Queer Farmland: Land Access Strategies for Small-Scale Agriculture

Abstract

Farmers struggle to afford farmland because competing land uses raise prices higher than what farmers earn, especially in small-scale and sustainable agriculture. Farmers often depend on an intimate partner’s income or labor to access land, yet few studies investigate sexual relationships in farmland access. I interrogate how sexuality shapes land access for small-scale agriculture through participant observation and interviews with 25 queer farmers in New England. I find that queer farmers’ sexual identities and relationships influence where they farm, who they live and work with, how they afford the land, and how they learn to farm. I argue that finding land, labor, credit, and knowledge are intertwined, heteronormative processes of capital accumulation shaped by racism and sexism. Queer farmers’ experiences navigating heteronormativity suggest the relevance of sexuality to land conservation and food justice, limits of organizing land access through sexual relationships, and alternatives to the “family farm.”

keywords:

• Family farm
• food justice
• gender
• land
• sexuality
• sustainable food systems

Acknowledgments

I thank Jane Collins, Monica White, Bastiaan Reydon, Tom Safford, Nicole Fox, Cliff Brown, Rebecca Glauber, Tamsin Whitehead, Pinar Batur, Danielle Falzon, Jaclyn Wypler, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. I am deeply grateful to the participating farmers.

Notes

1 I use “queer” when referring to a non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender group and participants’ self-identifiers when referring to individuals. “Cisgender” refers to people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth.

2 “For queer theorists, heteronormativity means the set of norms that make heterosexuality seem natural or right,” which “often operat[e] unconsciously or in ways that make it particularly difficult to identify” (Valocchi 2005, 756). Heterosexism, in contrast, “points to the systemic nature of oppression against queers through cultural, political and economic structures favouring heterosexuality and heterosexuals. Heterosexism is the form of oppression resulting from the ideology of heteronormativity” (Jeppesen 2010, 464).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded in part by grants from the Rural Sociological Society and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Community and Environmental Sociology Department’s Crowe Scholarship Fund.