Beyond Who Farms: Stewardship, Gentrification, and the Production of Agricultural Space

• In Event: Marxist Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Marxist Sociology Section Roundtable 1

Abstract

Farmer training programs are widely promoted as solutions to labor shortages, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. Yet they operate within landscapes shaped by uneven histories of land dispossession, racialized development, and intensifying gentrification pressures. This article examines how a county-supported farmer training program in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico intersects with processes of gentrification and land stewardship in a region marked by deep Indigenous and Hispanic agrarian histories. Drawing on thirteen in-depth interviews with farmers, program leaders, and community stakeholders, I analyze how participants understand and negotiate gentrification in relation to agricultural land. Using a production of space approach, I argue that farmer training programs function as spatial institutions that actively produce agricultural space. They are not neutral technical initiatives; they shape who becomes a farmer, how land is accessed and worked, and which spatial logics become dominant. While such programs can reproduce exclusion by privileging resourced newcomers, they can also sustain continuity in historically rooted agricultural communities when stewardship is grounded in place-based reciprocity and collective responsibility. By reconceptualizing farmer training programs as political actors in the production of space, this article contributes to scholarship on rural gentrification, land governance, and alternative food networks, demonstrating how agricultural futures are actively negotiated through institutionalized training infrastructures.

Author

• Vittoria R Totaro, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque