outreach, and nutrition/health education skills, and they learn about the strength inherent in their own and their community’s unique assets. The fundamental resource in all of these projects is the people. They are the best storytellers. They are the local heroes. It is they who have found their own unique ways to create the social, economic, intellectual, and political spaces for these projects to thrive. Partnerships Community food systems projects provide a vehicle for diverse groups to come together for the purpose of making their food system and their communities more sustainable. As part of the university, we of course, encouraged campus faculty and Cooperative Extension to be partners in these projects. They have access to particular skills and capacities that could support the development of these struggling projects. Project leaders identified some areas where such partnerships are most valuable.
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Access to resources: economic resources, technical resources and organizational skills. In the best projects, university personnel acted more as facilitators and less as project leaders. Yet, they offered valuable support (e.g., access to grants, technical skills, facilitation skills) on a consistent basis, to nurture projects along. It is the pragmatic skills community members need most. Capacity to help projects evaluate progress and reflect on their past and future directions. Although we at SAREP have done this to a limited extent, we can see how creating more spaces for reflection and sharing would be extremely valuable. There is no template out there, so every bit of time spent thinking, reflecting, readjusting, re-evaluating, is useful. Framing. University faculty and extension personnel can use their background in social or agricultural or nutrition sciences to help locate projects within a broader framework. This is most useful to community partners (and university partners) when they are part of the discussion process and can comment on initial ideas and drafts. This larger framing can help community participants see themselves and their work as part of something much larger.
Principles or values We found that the motivation for community residents, project leaders, and SAREP staff to be involved in many of these projects over a long period of time came from a deep commitment to social, economic, and environmental justice and health, to democratic participation, to the importance of local wisdom, local dreams, community spirit, and often to their own spiritual traditions. We saw that by remembering these values and by allowing the community to help nurture them, the motivation could be sustained over time, even when things looked bleak. Susan Ornelas, one of our project leaders, for instance, was turned down on several grant proposals and had lost support temporarily from the institution of higher education with which she was affiliated. But did that discourage her? NO. She spent the summer making and selling homemade burritos from a little cart to raise resources for the project. Eventually, circumstances did change and the project was once again on stable ground. I really admire that brand of persistence and determination, typical of many of these project leaders. I believe it comes from a sense of hope. Hope in the face of difficult circumstances. Hope that is seeded and nurtured in companionship. Hope that all of our efforts together will result in a more sustainable, life-giving food system for all.
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In closing, I would like to share the words of Peter Gillingham, who in the afterword to E. F. Schumacher’s book, Good Work, explains the theme and title of Schumacher’s book, and in so doing, provides inspiration for our work. “[Good work] is the belief that our only salvation individually and collectively lies in taking back the responsibility for finding and creating our own good work, the place where the spiritual and the temporal, the theoretical and the concrete, mankind and nature, all converge; and for increasing our capacities so that we can and will do so.”
Notes 1. See Dr. Campbell’s recent paper, “Conviction seeking efficacy: Sustainable agriculture and the politics of cooptation,” Agriculture and Human Values 18(4): 353–363, 2001. 2. Many thanks to Dr. Robert Pence, who spent many hours interviewing project leaders, helped facilitate the forum, and suggested helpful ways of thinking about and organizing responses. For his account of BIOS and BIFS, two California-based programs that define an applied Agriculture Partnership model of extensions, see Pence and Grieshop, 2001. 3. According to Robert Putnam (1993), social capital refers to “features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.”
References Boyt, H. and N. Kari (1996). Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Campbell, D. (2001). “Conviction seeking efficacy: sustainable agriculture and the politics of co-optation.” Agriculture and Human Values 18(4): 353–363. Gillingham, P. (1979). “The making of good work.” In E. F. Schumacher (ed.), Good Work. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Lyson, T. A. (1999). “From production to development: moving toward a civic agriculture in the United States.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, August 4–8, 1999, Chicago, Illinois. Pence, R. A. and J. L. Grieshop (2001). “Mapping the road for voluntary change: Partnerships in agricultural extension.” Agriculture and Human Values 18(2): 209–217. Putnam, R. D. (1993). “The prosperous community. Social capital and public life.” The American Prospect (13): 35–42. Address for correspondence: Gail Feenstra, Food Systems Analyst, UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Ed. Program, One Shields Ave., University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA Phone: +1-530-752-8408; Fax: +1-530-754-8550; E-mail:
[email protected]