Thomas A. Lyson - Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community

The path to civic agriculture began in 1988 when I became the director of Cornell's Farming Alternatives Program (FAP). Although the program was established during the farm crisis of the mid-1980s to help New York farmers ease out of dairying and into alternative enterprises, its mission changed in the 1990s from assisting individual farmers to working with groups of farmers and community development practitioners to promote a more sustainable agriculture and food system in the state. Sustainability became the focus of much of my research and writing during the 1990s. And it was during this period that the emergence of a new form of agriculture and food production became visible. Farmers markets were springing up everywhere around New York State. Small-scale food processors appeared on the radar screen. Community and school gardens began dotting the landscape. And organic farmers were organizing into networks to more effectively market their products.

For a while we called these emerging forms of agriculture and food production the New Agriculture. They were new in many important and significant ways, not the least of which was that they had strong ties to community and the environment. But there was another New Agriculture on the block. The nation's agricultural biotechnology companies were proclaiming that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were going to serve as the foundation of a New Agriculture that would feed the world. If the biotechnology corporations had appropriated the term New Agriculture for their purposes, what did we have?

The new forms of production, processing, and distribution that we were tracking clearly had a connection to place and people. They were more than just a set of new production techniques. They were civic. And so in 1999 I coined the term civic agriculture in a paper I delivered at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society.

I owe thanks to many individuals for their support, assistance, and encouragement. My colleagues in the Community, Food, and Agriculture Program (formerly the Farming Alternatives Program), Joanna Green, Heidi Mouillessaux-Kunzman, Duncan Hilchey, and Gretchen Gilbert, have integrated many of the civic concepts into their work and put a human face on civic agriculture.

Over the past fifteen years Gil Gillespie and I have worked on several large agriculture and food system projects. The results generated from these projects have provided grist for this book. Jennifer Wilkins in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell showed me the connection of my work to community nutrition. Phil McMichael's work on global food systems served as a very useful counterpoint to my interest in the local. Jeff Sobal's conceptual work on the agriculture and food system helped me situate my work in a broader systems context.

I have had the good fortune to work with many talented graduate students at Cornell. I have learned from all of them. Melanie DuPuis showed me how state-level agricultural policy preserved family farming in some places while leading to industrialization in other areas. Clare Hinrichs looked at how farming, family, and community are bound together. Rick Welsh delved into the survival strategies of family farmers. Beth Barham compared the sustainable agriculture movement in France with that in the United States. Bob Torres showed how denominations of origin can nurture local agriculture development. Robin Kreider has shown how informal organic marketing standards become formalized. And Matt Hoffman has tested the civic agriculture model in Vermont.

Outside of Cornell, Doug Harper's work on changing works among dairy farmers in the Northeast showed me how community and farming could be brought together. My understanding of the civic community benefited from my collaborations with Charlie Tolbert, Mike Irwin, and Troy Blanchard. Gail Feenstra and Mike Hamm read my manuscript with a critical eye. Their comments and suggestions are much appreciated.