Managing and imagining crop diversity in Idaho’s Magic Valley

Keywords: crop diversity, imaginaries, Magic Valley, US, agriculture
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

Simplification of United States (US) agricultural landscapes contributes to alarming rates of environmental degradation. Increasing agrobiodiversity throughout the US agri-food system is a crucial goal toward mitigating these harmful impacts, of which crop diversification is one short-term mechanism to do so. However, crop diversification strategies have yet to be widely adopted in the US. Thus, we explore these barriers and bridges to crop diversification for farmers in the south-central Idaho’s Magic Valley– a diverse agricultural region. We address two main research questions: 1) how and why do farmers enact temporal/spatial strategies to manage crop diversity, and 2) what are the barriers and bridges to alternative diversification strategies? Through a political agroecology and spatial imaginaries lens, we conducted and analyzed 15 farmer and 14 key informant in-depth interviews between 2019 and 2021 to gauge what farmers are currently doing to manage crop diversity (the present) and how they imagine alternative landscapes (the imaginary). We found that Magic Valley farmers have established a regionally diversified landscape relying primarily on temporal diversification strategies – crop rotations and cover cropping – but, in some cases, these strategies competed with other conservation practices, like reduced tillage. Further, experimenting with and imagining new landscapes is possible, but daily challenges and structural constraints make these processes not only difficult but even “dangerous” to dream of. To support agroecological transformation, the realities who is farming must be centered alongside how they farm, and we must reckon with past and present land use paradigms to re-imagine what is possible.