Adam Calo, The Yeoman Myth: A Troubling Foundation
Adam Calo (James Hutton Institute, Environmental Science and Policy) joined us on February 9th as our second speaker in the Rural Law and Policy Series, with a talk entitled The Yeoman Myth: A Troubling Foundation of the Beginning Farmer Movement, based on his article bearing the same title, available here (if you experience download issues, please contact the author directly at Adam.Calo@hutton.ac.uk). Click below to watch his talk.
bio
Adam Calo received his PhD from the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, where he studied how problems of land access in California frustrated beginning farmer aspirations. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, studying the role of land reform policies on the potential for agricultural change.
abstract
Aging farmer demographics and declining agricultural trends provoke policy makers, farmer advocacy groups, and food system scholars to ask, “Who will do the work of farming in the future?”
One prominent response to this question is the rise of a “beginning farmer” narrative, where the goal of creating new farmers emerges as a key aspirational food system reform mechanism. In this vision, young and beginning farmers will seize the transitioning lands from retiring farmers and bring with them an alternative system that is ecologically minded, open to new innovations, and socially oriented.
This talk critically examines the underlying imaginaries and mythologies that drive the theories of change and policy actions of the beginning farmer narrative. Doing so raises important questions about the concept of “rural renewal” as social, political or ecological pursuit:
What underlying structures are further entrenched given a blanket goal of regeneration?
Is it wise to try and re-generate the agricultural system without first asking which features should be kept, discarded, or invented anew?
Instead of speaking of “the need for new farmers”, might it be worth asking what happened to the old ones?
This line of inquiry began when interviewing graduates of farmer training programs—who possessed the skills to grow high quality food with little resources on marginal soils—but were without a path to secure the land tenure required to implement their agrarian visions. The problem of farmland access led me to seek inspiration from the new Land Reform Acts in Scotland, where the state is attempting to reshape the norms of property as a precursor to deliver social and ecological benefits.
other work by Adam Calo
You can find more of Adam’s work here. In addition, he is currently working on an interview-style podcast series that will take a deeper dive into Scottish Land Reform. Although not published yet, a series of teasers from his interview with Malcom Combe (Strathclyde, Law) are below:
