In this study we examine how the agribusiness industry works to manipulate conventional farming masculinities in the United States to facilitate agricultural deskilling, a process that has serious implications for the future of sustainable agriculture uptake among American farmers. Through analyzing one year's worth of advertisements in three conventional farming magazines and through conducting participant observation and interviews at the second largest indoor farming show in the United States, we examine the ways in which agribusiness companies, such as chemical, seed, and farm machinery manufacturers, represent farmers and farming masculinities in their advertisements and marketing materials. We observe a shift occurring among certain agribusiness sectors away from representations of a rugged, strong, solitary farmer, who dominates nature through his manual labor, to depictions of a “businessman” farmer, who farms in collaboration with certain qualified partners (i.e., company representatives). We ultimately argue that these new representations of farming masculinity aim to more deeply entrench conventional farmers' dependence on chemical inputs and agribusiness products by promoting a process of deskilling, effectively alienating the farmer from the land.

The COVID‐19 pandemic and associated public health and social distancing mandates caused unprecedented shifts and disruptions for local and regional food systems (LRFS). The pandemic also brought new and heightened attention to the structure and resiliency of US food systems, and LRFS appeared to be positioned to significantly increase the scope and scale of their market reach as a result. Researchers from three universities collaborated with staff from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service to recruit leaders from sixteen key coalitions within the U.S. LRFS sector to frame an adaptive, community‐driven set of applied research activities to understand important themes, learn from effective responses and gain insights into how local and regional supply chains may change post‐pandemic. In this paper, we summarise urgent and emergent strategies and innovations from LRFS captured in a fall 2020 consumer survey, with additional insights on how the survey was framed and interpreted, considering synthesis of collaborative discussions and project team interactions. We conclude the article with a set of research, policy and technical assistance priorities that were identified and validated by this LRFS network.

The "scaling-up" of Alternative Food Networks (AFN) through food hubs and other values-based supply chains has the potential to simultaneously serve the needs of mid-sized farmers and expand the scope of AFN impact and access. This paper argues for greater consideration of the process and practice of scaling-up as it applies to farmers transitioning into AFNs from conventional markets. Interviews with mid-sized farmers from two food hubs in the Southeastern U.S. shows that food hub farmers consist of a mixture of new-entrant farmers growing their farm enterprises from direct markets, and heritage (e.g., multi-generational) farmers already engaged in large-scale production who are scaling-over to wholesale AFNs from traditional commodity production. Relative to first-generation farmers, the larger scale heritage farmers have distinct motivations and challenges that vary along a number of dimensions of their personal and enterprise history. The paper concludes that by supporting the unique needs of mid-sized farmers scalingover from conventional markets, Food Hubs can play a transformative role in the expansion of AFNs and thus the broader goal of transforming our food systems. [agriculture of the middle, food hubs, alternative food networks, mid-sized farmers, values-based value chains, scalingup] Lilian Brislen is the Executive Director of The Food

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