Karsten Mündel
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 444
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Many farmers express significant concern about the chemical use on their farms---a common trait of North American agriculture. Nonetheless, most farmers continue to practise chemical agriculture. This dissertation focuses on farmers who have made a transition from chemical to sustainable agriculture in the province of Alberta. Sustainable agriculture, in the context of this dissertation, is an approach to farming that considers the farm as an ecosystem with interventions geared towards treating root causes rather than symptoms. This is contrasted with chemical agriculture. Within the context of this adult education thesis, farmers' transitions are conceived as an informal learning project. The central argument is that farmers' learning is transformative to the extent that it transcends acquiring new farming skills and knowledge to encompass an understanding of the chemical agrifood system as fundamentally socially unjust and environmentally destructive. The limited previous research into farmers' transitions focuses on the important ecological aspects of farm transition, often to the exclusion of social aspects. This thesis makes a contribution to understanding farmers' motivations for transition, the process of their informal transformative learning and the various forms of civic engagement that result. The data show that farmers followed one of four paths to sustainable farming practices: incomplete transformative learning; conscientization through sustainable agriculture; concurrent transformations; and closing a values-action gap. In all but the first of these, farmers had a counterhegemonic understanding of both their farming practices and their civic engagement. A major form of farmers' engagement is through the articulation of a sustainable agriculture standpoint---a vision for sustainable farming practices as part of a sustainable agrifood system. Farmers are also involved formally and informally in myriad other activities in their rural communities and beyond through business, non-profit, and state organizations. Situating the research in the province of Alberta gives an interesting insight into farmers' different forms of dissent because of the political realities of this context. The theoretical framework combines insight from the political economy of sustainable agriculture, hegemony and counterhegemony, feminist standpoint theory and transformative learning and conscientization. Data were collected through a series of semi-structured interviews with sustainable farmer families in Alberta.
