A livelihood to feel good about: Enacting values around animals, land, and food outside of the agricultural core

Abstract

This paper presents and reflects on findings from ethnographic research conducted with small-scale farmers in the Parry Sound district, Ontario, Canada. The research highlights understandings of what it means to be a “good farmer” and explores how farmers enact their personal values and morals in efforts to produce “good food” for their communities. Central issues that emerge include notions of how to ethically care for animals and the land, as well as how to navigate tensions that can emerge while engaged in agricultural livelihoods. In their agriculturally peripheral location, participants point to how they imagine and embody possibilities about “good farming” and “good food” that challenge in various ways the larger-scale agricultural approaches that dominate agricultural core areas in southern Ontario.