Farm households and the elusiveness of social sustainability: Contrasting the emotional registers of organic and conventional producers

Abstract

In sustainability scholarship broadly and sustainable agriculture research specifically, the ‘social’ facets of a system have long been considered the least well understood and most difficult to operationalize. Efforts to compare organic and conventional agricultural production have often left the social dimensions of these systems unexplored. This article presents results from a 2020 statewide survey of farmers in Ohio, USA. Rooted in both classic agri-family theories of family farm change and contemporary theoretical calls to attend to the affective dimensions of agriculture, the paper analyzes farmers' socio-emotional responses to the 2019 growing season, a particularly stressful agricultural year. It uses bivariate analyses to compare organic and conventional producers' experiences of stressors and compare their reported levels of satisfaction, optimism, and stress. Although organic producers experienced significantly more stressful events, they also reported feeling more optimistic, more satisfied, and less stressed. These findings suggest that farm studies focused exclusively on financial, production, or attitudinal variables may miss key facets that differentiate organic from conventional production. Considering the structural and demographic conditions of the eastern Corn Belt, the article discusses how social sustainability relates to regionally specific processes of conventionalization and may illuminate feedback loops between farm households' emotional experiences and organic sector growth.