agriculture definition

2014 Rural Sociological Society Annual Conference : �Equity, Democracy, and the Commons: Counter-Narratives for Rural Transformation.� Location: New Orleans, Roosevelt Waldorf Astoria Hotel Date: July 30th to August 3, 2014 Paper Abstracts due: March 3 Submission: Email abstracts (up to 350-words) to Loka Ashwood (ashwood@wisc.edu) and Kate Mactavish (kate.mactavish@oregonstate.edu)  in lieu of an online submission . Changing community and production dynamics in rural America make it a state-sanctioned site for some of the most hazardous and toxic industries of our time.  From its production treadmill, industrial agriculture has cast onto rural America a plethora of negative externalities:  mounting levels of air and water pollution, farm consolidation, and depopulation.   A range of extraction and other risky industries justify the siting of facilities in rural areas because of easy access to ample natural resources, sparse populations that reduce exposure risk...

I know the association of urban ag/slow food/organic/locavore movement with all things virtuous has been going on for some time, but just because the movement has proved so self-congratulatory (and mostly bourgeois) didn't necessarily make rural farmers the "bad guys."  I figured that, more than anything, the slow/local/urban ag craze was, at worst, implying (if only to those too myopic to look beyond their own food needs) that large-scale farmers (and, by extension, rural communities and populations) were (becoming) obsolete.   But a story in the  New York Times  a few days ago left me wondering if the urban ag trend (the fruits of which I admit to regularly indulging from my suburban home in greater Sacramento, where  many posh farmers markets  surround me) also makes rural farmers look less virtuous, even a bit like "the enemy."  Kirk Johnson's  story  focused on what he called a new business model of farming, one marked by smaller-scale f...