UC Berkeley

An aging domestic farmer population and depreciating rural sector provokes “good food” activists and policy makers alike to ask, “Who will farm?” One proposal is the aspirational narrative of beginning farmers, where a new generation eschews urban ambitions for a rural life based around environmental stewardship and food systems transformation. This ideal replicates a classic American imaginary: the self-made yeoman farmer as the foundation of society. In doing so, the beginning farmer movement demonstrates a critical blind spot: How will these new farmers get onto the land? Learning from farmers seeking to fulfill this new agrarian dream in California, this dissertation shows how the problem of land access threatens to dead-end the aspirations of the beginning farmer movement.

First, I examine how sociocultural and relational constraints impede land access for former immigrant farmworkers aspiring to independent farming in California’s Central Coast region. Here, I argue that landlord–tenant farmer dynamics dominate and thus complicate beginning farmer narratives. Then, I analyze the flagship federal support program for beginning farmers, the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program (BFRDP). Analysis of the BFRDP’s funding history and discourse reveals a “knowledge deficit” based program focused on the technical rather than the structural aspects of beginning farming. This is contrasted with qualitative analysis of beginning farmer experiences in California’s Central Coast region. The discrepancies between the farmer experiences and the national structure of the BFRDP program ultimately reveal a policy mismatch between the needs of beginning farmers and the programs intended to support them. Finally, searching for methods to re-envision the standard beginning farmer narratives, I explore how web-mapping tools may attend to the entrenched problems of land access. Land access problems are found to be inherently spatial, opening the possibility of mapping interventions. I describe the development of the Farmland Monitoring Project (FMP), a web-mapping framework that interrogates multiple elements of the land access barrier. The reflection-in-practice of the FMP helps explore the juncture between critical GIS and beginning farmer land access dilemmas.

In summary, I argue that the antiquated yeoman myth limits the transformative potential of beginning farmer aspirations. I offer suggestions for how to escape such a narrow narrative construction. In principle, without structural attention to land redistribution and access, the ideal of the new farmer will remain a niche phenomenon.