Civic Agriculture Research Articles

Developing Inclusive Nutrition Education Direction for Sustainable Dietary Competency in Elementary Schools

우리나라 식생활교육은 2009년 식생활교육지원법이 제정되면서 건강, 환경, 배려를 핵심 가치로 삼아 변화되기 시작하였으며, 제3차 식생활교육 기본 계획(2020년-2024년)에서는 지속가능한 식생활로 함께 하는 농업, 건강한 국민, 포용하는 사회 실현을 비전으로 제시하고 있다. 그러나 4차 산업혁명의 디지털 문명은 학교 식생활교육에도 큰 영향을 미치고 있다. 따라서 이 연구에서는 우리나라 학교 식생활교육에서 지속가능한 식생활교육 내용을 살펴보고, 4차 산업혁명으로 인한 교육의 디지털 전환에 직면한 식생활교육 현상을 진단하고, 지속가능한 식생활 역량 함양을 위하여 포용적 식생활교육 구조와 내용 체계의 구체성을 통해 포용적 식생활교육의 방향을 탐색하였다. 포용적 식생활교육을 위해서는 인지적 학습, 정의적 학습, 실천적 학습이 포용적 방식으로 융합될 수 있는 구조와 체계가 필요하며, 지속가능한 식생활교육을 실천하기 위해서는 학습자 핵심 역량 함양에 중점을 두는 포용적 식생활교육의 방향에서 그 대안을 마련해야 할 것이다.Since the enactment of the School Meal Support Act in 2009, South Korean dietary education has been evolving, placing health, environment, and consideration as its core values. The 3rd Basic Plan for Dietary Education (2020-2024) aims to achieve a sustainable dietary lifestyle that civic agriculture for collective consumption, healthy citizens, and an inclusive society. However, the digital civilization of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is significantly impacting dietary education in schools. Therefore, this study examines sustainable dietary education content in South Korean school meals, diagnoses the phenomena of dietary education facing digital transformation in education due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and explores directions for inclusive dietary education through concrete structures and content systems for inclusive dietary education that foster sustainable dietary capabilities. To achieve inclusive dietary education, a structure and system that allow cognitive, normative, and practical learning to be combined in an inclusive way is required. Furthermore, to practice sustainable dietary education, alternative approaches that emphasize the development of learners' core competencies are necessary in the direction of inclusive dietary education that fosters inclusivity.

Environmental impacts and future challenges of livestock sector in Hungary

In developed countries, livestock farming faces significant global challenges, including adverse environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and pollution from industrial animal husbandry. These negative processes were accompanied by the disappearance of livestock breeding from backyards and small farms’ demise in recent decades. As a result, the sector’s significance in rural communities has decreased, causing challenges for rural development. This research investigates these processes on the example of the Hungarian livestock sector from the 1990s to recent years, with statistical and policy document analysis, literature review, and interviews in Hungary’s Southern Great Plain. The results show that the number of animals kept in rural settlements has decreased significantly in the last three decades. The established large-scale industrial animal husbandry is a negative environmental burden without positive externalities. In conclusion, the disappearance of the backyard and small-scale livestock farms from the Hungarian countryside has resulted in the loss of multifunctionality and social exclusion. A diversified farming system and a more balanced policy preference toward civic agriculture and small-scale animal husbandry can bring many environmental, economic, and social benefits to rural Hungary.

