“Profitability” vs. “Making It:” Causes and Consequences of Disembedding Beginning Farms’ Finances

Abstract

Efforts to recruit, train, and support beginning farmers often emphasize that mastering business finances is a key to farm success. Such efforts to inculcate business mentalities in new farmers are akin to farm-level projects of economic disembedding. While many experts hold that isolating a farm's financial metrics reveals its viability, this article draws upon Polanyian economic understandings to argue that disembedding a farm's finances is fundamentally impossible and that a new farm's finances do not reliably indicate its longevity. Analysis of 12 Iowa cases where alternative farmers decided to quit within five years shows that not all profitable farms succeed. Rather, factors such as personal relationships, burnout, and dissatisfaction with rural life interact with a farm's finances to impact decision-making in highly individual ways. Instead of reducing farm economics to farm finances, this article argues for a contextual understanding of financial considerations within social, historical, and relational elements. [beginning farmers, farm exits, American Midwest, local food systems, embedded economics] Andrea Rissing is a President's Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University in the School of Environment and Natural Resources. Her research examines producer livelihoods and intersections of different food system scales in the United States.

Medical economic vulnerability: a next step in expanding the farm resilience scholarship

“…Second, the variation in results between objective and subjective outcome measures reinforces the importance of using multi-dimensional measurements attentive to both quantitative thresholds deemed indicative of challenges, as well as farmers' lived realities and their perception of current and future prospects (Darnhofer et al 2016;Meuwissen et al 2019;Perrin et al 2020;Rissing 2019). Based on our findings, discounting farm households' lived experience could lead to situations where we overlook the early warning signs of a looming crisis.…”

The landowner role in beginning farmer/rancher land access: predictors of landowners' views of extrafamilial farm transfer to a BFR

“…This contrast suggests that expanding research into landowners who Intra-familial vs extrafamilial farm transfer are approaching retirement (Inwood, 2013;Lobley and Baker, 2012;Mishra et al, 2005;Ruhf, 2013) to further explore their past, present and future financial circumstances relative to transfer and BFR land access will lead to valuable insights into the dynamics the LAPI programs attempt to address (Riley, 2012(Riley, , 2016. These landowner inquiries could resemble the in-depth primary inquiries into BFR finances relative to other factors that influence their viability (Bruce, 2019;Munden-Dixon et al, 2019;Pilgeram and Amos, 2015;Rissing, 2019;Suryanata et al, 2021). They could also resemble a landowner version of secondary data analyses of BFR financial circumstances (Griffin et al, 2020;Katchova and Ahearn, 2017;Nadolnyak et al, 2019;Williamson, 2017).…”

“…These landowner inquiries could resemble the in-depth primary inquiries into BFR finances relative to other factors that influence their viability (Bruce, 2019; Munden-Dixon et al. , 2019; Pilgeram and Amos, 2015; Rissing, 2019; Suryanata et al , 2021). They could also resemble a landowner version of secondary data analyses of BFR financial circumstances (Griffin et al.…”

Polanyi and the Other Alternative Food Network: What San Francisco‐Based Multi‐Level Marketers of “Healthy” Food Tell Us About Values in Market Societies

“…Polanyi's insistence that the only (im)morality informing markets is "the motive of gain" is unproductive in this context. Certainly market societies are dominated by institutions that encourage actors to be "rational," "calculating," and self-interested in pursuing monetary profits on competitive markets (e.g., Barlett, 2017;Guthman & Biltekoff, 2021;Holmes & Yarrow, 2019;Kristiansen, 2023;Rissing, 2019). However, monetary value need not be the only value associated with markets.…”