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To fully understand the objectives of LaFarm, and hence the images and ideas this project serves to amplify, it is important to first understand the social conditions and movements out of which LaFarm grew. A comprehensive-enough analysis of such conditions in the United States began during the Great Depression, when Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 in an effort to provide economic relief to family farmers experiencing overwhelming crop failure. While ostensibly well-intentioned and genuinely helpful to many farmers at the time, Congress’s decision to create subsidies and price supports for individual crops (i.e. corn, sugar, wheat, etc.) incentivized many farmers to corporatize, buying up large tracts of land and planting only one or two types of crops on that land, (Pirog et al, 2014). Whereas at one time people relied on individual small to midsize local farms (or farms of their own) for a wide variety of produce, meat, dairy, and grains which they would obtain themselves, now single-crop farms planted and harvested en masse, selling to food manufacturing companies who would transform these crops into a variety of processed foods that consumers could find in their local supermarkets. Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, food had become overwhelmingly corporatized in a “commodity-based food system” which efficiently incorporated every step of a natural human function into a new market-based economy (Pirog et al, 2014).
It is this corporatization and marketization of food which movements like the local food movement and the sustainable agriculture movement have historically sought to resist, and it has been the objectives of these movements that LaFarm most closely resonates with. These movements, and by extension, LaFarm, are energized by a wide swath of people who have grown disenchanted with the idea of “anonymous” food and its associated social, health-related, and environmental harms, among others, and have thus decided to “vote with [their] fork” by actively seeking out (and in many cases, establishing themselves) cleaner and more transparent food initiatives nearby. Such initiatives include, but are not limited to, farmers markets, community gardens, direct marketing programs, farm stands, food policy councils, and various forms of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which in general involves trading shares of local farms’ harvests, which travel directly from “farm to table,” thus completely cutting out the food-manufacturing and wholesale middlemen (Pirog et al, 2014). According to University of Nebraska scholar Neva Hassanein, “If there is a common conviction among those who identify with one or more of the goals associated with the sustainable agriculture movement, it is opposition to the industrialization, corporate domination, and globalization of agriculture,” (Hassanein, 1999).
This resistance to mainstream forms of gardening and food production have manifested in a number of varied forms throughout the 60s and 70s and into today. Particularly influential to LaFarm’s inception and continued operation have been what are frequently referred to as the student farming movement and the local food movement. These movements, which were influenced in turn by still more liberatory movements like the “back-to-the-land” movement, and perhaps most notably, the United Farm Workers movement, saw primarily middle-class college students join local organic farmers and working-class social activists in protesting several aspects of mainstream oppressive social consciousness, from the Vietnam war, to capitalism and consumer culture, to direct environmental harms in the form of chemical pesticides and other pollutants, (Hassanein, 1999). Moving into the increasingly neoliberal climate of the 1980s, there was a noticeable loss of focus on social justice as these movements tended to focus on issues that were more purely environmental as well as those that were tied to food industries, which had begun massively corporatizing for several decades by that point. Thus small farms picked up a lot of attention and have largely remained in the spotlight since then, (Hassanein, 1999).
It is this deafness to social justice that Bobby J. Smith, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, calls attention to in his article, “Food justice, intersectional agriculture, and the triple food movement.” In it, he explains how many of the previously mentioned contemporary local and sustainable food initiatives (i.e. farmers markets) are overwhelmingly white in their composition and value systems. He applies sociologist Elijah Anderson’s concept of “the white space” to describe how the majority of these ostensibly race-blind and race-neutral movements toward food sovereignty are anything but race-blind and race-neutral when their composition and consequent values and traditions are considered.
It is helpful also to consider small farms and community gardens and their designs with a more specifically racial and ethnic lens, as that one is often overlooked amidst the overwhelming homogeneity of American mainstream (white) culture, and particularly within its primarily white institutions (PWIs). In her essay “A Garden So Brilliant with Colors, So Original in its Design,” environmental history scholar Dianne Glave highlights the defining characteristics of an African American garden, and how they differed from those of a traditional, primarily Euro-American garden, particularly in the Progressive Era (Glave, 2003). In general, while Euro-American gardens tended to value structure and symmetry above all other factors, African American gardens tended to emphasize the combinations of wide varieties of color, shape, materials, and other stylistic choices. “African Americans relied on an oral tradition, unlike Euro-Americans whose expertise came from magazines and books.” While many wealthier white gardeners bought rows upon rows of whatever plants they understood to be conventionally attractive, African American gardeners placed more value in thrift and in the lack of the constraints of one dominant style (Glave, 2003). With this in mind, the team sought a less homogeneous design, preferring instead to tie multiple images and styles together in a complex, eclectic final aesthetic.
While all of these trends have been materializing in American and western society as a whole, it is also worth focusing on American agricultural education in particular as steps are taken toward a more comprehensive understanding of LaFarm’s inception and the values which necessitated it. To do this, it is not completely out of the question to look all the way back to the latter half of the 19th century, as the ideals of the Industrial Revolution were just solidifying as unquestioned aspects of the American ethic. It was during this that the US federal government sought to make technology a greater portion of its higher education system, instead of simply the humanities which tended to dominate the university atmosphere prior. It also sought to integrate the training of farmers with that of these technological fields as well as the more traditional liberal arts fields, to professionalize a trade which had come to be associated with anything but the speed and efficiency and instant gratification which now dominated the culture. In 1862, the Morrill Act was passed, which set aside land owned by the federal government for new institutions which sought to bring more technology, professional practices, and liberal arts initiatives to its agricultural curriculum (Sayre & Clark, 2003).
Over the next century, however, these trends of “professionalization” began to look more like “isolation,” as higher education began to gradually distance itself further and further from the interests of real farmers. This isolation manifested in myriad variations. In their seminal college farming history, “Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America,” Laura Sayre and Sean Clark point to the breeding of crop varieties which possessed no commercial interest to farmers or the public more generally. Another example concerns the creation of “environmental studies” departments and curricula which barely mentioned agriculture at all, let alone instantiated experiences that would truly provide students with a comprehensive understanding of food production and distribution systems (Sayre & Clark, 2003). It was in 1974 that André and Jean Mayer finally brought widespread attention to this gaping divide in their scathing publication, “Agriculture, the Island Empire,” in which they argued “the present isolation of agriculture in American academic life” put the future of the earth and its people in serious jeopardy. Finally, in 1994, David Orr published “Agriculture and the Liberal Arts,” which proposed small college farms as the solution. A decade later, in 2009, 29% of the 300 top North American colleges and universities had some type of small farm or garden to supplement their curriculum (Sayre & Clark, 2003), among them Lafayette College.