« The sanitary settler state: Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Sanitary Citizenship in the Settler Colonial City: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia’, in Maxine Newlands, Claire Hansen (eds), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2024
The settler prison reproduces settler colonialism: Patrick Horton, ‘The only guaranteed Aboriginal housing is… ‘, Parity, 37, 5, 2024, pp. 83-85 »

The settler family farm reproduces settler colonialism: Isaac Sohn Leslie, Alexa Wilhelm, Analena Bruce, ‘”Marriage is Necessary”: how accessing infrastructure through the family farm affects viability, transitions, and justice’, Agriculture and Human Values, 2024

22Aug24

Abstract: Infrastructure can make or break a farm’s economic viability. Farmers’ ownership and ability to invest in infrastructure is often arranged through the family farm model, where farmers are typically married to their business partners. In this paper, we analyze the implications of organizing infrastructure access through the family farm model. Through interviews with 66 farmers and key informants in New England, U.S., we identify a treadmill of infrastructure accumulation for farmers with family capital and a treadmill of high labor and low profitability for farmers without the family capital to acquire needed infrastructure. Infrastructure accumulation in the family farm model builds farms that are difficult to adapt to new systems and markets, challenging to retire from without selling to developers, and hard for beginning farmers to afford. The economic tendencies of organizing infrastructure through the family farm model can make it difficult for farmers of all social backgrounds to access farmland and infrastructure. Moreover, continued inequities in family wealth and wages, credit access, and social capital means that the family farm model systematically disadvantages farmers of color, LGBTQ + farmers, limited resource, and women farmers. We argue that infrastructure accumulation through the family farm model is a process that intensifies inequities in farm viability, exacerbates the challenges of transitioning farms to new farmers and ways of farming, and fuels land injustice.


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