Visions of Regenerative Agriculture
As a means to improve soil health, the basic idea of regenerative agriculture is not new. But in recent years it has attracted unprecedented attention from policymakers and businesses that see it as a potential solution to pressing environmental and social problems. What does this mean for farmers and pre-existing regenerative agriculture movements? To answer this question, this project examines a set of company-sponsored soil health and carbon farming initiatives in the U.S. Great Plains and New England. Drawing on the perspectives of diverse stakeholders – farmers, companies, scientists, and community members – the project aims to understand how their visions of regenerative farming shape both on-the-ground practices and broader debates about the future of U.S. agriculture and its role in addressing climate change. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Studies Program.
Past Projects
Corporate Food Supply Chain Sustainability Initiatives
This National Science Foundation-funded project examined the efforts of major food companies to assess and improve the sustainability of their agricultural supply chains. In the 2000-teens, many such companies publicly committed to time-bound, quantitative “sustainable sourcing” goals for commodity crops such as corn, soy, and wheat. But most had no direct relations with or control over the farms producing those crops. How then to assess their sustainability, and ensure it improved over time? To address this challenge, many companies joined multi-stakeholder initiatives, where they developed sustainability metrics as well as tools to collect relevant on-farm data. These initiatives assumed that the very practice of metrics-based assessment would drive improvement. But progress proved much slower than expected; this project helped to show why. For more information about our findings, see the NSF project outcomes report.
The Politics of Food’s Footprint
We know that the environmental footprint of different foods varies, depending on – among other things – whether they are plant or animal-based, and where and how they are produced, processed and transported. But how is a food’s footprint actually calculated, and where did this metric come from? Supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, this project explored the scientific and industry debates over how best to measure and promote awareness of food’s complex footprint.
Science for the Public: The Politics of Food’s Environmental Footprint (video)
Books
Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard, 2009)
That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress.
Fresh won the 2010 Sally Hacker Prize, awarded to the best book in the history of technology directed to a broad audience of readers.
French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford, 2004)
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, French Beans and Food Scares illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy. These intermediaries’ accounts provide a unique perspective on the practical and ethical challenges of globalized food trading. They also show how postcolonial ties shape not only different societies’ geographies of food supply, but also their very ideas about what makes food good.