Across the fence line: Civic Agriculture within Industrial Domination

Abstract

How does civic agriculture operate where industrial agriculture dominates? Research on civic agriculture — the embedding of food production in local community relationships — has concentrated where the industrial system is structurally absent: in sociopolitically liberal peri-urban and coastal settings where civic agriculture is broadly supported, not in the heart of industrial farming country. Based on seven weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at a regenerative Catholic farm in the heart of a Midwestern industrial farming region, I trace how farmers pursuing civic agriculture operate within, and respond to, the structures of industrial agricultural domination that surround them. I find that domination reaches the farm in four distinguishable forms — chemical drift, absentee property power, commodity-treadmill lock-in, and the hollowing of civic institutions — and that the farm answers by putting relationships before economics, an inversion its faith-based institutional form makes affordable. The civic life it builds is genuine and bounded at once: the farm draws metropolitan environmentalists, conservative farmers, atheists, and religious adherents into shared work, while remaining entangled with the commodity system it works against. My work extends civic-agriculture research by showing what the form becomes — and what it costs — where it shares a fence line with the system it resists.