In vino veritas, in aqua lucrum: Farmland investment, environmental uncertainty, and groundwater access in California’s Cuyama Valley

Fairbairn, Madeleine; LaChance, Jim; Master, Kathryn Teigen De; Ashwood, Loka

doi:10.1007/s10460-020-10157-y

Cited by 17 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Consolidation of farm and land ownership occurs both as farmers become locked into a downward economic spiral-in which they must take on debt to purchase increasingly capital-intensive inputs in the face of steadily shrinking profit margins-and through farmland financialization, in which non-farmers use new forms of financial investment to profit from farmland. This process drives a trend toward increasing farmer tenancy and absentee land ownership, which siphons wealth away from rural communities and limits the range of viable farm business models (Cochrane, 1993;Hendrickson and Heffernan, 2002;Bernstein, 2010;Howard, 2016;Fairbairn et al, 2021). Homogenization refers to the rapid decline of crop and livestock diversity across both farm and landscape scales due to specialization in commodity crops for global markets (Khoury et al, 2014); increasing concentration of the global seed market (Howard, 2020); and privatization of plant genetic resources (Kloppenburg, 2005; Montenegro de Wit, 2017b).…”

Section: Simplifying Pathwaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Financial institutions often seek marginal farmland, for example land with low soil quality and little annual rainfall, for speculative investment. And this often removes that land from the hands of local farmers (Fairbairn et al, 2021). Studies from around the world suggest that marginal lands can be used for bioenergy crops (Helliwell, 2018;Koide et al, 2018), livestock production (Hall, 2018), or removed from cultivation for restoration and conservation (Merckx and Pereira, 2015).…”

Section: Simplifying Pathway Trends: Extracting Value From Marginalizmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The economic factors driving land use are increasingly divorced from the day-to-day operational decisions of working farms. Each year, more land is taken out of food production for other uses-e.g., energy production, residential development, or conservation reserves-while farmland that remains in agriculture is increasingly purchased by non-farmers as a capital investment (Fairbairn et al, 2021). These trends make it harder for farmers to own and access farmland, reducing their control over its dispensation.…”

Section: Enhancing Land Access and Tenurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Petersen-Rockney

Baur

Guzman

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Humanity faces a triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. In response, increasing the general adaptive capacity of farming systems is essential. We identify two divergent strategies for building adaptive capacity. Simplifying processes seek to narrowly maximize production by shifting the basis of agricultural production toward centralized control of socially and ecologically homogenized systems. Diversifying processes cultivate social-ecological complexity in order to provide multiple ecosystem services, maintain management flexibility, and promote coordinated adaptation across levels. Through five primarily United States focused cases of distinct agricultural challenges—foodborne pathogens, drought, marginal lands, labor availability, and land access and tenure—we compare simplifying and diversifying responses to assess how these pathways differentially enhance or degrade the adaptive capacity of farming systems in the context of the triple threat. These cases show that diversifying processes can weave a form of broad and nimble adaptive capacity that is fundamentally distinct from the narrow and brittle adaptive capacity produced through simplification. We find that while there are structural limitations and tradeoffs to diversifying processes, adaptive capacity can be facilitated by empowering people and enhancing ecosystem functionality to proactively distribute resources and knowledge where needed and to nimbly respond to changing circumstances. Our cases suggest that, in order to garner the most adaptive benefits from diversification, farming systems should balance the pursuit of multiple goals, which in turn requires an inclusive process for active dialogue and negotiation among diverse perspectives. Instead of locking farming systems into pernicious cycles that reproduce social and ecological externalities, diversification processes can enable nimble responses to a broad spectrum of possible stressors and shocks, while also promoting social equity and ecological sustainability.

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Section: Simplifying Pathwaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Simplifying Pathway Trends: Extracting Value From Marginalizmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Enhancing Land Access and Tenurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Petersen-Rockney

Baur

Guzman

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…While future land imaginaries can be full of opportunity and hopeful, in other settings people may feel that there is little room for imagining or dreaming, with futures dominated by (social) obligations attached to land (Visser 2006) or heavy debts linked to land (Hofman 2018). Fairbairn et al (2020) also describe counter-imaginaries of the rural population, which critically interrogate the investor's farmland imaginaries and their far too rosy water availability situation. Yet, as their article notes, these alternative imaginaries have not (yet) translated into more hopeful or just land trajectories.…”

Section: Affective Dimensions Of Land Imaginariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

Sippel

Виссер

2020

Agric Hum Values

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Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what distinguishes land from other resources, this symposium suggests the notion of ‘land imaginaries’ as a crucial lens in the study of current land transformations. Political-economy, and the particular economic, financial, or political interests of various actors involved in land projects do not directly result in, or translate into, outcomes, such as dispossession and enclosure, increased commodification, financialization, and assetization, or mobilization and resistance. All these processes are informed by different imaginaries of land—the underlying understandings, views, and visions of what land is, can, and should be—and associated visions, hopes, and dreams regarding land. Drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, crossing Global North/South and East/West, and including contemporary and historical instances of land transformation, this symposium addresses the multifaceted ways in which implicit, explicit, and emergent understandings of land shape current land transformations.

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“…For instance, much of the material dimensions of institutional landscapes that Woods wanted to learn more about are superbly covered in the recent book by Fairbairn (2020), where she shows in great detail what farming assemblages finance seeks to carve out from the human- and the nonhuman world, and how it often fails at doing so. More recent work by Ashwood et al (2020) and Fairbairn et al (2021) also covers what Woods calls the ‘metaphorical ‘landscape’ constituted by corporations, funds and organizations’. In addition, new research is in the making by scholars such as Sarah Sippel (for Australia), Andrew Ofstehage (for Brazil) and Alexandra Langford (for Australia), which will certainly add more ethnographic flesh to the operations outlined in my book.…”

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confidence: 99%

Agri-investment scholars of the world unite! The finance-driven land rush as boundary object

Ouma

2022

Dialogues in Human Geography

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This response addresses several of the issues raised by the commentaries on my book Farming as Financial Asset – Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes (2020). Reflecting upon the intentions and limitations of the book, it makes a call for treating agri-investments to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles. In detail, it engages with the question of how farmland investments relate to other ‘asset classes’ in terms of the practical (and political) problem of institutional investibility, the material and human dimensions of institutional landscapes, the ownership question, as well as the challenge to write a book that has a global historical outlook and offers situated accounts at the same time. It also engages with questions of comparativism, methodology, and the political implications of an opening-the-black box approach.

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In vino veritas, in aqua lucrum: Farmland investment, environmental uncertainty, and groundwater access in California’s Cuyama Valley

Cited by 17 publications

References 38 publications

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

Agri-investment scholars of the world unite! The finance-driven land rush as boundary object

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