Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mobile Farming Families of Southern Appalachia and the Mexican Bajio

North American agricultural livelihoods have gone through significant transitions since the late twentieth century. Changes include the restructuring of food systems so that local farming economies are increasingly tied to global networks and processes. One somewhat surprising response on the part of local food producers has been the rise of binational family-based farming enterprises, which, despite being small to midscale ventures, successfully coordinate across state lines to facilitate vertically integrated operations, mitigate inequities, and access produce markets. The research supported by this award will investigate how this occurs: how do local family fruit and vegetable producers utilize global networks, coordinate transregional projects, and contribute to food system circulations? And what role do traditional modes of organizing family farms, such as kinship networks, play in contemporary farming operations? The research will be carried out by University of Kentucky doctoral student Mary Elizabeth W. Schmid, with direction from anthropologist Dr. Ann E. Kingsolver, in the western North Carolina region of southern Appalachia, with comparative research in other southeastern U.S. states and Mexico.

Schmid will document family and enterprise histories, provisioning strategies, forms of relatedness, cultural practices, and decision-making processes to determine how members draw on family and non-family relations to enable strategic production, distribution, and marketing coordination across time and space. Her mixed methods approach will include archival research, participant observation, interviewing, social network analysis, ethnographic mapping, and qualitative analysis of textual data. She will map family and enterprise networks, temporal cycles, transnational kinship circuit flows, and the social organization of fruit and vegetable production and marketing. Findings from this research will contribute to understanding the functioning of small to midscale fruit and vegetable production enterprises in the contemporary economy and the social and economic effects of agricultural policies intended to regulate this sector.