Do Farmers Know Better? Exploring Innovation, Environmental Change, and Rural Livelihoods among US Hop Growers

Abstract

This dissertation examines the paired social and environmental impacts of farmer-driven innovation through on-site interviews and participant observation with US hop growers. Together, these three research articles make an important contribution to environmental and rural sociology along with science and technology studies by showing how farmer-directed science can support more sustainable futures. While most large-scale US farmers are already technologically and economically “locked” into unsustainable practices, hop growers break this mold, using profits resulting from the craft beer boom to innovate their own implements and further develop their own on-farm breeding programs. Using qualitative methods, I examine these growers as a case study, revealing that farmer-driven innovation can result in improvements to environmental sustainability and adaptive capacity. However, I also find that without policy interventions, small farmers are excluded from profitable new technologies and laborers still face unequal exposure to environmental and financial risks. The three articles each examine different aspects of this dynamic: Chapter 2 overviews the contemporary state of Yakima Valley hop farming and describes hop growers’ efforts to “decommodify” hops. Chapter 3 is a “deep dive” study into knowledge-politics involved in producing new genetics at the largest farmer directed hop breeding operation in the US (HBC). Chapter 4 examines the small farmers that operate as an alternative to the large neo-plantation farms indicative of the new US and Yakima-focused hop marketplace.