In Agrarian Dreams Guthman gives us a fine-grained and historically rich analysis of how organic agriculture became big business in California. The question motivating the study is a critical one: how did organic agriculture become so similar to conventional agriculture in terms of industry structure, economic forces and political dynamics? Guthman addresses that question with a diverse approach, drawing on tools from social geography, land economics and interpretive sociology. Her multidimensional argument is summarized in several clear points. First, real organic farming in California is far from the small-farm agrarian ideal that seems to drive organic activism and consumption choices. Second, organic agriculture in California reflects a pre-existing landscape dominated by massive industrialized systems of production and marketing. Third, the contemporary organic certification system fails to promote the deeper social and ecological goals of organics, because they were made to institutionalize economic incentives for organic production. Finally, Guthman concludes, organic agriculture cannot lead to fundamental change in the food system until it is regulated by institutions that encompass the broader social and ecological goals.
After the introductory chapter, Guthman first explains the remarkable growth of organic production in California after 1980. In contrast to the first generation of growers, who were drawn to organic farming by ‘deeply held political, environmental, philosophical, and/or spiritual values’ (p. 23) most of the growers entering organics after 1980 were conventional producers seeking higher profits through new regulatory channels. Guthman shows this growth to be essentially ‘demand-led’, as intermediaries sought to satisfy the market mostly by recruiting the conventional growers they already worked with to convert part of their operations. ‘Gentleman farmers’, often orchardists, formed another key group drawn in by intermediaries. These commodity and specialty crop growers, facing new competition from the international market in the 1980s and 1990s, found organics to be a low-risk accessible way to seek higher value per acre. Products that were relatively easy to grow organically, such as processing tomatoes and wine grapes, increased in production the fastest.
Because the organic movement was eclipsed by the growing organic sector, the contemporary organic situation in California is structurally similar to agribusiness-as-usual, Guthman argues in the third chapter. While the median size of an organic farm in 1997 was 5 acres, over half of the organic sales accrued to the top 2% of growers (p. 43). Taking into account the vast number of hobbyist growers, the structure of organic agriculture in California is not really any different from the conventional sector. Guthman shows that farm ownership and land tenure are substantially the same, even when comparing all-organic growers with those who have both conventional and organic operations. She further rates growers according to agroecological principles and finds that very few (really only subscription farms) conform to ideals of high dependence on farm-based resources, biodiversity and permanent year-round workers. Similarly, most organic acreage is producing for conventional-style long-distance markets, another violation of the small-scale ideal. Given this situation, Guthman finds it unsurprising that most of the major growers express little or no commitment to the deeper political and social implications of organic agriculture.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, Guthman argues that the contemporary situation arises from how the organic boom grew on the pre-existing agro-industrial landscape. Her explanation focuses on how each successive wave of agricultural innovation creates higher expectations for agricultural value per acre, which then leads to higher land values. These higher land values then compel growers to seek maximum income from each piece, prompting innovation and further ratcheting up land prices. Chapter four describes how high-value crops such as vegetable and tree fruits replaced wheat early in the 20th century. The consolidation of packing and shipping locked in growers' reliance on low-paid contract labor in the 1930s and 1940s, instituting industrial relations in the system. Guthman argues that organics in the last part of the 20th century reproduced this dynamic, creating a new high-value stream linking contract labor, monocropping, and concentrated packing and marketing systems to distant retailers. These dynamics are shown in contemporary regional variation in organic farming – ranging from ‘organic by neglect’ to subscription farms pursuing social and ecological justice. Guthman describes and explains these regional patterns in chapter five.
Chapters six and seven focus on how the emergence of the current federally shaped certification system both reflects and reinforces the industrial character of most of the organic sector. The history Guthman gives in chapter six traces how the more complex social and ecological goals of organic agriculture became subsumed to industry concerns about instituting a price premium for organic production and creating a significant barrier to entry. As a result, organic standards came to focus on inputs rather than processes and land rather than people or operations. This price premium approach has serious consequences, Guthman argues in chapter seven. The overall effect was to narrow the range of auditable standards and limit their effectiveness in promoting long-term investments in ecological health and social outcomes. The materials list became a far-too-central arena for politicized debates about standards as well as a focus of manipulation. For example, Guthman describes a practice that violates the spirit, but not the letter of the rules: using a prohibited insect-attracting chemical just outside of a certified organic plot (p.152). Overall, the emerging standards led to an ‘input-substitution’ approach that fits in well with the labor, production and marketing practices of conventional agriculture.
Guthman comes full circle in the conclusion, warning that the family farm ideal, so dominant in organic agriculture discourse, is not only untrue but also unhelpful in envisioning and seeking a truly transformed agriculture. Scale is not the problem. Farmer independence is not the problem. The problem is relationships of exploitation that become taken for granted and reproduced in emerging agricultural systems. The populist agrarian vision does not, for example, raise the question of why farmworkers were not included in discussions leading to organic standards. It also does not address how the commodification of land or income inequality in American society limits the ability of organic agriculture to pursue social goals. In the final chapter, Guthman offers a few ideas for bringing the social and environmental aspects of organics into the foreground.
Guthman's argument is both provocative and persuasive, going beyond the hand-wringing that recent debates over organic regulation have prompted to offer an explanation of how and why actual existing conditions in California fail to realize the goals of the organic movement. The precise and straightforward writing style makes the key points all the more vivid. This book will likely find a home on the well-trafficked bookshelves of many activists and scholars.
My only disappointment with the book is that it does not address the counterfactual question: could it have been otherwise? By her account, it seems that standards were always about protecting a marketing category and were always driven by larger-scale market-oriented growers. Doesn't the massive growth of organics have to articulate with the pre-existing agricultural landscape? Her analysis raises a question: has organics ‘conventionalized’ or was it always, in a sense, ‘conventional’? Was there a time when the organic label had integrity or did the very process of labeling take ‘organic’ from a way of life to a marketing category? This question was not Guthman's agenda, so my critique is perhaps misplaced. But nevertheless because this question is not addressed, the shape of the analysis tends to treat the conventional–alternative divide as more solid than it is. Despite my quibble, Guthman's ambitious and rigorous research adds an important empirical touchstone to an often unhelpfully abstract debate. This kind of situated analysis will help all of us understand different perspectives as well as the common values that will lead to tangible, positive change.
