Aspirations to farm ‘better’ may fall short in practice due to constraints outside of farmers’ control. Yet farmers face proliferating pressures to adopt practices that align with various societal visions of better agriculture. What happens when the accumulation of external pressures overwhelms farm management capacity? Or, worse, when different visions of better agriculture pull farmers toward conflicting management paradigms? This article addresses these questions by comparing the institutional manifestations of two distinct societal obligations placed on California fruit and vegetable farmers: (...) to practice sustainable agriculture and to ensure food safety. Drawing on the concept of constrained choice, I define and utilize a framework for comparison comprising five types of institutions that shape farm management decisions: rules and standards, market and supply chain forces, legal liability, social networks and norms, and scientific knowledge and available technologies. Several insights emerge. One, farmers are expected to meet multiple societal obligations concurrently; when facing a “right-versus-right” choice, farmers are likely to favor the more feasible course within structural constraints. Second, many institutions are designed to pursue narrow or siloed objectives; policy interventions that aim to shift farming practice should thus anticipate and address potential conflicts among institutions with diverging aspirations. Third, farms operating at different scales may face distinct institutional drivers in some cases, but not others, due to differential preferences for universal versus place-specific policies. These insights suggest that policy interventions should engage not just farmers, but also the intersecting institutions that drive or constrain their farm management choices. As my framework demonstrates, complementing the concept of constrained choice with insights from institutional theory can more precisely reveal the dimensions and mechanisms that bound farmer agency and shape farm management paradigms. Improved understanding of these structures, I suggest, may lead to novel opportunities to transform agriculture through institutional designs that empower, rather than constrain, farmer choice. (shrink)

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)