Food for Local Benefit: Civic Agriculture at the Wea Creek Orchard

Food for Local Benefit: Civic Agriculture at the Wea Creek Orchard

Building a bridge between civic agriculture and civic engagement: farmers’ markets as communication infrastructure

PurposeThis work aimed to show how farmers’ markets can act as communication infrastructure, and by doing so, facilitate civic engagement. We used communication infrastructure theory (CIT) as a guide.Design/methodology/approachWe integrated findings from two surveys that took place in the US state of Wisconsin. In a survey of Wisconsin farmers’ market leaders, we considered what features farmers’ markets have that may help them act as communication infrastructure. Using data from a survey of Wisconsin residents, we ran a regression model to demonstrate the relationship between farmers’ market attendance and micro-level storytelling about local food.FindingsWe found that farmers’ markets can act as meso-level storytellers and provide a communication action context supportive of civic engagement. Through the farmers’ market leader survey, we found that over half of the markets noted existing partnerships with media outlets. Furthermore, farmers’ markets may connect residents to important organizations in the community. Many farmers’ markets had features to make them more physically and financially accessible, such as accepting food assistance benefits. With the Wisconsin resident survey, we found that farmers’ market attendance predicted storytelling about local food better than overall local food purchasing, further suggesting that markets can facilitate social interactions.Originality/valueWe document an important benefit that farmers’ markets can offer communities: they have the potential to act as communication infrastructure. As stronger communication infrastructure can facilitate civic engagement, this work provides a mechanism by which to connect civic agriculture activities and increased levels of civic engagement.

Civic agriculture in review: Then, now, and future directions

“Civic agriculture,” a term first coined by rural sociologist Thomas Lyson, refers to forms of agriculture that occur on a local level, from production to consumption, and are linked to a community’s social and economic development. Sixteen years since its original articulation, the term “civic agriculture” has taken on greater significance in research, political activism, and community organizing. Grown from the roots of civic community theory, civic agriculture functions as a new branch of civic community theory that is ripe for theorization. In revisiting the foundations of the term, this review paper seeks to consolidate current and future research in the field of civic agriculture with a focus on its link to social welfare. This begins by reviewing the foundations of civic community theory and discussing how they influence research related to civic agriculture. As we report in this paper, there remain considerable gaps in understanding of how civic agriculture can be fomented by—or is related to—indicators such as demographics, concentration of power, community cohesion, and civic engagement. Consequently, the assumed links between local food systems and social welfare must continue to be studied to determine correlation and causality. This understanding is particularly important during this time of global pandemic, when the flaws and inequities of global supply chains are exposed and where, in many cases, civic agriculture met the increasing interest in local food. The COVID-19 pandemic has amply demonstrated the fragility and instability of global food supply chains, making the need for local food systems more significant and more relevant to communities across the world.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA): Significance and prospects for growth for individuals, communities, and food systems

Abstract Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is an alternative way of supplying food based on direct interaction between producers and consumers. As an alternative food network (AFN) and a form of civic agriculture, it is considered a more sustainable way of food production and consumption compared to the conventional food system. The number of CSA initiatives has been increasing in the last few decades worldwide parallel to growing scholarly debates about its usefulness, viability and potential. This article contributes to the review of the following: The impacts of CSA on individuals and communities, including motives for involvement and benefits received; the impacts of CSA on food systems, particularly on sustainability; and the barriers and opportunities for CSA growth. We conclude that CSA addresses the needs for sustainable and ecologically sound food and contributes to community building by reconnecting urban and rural places and people with their food. It is also an active position against the unsustainable dominant food systems and shows a different way of caring for the planet and the people. However, in order to grow, CSA needs to overcome certain barriers, namely financial difficulties, unrealistic member expectations and the need for social justice by providing livelihoods for the farmers and becoming more inclusive in terms of race, income and gender. The COVID-19 crisis presented an opportunity for CSA to become more effective as the CSA initiatives demonstrated resilience during lockdowns and the demand for their products increased.

