In the mid twenty-tens, many major food companies committed to sustainably source their priority ingredients, including North American commodity crops. With deadlines set for the decade’s end, companies joined multi-stakeholder initiatives and developed standards, metrics, and other assessment tools to help them track and drive progress. In short, they embarked on the sort of corporate supply chain governance that agri-food scholars have long studied. But how would this governance happen, especially in the commodity supply chains where companies knew and controlled (...) little about upstream production? Treating supply chain governance as not just a corporate undertaking but also the work of mid-level sustainability managers, this paper examines the practical skills and knowledge, or mētis, employed by managers in their efforts to win the support of colleagues, farmers, and other supply chain actors. This analysis provides insight into how and why food companies’ approaches to governing agricultural sustainability have changed since they set their 2020 sourcing goals. More broadly, it highlights the contingent nature of their governance. (shrink)

Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to (...) thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors’ experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers. We encourage funding bodies to develop mechanisms that ensure funded projects respect the integrity of social science expertise and (...) incorporate its insights. We also call for the integration of social scientific questions and methods in interdisciplinary projects from the outset, and for a genuine curiosity on the part of STEM and social science researchers alike about the knowledge and skills each of us has to offer. We contend that cultivating such integration and curiosity within interdisciplinary collaborations will make them more enriching for all researchers involved, and more likely to generate socially beneficial outcomes. (shrink)

Metrics have long served as tools for governing at a distance. In the food industry, major manufacturers have embraced metrics as tools to govern the sustainability of the farms producing their commodity raw materials. This metrical turn has been influenced but also complicated by agricultural datafication, that is, the increasing quantities of data generated on and about farms. Despite the sheer abundance of data that companies might use to measure and drive improvement in on-farm sustainability, they have struggled to collect (...) data suitable for such purposes. Attention to the different kinds of distance and diversity across which metrics are supposed to govern suggests reasons why they may fail to do so, even when wielded by otherwise powerful corporations. (shrink)

In recent years regenerative agriculture has attracted growing attention as a means to improve soil health and farmer livelihoods while slowing climate change. With this attention has come increased policy support as well as the launch of private sector programs that promote regenerative agriculture as a form of carbon farming. In the United States many of these programs recruit primarily in regions where large-scale commodity production prevails, such as the Great Plains. There, a decades-old regenerative agriculture movement is growing rapidly, (...) but not due to the incentives offered by companies’ carbon programs. On the contrary, farmers are adopting regenerative practices to cut their dependence on corporate agrochemical inputs and expertise, and to thereby achieve technology sovereignty. These practice changes often strain farmers’ existing social relationships while drawing them into new and previously neglected ones, including the more-than-human relations necessary for building soil health. These new relationships and the knowledge they generate may in turn lead farmers to think differently about their own autonomy. These findings provide insight into farmers’ skepticism of private sector carbon farming programs, and highlight the value of attention to the multiple types of relationship change that accompany and facilitate regenerative transitions. (shrink)