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Encounters with a range of small-scale family farms contribute to a fundamental rethinking of what constitutes progress towards sustainable agriculture in the United States today.
Iowa is often referred to as the "most altered" landscape in the United States—over 99.9% of its native prairie has been plowed for farming. Today, it is the country's leading producer of corn, hogs, and eggs, and its landscape is synonymous with industrial agriculture. And yet, scattered in between the state's massive grain monocultures, small-scale farms are improbably emerging in the heartland of "Big Ag." On operations as small as a single acre, a new crop of farmers seeks to feed their communities by growing food in harmony with nature.
Anthropologist Andrea Rissing spent a decade getting to know these improbable "alternative farms" through in-depth interviews and working alongside ecologically conscious farmers to plant, weed, and harvest food by hand at the American epicenter of industrialized agriculture. Tracing the complex experiences of these young farmers, Rissing upends over a century of thinking on the inevitable march of food cultivation towards specialization, mechanization, and financialization.
Creatively applying insights from critical agrarian studies to a modern context where small-scale, diversified agriculture is born anew from an industrial landscape, Rissing shows us how the same constellation of forces stretches across centuries and continents to shape processes of agrarian transformation. She illustrates how different elements of the industrial system, such as irregular fields unsuitable for mechanical cultivation, cast-aside equipment, and familial land inheritance norms simultaneously catalyze and constrain nascent alternative agricultural livelihoods. For centuries, global agriculture has supplanted human-powered cultivation with industrial production. Fields of Opportunities tells the surprising story of how this modern trend is newly reversing and invites us to reconsider how we might achieve resilient and sustainable food systems.
"One might not expect to find the seeds of a new agriculture in the heart of the world's most industrialized landscapes, where conventional food systems appear definitively to have won. Yet, Andrea Rissing finds exactly that. She demonstrates how new farms take root not merely despite the industrial regime, but through it—emerging from discarded fields, idled equipment, and the stubborn kinship of farm families. Rissing's delightful prose grounds the discussion in a political economy spanning from Marx to La Via Campesina, revealing diversified farms as a persistent, living alternative waiting to be reclaimed from the furrows of the Corn Belt."—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
"Iowa presents an astounding challenge to the possibilities for change in American industrial agriculture. In Fields of Opportunities, Andrea Rissing asks a hard question: 'Under what circumstances can new forms of agriculture take hold?' Rissing's answer is deeply informed and beautifully argued, written in a graceful style, and filled with insights that lead the reader to imagine a new American agriculture, beyond corn and hogs, to a countryside of young smallholders. This book is more than an investigation but a meditation and memoir on the prospects for a healthy countryside and a revitalized democracy."—Steven Stoll, author of Land: A History in Seven Words and Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia
"Forget romantic notions about small farming. Anthropologist Andrea Rissing presents a hard-headed, fieldwork-based analysis of what it takes to grow nutritious food (rather than livestock feed) and how precarious such work is for anyone who has not inherited land. She makes a compelling case for the value of alternative agriculture and how and why food systems can better support it." —Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat Now
"Well researched and well written, Fields of Opportunities is at once a sobering and hopeful look at the obstacles and opportunities facing beginning farmers who want to grow food for their communities. Nuanced yet heartfelt, Rissing looks beneath the surface of labels like conventional and alternative to reconsider the dynamics of modern agriculture. Grounded in Iowa's farmscape of corn and soybeans and based on visits to 62 farms, she posits that the dominant farming system has both spawned and supported a more community centered approach with the potential of reshaping industrial agriculture. She offers a symbiotic view where small farmers rely upon relationships with the industrial system they often seek to subvert. At the same time, she points out the failure of the national farm economy where nearly 90% of farm households depend on off-farm income. Based on insights from agrarian studies, Fields of Opportunities offers a way forward toward more sustainable and resilient food systems." —Julia Freedgood, Senior Fellow & Senior Program Advisor at the American Farmland Trust