| During the many years over which the institutions of agricultural science have neglected alternative farming practices and undervalued farmer-generated knowledge, farmers in the sustainable agriculture movement have produced their own personal, local knowledge as a basis for moving toward an agricultural system that is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just. Previous treatments of local knowledge in sustainable agriculture have focused on the individual farmer and overlooked the ways farmers share knowledge in the many farming networks organized around the country expressly for that purpose. To address this omission, this dissertation uses recent contributions to social movement theory to explore how knowledge-related activities can be a basis for collective action at the local level.;Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interview data collected over a two-year period, I describe and analyze two sustainable farming networks in Wisconsin. One group, the Ocooch Grazers Network, consisted of dairy farmers who practice intensive rotational grazing, a technique which represents a major departure from conventional, confinement-based dairying. The other group, the Wisconsin Women's Sustainable Farming Network, was formed to promote the success of women farmers and their various sustainable farming enterprises.;The networks offer instructive comparisons. Each group constituted a social movement community with informal organizational patterns. Members of both networks asserted the validity of personal knowledge; however, the cases suggest that different lived experiences produce multiple and partial perspectives from which local knowledge is generated and exchanged. Grazers' local knowledge was profoundly shaped by physical place as they adapted the principles of rotational grazing to their particular farms. By contrast, in the Women's Network, it was social location (i.e., their experiences in a gendered society) that most strongly influenced the standpoint from which members' knowledge was constructed and exchanged. In both networks, members exchanged ideas, values, and beliefs about the ideological underpinnings of the sustainable agriculture movement. Also, as members of both groups departed from technical and social conventions, they found valuable social support from others who shared common interests. The dissertation concludes by considering the broader implications of this kind of local-level, collective activity centered around the creation and exchange of knowledge. |
