Sydney Moriah Giacalone

SYDNEY GIACALONE, then a graduate student at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “‘What Kind of Ancestor Do I Want to Be?’ Culpability, Repair, and Re-Alliance on the American Family Farm,” supervised by Dr. Myles Lennon. Across diverse regions of U.S. agriculture, a small but growing subgroup of rural farmers from multigenerational farming families are thinking about their own culpability in American agriculture’s past and present environmental and social harms, and desiring to change. This research studies producers in the American South and Midwest who are transitioning away from conventional practices towards environmentally and social repairing approaches. Drawing from 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 73 participants from 47 farms, the research studies these farmers’ experiences questioning their past education and internalized ideologies, learning how to collaborate with plants, animals, and microbial life to repair degraded ecologies, making intentional breaks from family and institutions, and creating networks to align with other people and causes. As farmers attempt to disrupt the hierarchies upholding and constituting the American family farm from within this structure itself, how are familial, ecological, and community relationships broken, remade, or formed anew? This report details the research conducted and preliminary findings from on-farm and community participant observation focusing on 13 in-depth participating farms in Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Missouri, and Nebraska; archival and family document co-research; and network participant observation and relationship facilitation.