Agrarianism is important in the American mythos. Land represents both a set of values and a store of wealth. In this paper, we ask how land matters in the lives of rural, Southern, Black farmland owners. Drawing on thirty-four interviews, we argue that, since the end of slavery, land has continued to operate as a site of racialized exclusion. Local white elites limit Black farmers' access to land ownership through discriminatory lending practices. At the same time, Black farmland owners articulate an ethos in which land is a source of freedom, pride, and belonging. This we term Black agrarianism. They cultivate resistance to the legacies of slavery and sharecropping and contemporary practices of social closure. These Black farmland owners, then, view land as protection from white domination. Thus, we demonstrate how landownership is a site for the recreation of racial hierarchy in the contemporary period whilst also offering the potential for resistance and emancipation.

In this paper, we situate the recent rise of racialized and often violent political discourse within a framework of a class-based conception of nature and property. In this theoretical work, we contribute to thinking about how Whites are racially constituted by showing how an understanding of whiteness among the far right is significantly linked to narratives surrounding rural spaces as havens of individualism and in sharp contrast to the perceived multiculturalism of the city. In developing our argument, we utilize public statements made by Ted Nugent as observable examples of this far-right, violent, and racialized rhetoric. We argue that the far right is able to create a common ground with moderate conservatives around a shared understanding of rural places as embodiments of virtuous white culture, private property, and individualism. This politicized whiteness project, we argue, helps to galvanize and strengthen a conservative coalition while simultaneously pulling their collective ideology further to the right.

In this article we analyze the community capital implications of an emerging canola biofuel value chain within wheat-producing regions of the United States as radical changes are taking place in energy markets and prices drop. We analyze the intersections of the motivations that encourage and sustain value chain participation and stocks and investments of community capitals. We use the Community Capitals Framework (Flora et al. 2016) to analyze the ways that new biofuel value chains affect various types of capital within rural communities, and to understand the context, processes, and impacts of decision-making within the biofuel value chain. Interviews and focus groups with actors along the value chain including farmers, processors, transporters, plant breeders, extension professionals, and farm service suppliers identify motivational factors and how community resources affect participation decisions.