Abstract
Based on 10 months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers’ identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers.
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Notes
It is notable that, as of the publication of this paper, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board—the statewide office tasked with monitoring and managing water resources across Oklahoma—had not completed its assessment of the Rush Springs Aquifer. Without the formal approval of OWRB’s study of Rush Springs—which takes into account geology, hydrology, recharge rates, and human use of groundwater in order to set an annual draw rate limit for water users—it remains a common belief in the region that the current usage patterns of the Rush Springs Aquifer is sustainable. This could change when these scientific finds are released and approved.
Encroachment of eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), resulting from decades of fire suppression and changing land use patterns (Fuhlendorf 1999; Fuhlendorf et al. 2008), has created on-going and expensive land management challenges for farmers in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Longer term ecological and climate impacts of woody encroachment are also projected to be significant (Engle et al. 2008; Ge and Zou 2013).
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Acknowledgements
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OIA-1301789. The authors would like to thank the people of Caddo County, Oklahoma, for their extraordinary generosity and kindness. We would especially like to thank the staff of the Anadarko Community Library.
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VanWinkle, T.N., Friedman, J.R. What’s good for the soil is good for the soul: scientific farming, environmental subjectivities, and the ethics of stewardship in southwestern Oklahoma. Agric Hum Values 34, 607–618 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9750-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9750-z