A contemporary concept of the value(s)-added food and agriculture sector and rural development

ABSTRACT The changing structure of agriculture strains the historically close relationship between commodity agriculture and rural development. Meanwhile, growth in consumer interest for differentiated, value-added products has the potential to create community economic development opportunities. However, the evidence regarding the benefit of value-added programs for broader community wealth is mixed. We argue that the mixed findings result, in part, from differences in how “value-added” is defined. Value-added agriculture has been conceptualized in many ways. Taking a US-focused approach, we first review four main concepts: value-added, short food supply chain, values-based supply chain, and civic agriculture. Building on these, we present our definition of a value(s)-added food and agriculture sector, incorporating three features: (1) Consumers make purchases that simultaneously provide utility and enable a price premium; (2) the shared principles among firms and their relational arrangement support the distribution of the value, and thus the premium, across the chain and between owners and employees (the use of “principles” or “values” prompts the “(s)” in our definition); and (3) supply chain actors have a demonstrated commitment to the community. We discuss how this definition contributes to debates in, and has implications for, community economic development policy.

Alongside the Grain: Conceptualizing Scale and the Upper Threshold of Local in the Agro‐industrial Palouse

AbstractThis paper uses a case study of local food system development in the agro‐industrial Palouse region of the northwestern United States to examine how communities negotiate the boundaries of local. Farmer‐vendor participation in the region's largest farmers market shows that local‐scale boundaries are porous and sometimes problematic, particularly when considering producers on the “upper threshold of local”—the boundary between local and middle socio‐spatial scales. Examining how farmer‐vendor strategies, farmers market politics, and organizational engagement in Palouse civic agriculture relate to a contested upper threshold boundary provides insights on how distance‐dependent notions of local may be challenged, how operation size can be stretched, and how this blurry and porous boundary presents problems for mid‐sized operations hoping to engage or broker multiple locales or scales.

Le esperienze italiane di Sistemi partecipativi di garanzia

This article is featured within the debate around food production and provisioning, notably around organic agriculture and certifications systems. Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGSs) represent an example which is currently spreading across several countries in the World. Starting from the latest theories on Civic Agriculture (CA), this paper draws PGSs when compared to other ways of guarantee. These phenomena are not exactly new. In fact, it has been observed a continuous growth of these experiences over the last years. The aim is to describe main examples of PGSs in Italy.

The new urban agricultural geography of Shanghai

Agricultural geography has remained largely trapped in a neoclassical economic paradigm in which farm types have been understood to be predominantly products of location and global markets. This paper attempts to subvert this approach by reflecting on the emerging culture of small scale ecological farming in Shanghai. Such farms have been growing in number since 2000, driven largely by the availability of land and an increasing demand for safe and healthy food. While being a rational productivist response to a market opportunity, however, these farms reflect a break with conventional farming, in terms of their size, location and new farmer identities, as well as their socio-cultural relationships with customers and local communities. Using a survey of 45 such farms, the paper illustrates how and where new forms of farming, and the alternative food networks that they support, are colonizing the city. While being redolent of the growth in urban farming in many western cities, farming in Shanghai is driven by private individuals with personal and family, as well as broader community, motives. This suggests that while Shanghai may be experiencing the growth of alternative forms of what might be understood as civic agriculture, those involved are not primarily interested in the civilizing mission ascribed to many such movements. Rather, the new farms are hybrid service businesses in which the sales and marketing skills of the new farmers have allowed them to transform individual customers into members of food networks who form mutual co-dependent trust relationships that underpin the survival of the farms. Perhaps as a result of this, and despite strong demand for organic food, these new farms face a marginal existence in which business development is constrained as much by the strength and continuity of their food networks as it is by the quality and quantity of food that they can grow.

Gendering strategies for civic agriculture: The case of Blue Ridge Women in agriculture and the High Country Farm Tour

Gendering strategies for civic agriculture: The case of Blue Ridge Women in agriculture and the High Country Farm Tour

Cooperatives and alternative food networks in Italy. The long road towards a social economy in agriculture

