AbstractCritics charge that agriculture has reached an unsustainable level of consolidation and expropriation, as exemplified by the supply-chain breakdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, advocates suggest the current system serves consumers well by keeping prices low and access to choices high. At the center of this debate rests a disagreement over how to compute market power to identify monopolies and oligopolies. We propose a method to study power across different sectors by using Social Network Analysis to analyze key players, the (...) presence of core-periphery structures, and agricultural consolidation. We test our market network approach to power through an analysis of the top ten pork powerhouses. We find that Big Finance is closely tied to Big Ag, and that key players limit the capacity for more peripheral actors, like growers, equipment producers, and regional banks, to engage in the network. We identify system level risk of collapse and suggest pathways for reform. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between farmland investment and environmental uncertainty. It examines how farmland investors seek to “render land investible” in spite of drought, groundwater depletion, and changing regulations. To do so, we analyze a single case study: the purchase of 8000 acres of dry rangeland in California’s Cuyama Valley by the Harvard University endowment for use in creating an irrigated vineyard. Drawing from interviews with Cuyama Valley farmers and community members, participant observation at community meetings, and public document (...) analysis, we make two primary contributions to understandings of uncertain resource materiality in farmland investment. First, this case reveals that investors can turn environmental uncertainty into an advantage, exploiting both the temporal uncertainties associated with resource management under climate change and the spatial uncertainties inherent to all subsurface resources. We argue that the material and legal uncertainties of groundwater access provide investors with a potentially lucrative opening to assert their preferred land imaginaries and improve their property values. In the Cuyama Valley they did so through both participation in groundwater governance and the establishment of water-related infrastructure on their property. Second, this case highlights that the asset-making processes involved in farmland investment may be as much vertical as they are horizontal. The need to map and measure the uncertain vertical dimension of land creates an outsized role for scientific expertise in farmland assetization. (shrink)

Critics of modern agriculture decry the dominance of monocultural landscapes and look to multifunctionality as a desirable alternative that facilitates the production of public goods. In this study, we explored opportunities for multifunctional Midwestern agriculture through participatory research led by farmers, landowners, and other local actors. We suggest that agriculture typically fosters some degree of multifunctionality that arises from the divergent intentions of actors. The result is a scattered arrangement of what we term patchwork multifunctionality, a ubiquitous status quo in (...) which individuals provide public goods without coordination. In contrast, interwoven multifunctionality describes deliberate collaboration to provide public goods, especially those cases where landowners work across fence lines to weave a synergistic landscape. Using examples from two case studies, we demonstrate the spectrum of patchwork and interwoven multifunctionality that currently exists in the Corn Belt, and present underutilized opportunities for public good creation. (shrink)