But as University of Vermont Extension Assistant Professor of Community Development Ike Leslie points out in a new paper for Society & Natural Resources, "alternative agriculture" participants, and their contributions toward these social and environmental goals, range widely.
Leslie, who also has faculty affiliations with the Institute for Agroecology, the Food Systems Graduate Program and the Gund Institute for Environment at UVM, presents this alternative agriculture range as a continuum between environmental- and social-oriented practices and market-driven practices. And by identifying where specific farmer subgroups land on the continuum for issues like toxic chemicals, biodiversity, soil health, and food security, they argue it becomes possible to understand the larger economic and political structures that influence whether agriculture makes the world a healthier place.
"While we know which alternative farming practices address global environmental goals... it is another challenge to scale their use, especially across multiple global goals at once," Leslie writes. They add that their paper is an attempt to "spotlight leverage points for structural change."
Leslie's analysis is based on existing food systems literature and a case study of six types of alternative farmers in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. By putting this information together, they observe, for example, how export organic farmers might replace toxic inputs with non-toxic alternatives, but still use industrial practices like monocropping because that provides the highest and most immediate economic return. By comparison, an agroecological farmer might aim to create a socially- and environmentally-healthy ecosystem through diversified cropping, integrated plant-animal systems and agroforestry, but they may not be able to find affordable organic seeds and feed for their livestock, because the supply chain doesn't exist.
In their analysis, Leslie determined that inequities are what shape the alternative farmer subgroups, and the subgroups' capacity for action.
"The most economically and socially powerful alternative farmers grew certified organics (especially for export), relied most on market-embedded practices (which most aligned with their preexisting agricultural systems, capital investments, and worldview), and contributed ecologically primarily by eliminating toxics," Leslie writes of the case study. "The most socioeconomically marginalized groups grew agroecologically (often small-scale and cooperatively), resisted market-embedded practices (due to economic constraints, risk aversion, and social values), and contributed ecologically primarily with practices addressing biodiversity loss and climate change."
Based on these observations, Leslie builds the "Alternative Farmhouse" model. The pillars holding up the building are the practices that alternative agriculture uses for making the world a healthier place. The floor is the minimum standards required by organic certification, which Leslie points out "fuels a race-to-the-bottom." The roof, meanwhile, is the social and environmental goals that advocates are calling for.
Leslie adds that the state has a role to play in raising both the floor and the roof of this Alternative Farmhouse.
"The absence of minimum standards on toxicity, biodiversity, and the climate is effectively state regulation allowing market-driven actors to poison, kill species, and exacerbate climate change," they write. "So, the role of the state is ... to decide the parameters of farmers’ freedom to produce food that affects people and the environment in certain ways, and people’s freedom from particular harms."
Leslie's Alternative Farmhouse model is far from finished. However, their paper concludes with what the Alternative Farmhouse draft blueprint already indicates: "If farmers are to produce the socioecological outcomes the world needs, states and social movements must support all farmers in standing on the same global floor of minimum standards."