In the context of a special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies on more-than-economic motivations for farmers’ cooperation, this article aims to analyse the tensions and contending views of the cooperative movement in Italy with special attention to the agricultural sector and to the emergence of the new model of social cooperatives in the last decades of the 20th century. We interpret this emergence and its codification in law as the decoupling of more-than-economic motivations of cooperation from the mainstream Italian cooperative sector and their reinstatement in a new, but separate model of social cooperation more closely linked to community- and solidarity-oriented initiatives.The presence of institutional tensions and frictions hints at the fact that cooperatives have a multi-faced nature expressed in the not always easy co-existence of a cooperative economy and a cooperative movement. After the II World War, as Italian cooperatives in general and particularly agricultural cooperatives moved towards a productivist model and a ‘competitive market’ paradigm, the more-than-economic aspects have continued to inspire movements for social and community economies. In the 1990s the social economy project was appropriated but somehow ‘sanitized’ by the cooperative movement through the legally sanctioned establishment of social cooperatives and their confinement to specific sections within national cooperative federations. Later on, while the emergence of social cooperatives has had little influence on the functioning and orientation of traditional agricultural cooperatives and federations, the reinstatement of a social function for agriculture has taken place at the much more fluid interface between social cooperation, on the one hand, and civic agriculture movements rooted in alternative food networks and community-oriented initiatives, on the other. It is only recently that the cooperative movement has tried catch up with the new paradigms of alternative agriculture and rural development through the experimentation at regional level of the cooperative di comunità (community cooperatives), that operate to re-affirm the role of multifunctional and multi-stakeholder cooperatives in rural/territorial development.

Cultivating citizenship, equity, and social inclusion? Putting civic agriculture into practice through urban farming

Civic agriculture is an approach to agriculture and food production that—in contrast with the industrial food system—is embedded in local environmental, social, and economic contexts. Alongside proliferation of the alternative food projects that characterize civic agriculture, growing literature critiques how their implementation runs counter to the ideal of civic agriculture. This study assesses the relevance of three such critiques to urban farming, aiming to understand how different farming models balance civic and economic exchange, prioritize food justice, and create socially inclusive spaces. Using a case study approach that incorporated interviews, participant observation, and document review, I compare two urban farms in Baltimore, Maryland—a “community farm” that emphasizes community engagement, and a “commercial farm” that focuses on job creation. Findings reveal the community farm prioritizes civic participation and food access for low-income residents, and strives to create socially inclusive space. However, the farmers’ “outsider” status challenges community engagement efforts. The commercial farm focuses on financial sustainability rather than participatory processes or food equity, reflecting the use of food production as a means toward community development rather than propagation of a food citizenry. Both farms meet authentic needs that contribute to neighborhood improvement, though findings suggest a lack of interest by residents in obtaining urban farm food, raising concerns about its appeal and accessibility to diverse consumers. Though not equally participatory, equitable, or social inclusive, both farms exemplify projects physically and philosophically rooted in the local social context, necessary characteristics for promoting civic engagement with the food system.

Working on Wicked Problems in Food Systems

Working on Wicked Problems in Food Systems

Connecting resilience, food security and climate change: lessons from flooding in Queensland, Australia

The Australian food system is often assumed to be largely secure in the face of global environmental challenges such as climate change. In 2010/2011, serious flooding in Queensland left towns isolated, major roads and highways cut and incurred significant loss of life and property. In terms of food security, large areas of agricultural land were inundated, and food supply chains, including both long and short chains, were affected in significant ways. The impacts included increases in food prices; deterioration in food quality; reduced consumer access to food; and disruption to the sourcing, transportation and distribution of food, grocery and other items. Examining the discourses and policies surrounding food supply during and after the floods, this paper asks, what lessons for building a more resilient food system have emerged from the 2011 floods? To explore this question, we consider policy documents, media reports, interviews and fieldwork with key stakeholders. We find evidence of strong collaboration of state government and long supply chain operators, but to the general exclusion of civil society-based food chains. Long chains provide the vast bulk of food to Queensland consumers but are vulnerable when roads are cut; civic agriculture showed resilience but remained marginal to the food needs of most Queensland consumers. Both resilience and vulnerability were present within both long and short food supply chains. Yet, there is limited evidence that food security issues, beyond productivity enhancement, are being considered in discussions and policies for climate change and natural disasters. We suggest that a broader view of climate change, beyond disasters and food production, has yet to be fully integrated into food security policy—and supply chain governance and practice—in Australia.

