Socioeconomic geography of organic agriculture in the United States, 2007-2012

Abstract

Recent trends have shown that organic agriculture in the United States may longer form a homogeneous group. To better understand the spatial pattern of organic farming, the overall research objective is to examine organic agriculture and its ecological, technological, and socioeconomic correlates based on an agroecosystem framework combining Hernandez’s model and Flora and Flora’s community capitals framework. Using multiple measures of organic agriculture at the meso-scale during the period between 2007 and 2012, results from cluster analysis indicate that the typology of N=3,069 counties includes a majority of Low Intensity places, two groups of Moderate and High Intensity clusters that have seen a relatively large concentrate of organic farms and sales, and a small number of counties in clusters of Growing Farms and Growing Sales are rapidly expanding in place dominated by conventional agriculture. Through multinomial logistic regression, regional differences of organic farming are strongly associated with environmental factors such as climate and topography. Although technology employment has little effects on organic production, organic intensive places tend to have more diverse farm operations by having more women operators and direct sales to people and the community. Results show mixed support to link organic production systems with better socioeconomic settings. Places with moderate organic activity generally are more ethnically diverse and better educated. Nevertheless, they tend to have high dependency ratio. Places with high intensity organic production have higher labor force participation and higher community engagement; they also have higher rates of poverty. Further, organic