Abstract
Commentary 1
It is perhaps the mark of a true classic that its once revelatory conclusions now appear as common sense. Such is the case with Agrarian Dreams, a book which showed organic agriculture to be far less romantic or revolutionary than its popular portrayals would suggest. The rise and institutionalization of the organic label had done little to bolster diversified, ecologically revitalizing, and socially just agrarian livelihoods. In fact, it had reproduced many of the ills of its industrial counterpart: sprawling extractive monocultures sustained by exploitative labor practices. Regulation had narrowed organic practices to simple input substitution, easily amenable to established conventional growers attracted by market opportunity. Nearly 20 years later, when Walmart has become the largest retailer of organic products by keeping prices of its private label organic foods astonishingly low, and their origins obscured, Guthman’s original book rings truer than ever.
Agrarian Dreams articulates not only the shortcomings of the organics movement, but more importantly lays out how and why the very process of institutionalization and the pursuit of price premiums ultimately undermined the values espoused by its early adherents. The book provides an unvarnished and highly detailed account of how economics largely trumps ideology in explaining the growth of the organics sector. It then offers a political economic explanation for why the organics industry has come to mirror its conventional agribusiness counterparts. Exploitative practices and regionally specific commodity orientations are baked into land values, and the necessity to net a profit amidst strong competition inevitably tempers ideological ambition.
The book is also a direct response to those who champion small farms as a solution to the ecological and social ills of the “conventionalization” of organics. Downsizing does not provide an adequate remedy, Guthman argues. In fact it is distinctly counterproductive, focusing naively on form rather than on processes of exploitation. By embracing the Jeffersonian ideal, organic agriculture proponents romanticize private property as morally just and thus remain persistently silent when it comes to confronting the structural conditions of land and labor. The agrarian populist imaginary of the small family farm is not only ahistorical in the California context, capitalist from the get-go, it also naturalizes the property relations at the root of the problem. The central paradox for Guthman is that organic growers seek price premiums to cope with high land values, and in doing so likely make the problem worse, further constraining practices (like improved labor conditions) which might break from the existing economics of production.
As a sympathetic but steadfast critique, Guthman’s book became a springboard for several key strands of critical agri-environmental scholarship beyond the organic conventionalization conversation. First, it helped launch a rapidly expanding body of work confronting the limits of alternative food movements including localism, fair trade, and other ethical orientations sometimes referred to as the “Santa Cruz School” (Allen, 2004; DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Jaffee and Howard, 2010). Second, by laying bare the failures of a labeling scheme predicated on producer responsibility and consumer choice, Agrarian Dreams bolstered broader critiques of neoliberal governance both within and beyond agriculture. And finally, while the book predates most scholarship on the financialization of farmland, its emphasis on mechanisms of land valuation as the core constraint on farm practices appears in retrospect as a sort of ominous foreshadowing.
The centrality of land valuation is perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of Agrarian Dreams and has not been as widely adopted among fellow critics of organic conventionalization or eco-labels as neoliberal governance. The book is ultimately not just about shedding the idealism of organics, but about the legacies of rent-seeking that limit more radical relationships to land. In retrospect, this point might have been made even stronger if it had been able to engage with subsequent studies of California agriculture as an ongoing settler-colonial project inextricable from white supremacy (Almaguer, 1994). In this light, the oppressively race-blind and class-muted stance of the new agrarians appears more continuous than incongruous.
Guthman’s critique of scale as a meaningful metric for achieving social and ecological benefits has done little to put a damper on enthusiasm for small farms and “repeasantization” (van der Ploeg, 2009) among alternative agriculture advocates. A prominent survey of agroecological practices on organic farms across size classes staunchly supports scale as a proxy for ecological integrity (Liebert et al., 2022), albeit without proposing a causal mechanism or addressing labor relations. Recent attention to the prevalence of agroecological practices among US Latino/a farmers, despite frequent exclusion from alternative agriculture institutions like organic certification, comes closer to explaining how the scale dependence of diversification, direct sales and exclusively family labor does achieve some version of the agrarian dream (Minkoff-Zern et al., 2020).
That said, after nearly 20 years Agrarian Dreams serves as the clear referent on the conventionalization of organic agriculture, an essential work on California’s agrarian political economy, and a standard-bearer in geography for integrating empirical richness with theoretical insight. While best remembered as a critique of organics, in reality the book takes the conventionalization thesis as a jumping off point for developing a political economic analysis which clearly illustrates that structural conditions cannot be wished away by goodwill. For all those seeking to fundamentally change the way agriculture operates, the message is as relevant as ever.
Emily Reisman
University at Buffalo, USA