Defining the "C" in community supported agriculture

Localized agriculture is theorized to provide socio-environmental benefits to the community while ensuring a livelihood for local farmers. Much of the food systems literature refers to such an arrangement as civic agriculture, which is characterized as promoting community development by strengthening social ties among the various nodes of the localized food system. However, there is little literature that identifies the attributes of community and the specific mechanisms through which community qualities are produced, modeled, or replicated. This study's goal is to identify the meaning of community as used in the phrase "community supported agriculture" (CSA) by asking members and operators of local CSAs how they define community within the context of their membership. On-site interviews were conducted at the produce pick-up locations of four CSA farms in central Pennsylvania, resulting in a convenience sample of 97 CSA members and four operators. The survey instrument utilized open and closed-ended questions to collect information on farmer and member perceptions of their CSA community, motivations to join, and satisfaction with their experiences. The results suggest respondents are highly satisfied with products and services provided through their CSA. However, there are statistically significant differences in satisfaction scores across the four sampled farms. These differences support findings drawn from the open-ended questions indicating these CSA farms varied in member-defined attributes of a CSA community. Farm management practices, level of personal interactions, and other factors appear to have significant effects on CSA members' perception of community.

Urban agriculture and the prospects for deep democracy

The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit sector, and governmental institutions has grown exponentially over the past decade. Part of the appeal of UA is its potential to improve the civic health of a community, advancing what some call food democracy. Yet despite the increasing presence of the language of civic agriculture or food democracy, UA organizations and practitioners often still focus on practical, shorter-term projects in an effort both to increase local involvement and to attract funding from groups focused on quantifiable deliverables. As such, it seems difficult to move beyond the rhetoric of food democracy towards significant forms of popular participation and deliberation within particular communities. In this paper we provide a theoretical framework—deep democracy—that helps to contextualize nascent attempts at civic agriculture or food democracy within a broader struggle for democratic practices and relationships. We argue that urban agriculture efforts are well positioned to help citizens cultivate lasting relationships across lines of difference and amidst significant power differentials—relationships that could form the basis of a community’s collective capacity to shape its future. We analyze the theory of deep democracy through recent experiences with UA in Denver, Colorado, and we identify ways in which UA can extend its reach and impact by focusing more consciously on its political or civic potential.

Back to Basics: Is Civic Agriculture the Solution to Food Deserts in Texas?

Fair access to fresh fruits and vegetable is an important aspect of a healthy civil society. This study investigates the potential of farmers markets to transform food deserts of Texas into oases. Data for age, sex, race, income, grocery store access, and farmers markets in Texas were obtained from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service Food Environment Atlas and the US Census Bureau, in order to investigate the association between civic agriculture in the form of farmers markets and food insecurity in Texas. Data were statistically analyzed and spatially investigated. Spatial analysis of the distance to nearest farmers market suggests a strong inverse correlation between the distribution of civic agriculture activities and food deserts. These results encourage non-farmers transition to farming careers and help local farmers in Texas improve their competitiveness, preserve their farming traditions, and contribute to their societal and economic development.

The Civic Life of Food Production

The Civic Life of Food Production

Farmers' Participation in Civic Agriculture: The Effect of Social Embeddedness

AbstractThis work investigates how farmers' attitudes influence their decision to participate in some particular forms of civic agriculture, namely farmers' markets (conventional or organic), solidarity purchase groups, direct selling, and box schemes. It also explores whether social embeddedness‐related attitudes occur with different intensities within the various types of civic agriculture. To this end, a survey was carried out among farmers participating in civic agriculture in Sicily (Italy). Empirical results confirm the role of social embeddedness whereby personal relations between farmers and consumers are emphasized: a greater presence of community relations fosters a greater role of social embeddedness in farmers' decisions.