Abstract

Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time.

Highlights

  • Project specifics vary, a consistent logic unites most approaches to new farmer training. Niewolny and Lillard (2010, p. 73) found that while some holistic programming encourages farmers to reflect on their farming goals or personal values, overall, programs largely focus on “production practices, marketing, financial planning and resource assistance, business planning and management, and land acquisition and transfer.” Such programs aim to equip farmers with the information to make savvy business and production decisions, intending that these skillsets will prepare new farmers for agricultural success

  • We identify three areas in which childcare decisions influence farm operations: social, economic, and cognitive

  • At least since Alexander Chayanov’s analyses of Russian family farms’ demographic cycles (1966), social scientists have recognized the inextricability of household dynamics from the fate of farm operations

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Summary

Introduction

A consistent logic unites most approaches to new farmer training. Niewolny and Lillard (2010, p. 73) found that while some holistic programming encourages farmers to reflect on their farming goals or personal values, overall, programs largely focus on “production practices, marketing, financial planning and resource assistance, business planning and management, and land acquisition and transfer.” Such programs aim to. To demonstrate how empirical research into farm household dynamics produces insights that can improve farmers’ quality of life and business functioning, we qualitatively analyze interviews and focus groups with 43 farmers in the Northeastern United States. We identify three areas in which childcare decisions influence farm operations: social, economic, and cognitive We envision these as three types of pathways stretching between farm households and farm operations, channeling the impacts of childcare discussions, decisions, and arrangements onto agricultural production in different ways. Social pathways include farmers’ identities and relationships; economic pathways include farms’ organization, structure, growth, and enterprise diversity; and cognitive pathways include how farmers plan for farm goals and think about farm timeframes By charting such pathways, we illustrate the fundamentally interconnected nature of farm households and farm operations and indicate underrecognized areas for farm support interventions

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