Finally, some law and rural sociology/ag scholarship

For the six years I've attended the Rural Sociological Society's (RSS) Annual Meeting, I've been pressing for the production of more scholarship at the intersection of law and rural livelihoods--and specifically for more attention among rural sociologists to the role of law in the phenomena they study.  So, imagine my delight when I learned at the RSS meeting in August, 2013, of an article forthcoming in Rural Sociology titled, "Where's the Farmer?  Limiting Liability in Midwestern Industrial Hog Production."

Scholars largely assume that hog production is following the same industrialization process as the integrated poultry industry. Since the collapse of hog farming in the 1990s, academics have anticipated that producers will eventually become trapped in contracts that leave the integrator with full control over the production process. Embedded in this prediction is an assumption that hog farmers respond to these productive pressures individually. Our analysis of the Carthage Management System suggests a different path for the hog commodity chain. The Carthage Management System is a conglomeration of business management firms that bring finishing hog farmers together to form limited liability corporations (LLCs) in the breed-to-wean stage of hog production. We use a sociology of agrifood framework to suggest that the nuances of hog production encourage the use of what we call folding corporations to limit liability in ways that profoundly transform the family farm. Corporations and individual hog farmers alike employ this creative LLC structure to deflect responsibility for the risks of hog production. We identify how folding corporations externalize the costs of production onto rural communities. Additional research is needed to better understand unfolding farmer identities, legal protections for farmers, how widespread organizational structures like Carthage Management System are, and their consequences for rural communities and the industrialization process.

The paper's authors are Loka Ashwood, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin in the Dept. of Community and Environmental Sociology, and Danielle Diamond and Kendall Thu, both of the anthropology department at Northern Illinois University.  I was fortunate enough at RSS 2013 to moderate a panel on which Ashwood presented her paper on "The Moral Economy of Land Loss," and I'm excited by the prospect of future work from a rural sociologist expanding the discipline in exciting cross-disciplinary ways, including by engaging law and legal processes.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

New Report

The Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators (ASIWPCA) has issued a report calling for a warm embrace between EPA and those charged with implementing the CWA in most instances.

As the administration changes, one can question how and if agriculture's treatment under the CWA will change. I tend to suspect that it will change, but the question of how is more difficult. Read the rest of this post . . . .As this report highlights, the difficulties abound. From funding to TMDLs to non-point sources and nutrient controls, the report contains a variety of suggestions for change. Whether or not this is change we can (or should) believe in, is another matter. For instance, a state and federal cooperative effort at controlling non-point source pollution in agriculture appears remote in a climate where CAFO regulations are only now becoming final. And increased funding, alone, won't get the job done under the current framework, which excludes agricultural stormwater from the definition of point sources and relies on states to set water quality standards, develop TMDLs and implement them.

Given the geographic problems and the technical difficulty of finding the appropriate standard for controlling nutrients, states and local governments must play a key role, along with NRCS and EPA. So far, however, their progress has been lackluster. And I'm not sure state reluctance can be chalked up to funding. After all, states have always had the power to enact a different framework to control the problem.

The arguments contained in this report are troubling if one views the state's responsibility as one to control the pollution emerging from its borders. As I've mentioned before on this blog, the normative justification for funding the execution of this responsibility is fleeting. And this is true whether we are talking about federal payments to states or any payments to polluters. Of course, if we are exacting from agriculture an environmental benefit to which we are not entitled at base, then payment would seem to be in order. But I have a difficult time conceptualizing efforts at improving water quality as exactions. And statements like "Implementation of TMDL-driven reductions from nonpoint sources are typically very difficult to achieve reliably across the whole watershed because States are generally limited to voluntary, incentive-based programs to achieve results" (from the report) ignore the larger problem. States are only limited in this regard in a political sense. If a subsidiary level of government is unwilling to recognize and control the harms it inflicts on others (as one would expect), then the political will has to come from within a larger set of political boundaries within which those harms are felt. Our system is, at least when the harms are related to commercial endeavors, built to do this with legislation at the federal level. Whether it should include funding is an entirely different matter.

In any event, however, the report is interesting and I expect some changes to how we regulate agriculture's relationship with the resources it uses.