Farm Communities at the Crossroads: Challenge and Resistance (review)

Reviewed by: Farm Communities at the Crossroads: Challenge and Resistance Clint Evans Farm Communities at the Crossroads: Challenge and Resistance. Edited by Harry P. Diaz, Joann Jaffe, and Robert Stirling. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2003. Pp. 353 , $44.95 Farm Communities at the Crossroads: Challenge and Resistance is an outgrowth of a 1995 University of Regina conference that brought academics and farm activists together to discuss the crisis facing Saskatchewan farmers. Since the early 1980s the prairie farm community has been devastated by a series of economic blows and an exodus to the cities driven by farm consolidation. The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that many believe that the prairie farm community has reached a crossroads, a point at 'which something precious is in danger of being left behind, but something valuable may be gained if only we take the right course.' The book's editors, University of Regina sociologists Harry Diaz, Joann Jaffe, and Robert Stirling, capture a sense of the scale and scope of the farm crisis through their article selection. They also capture the human dimension of the crisis through a focus on three interrelated themes: deskilling of farm labour, challenges facing the farm community, and grassroots resistance to the economic and political forces of globalization. The book itself is a weighty tome consisting of twenty-five articles and a short introduction. The articles are divided into six main sections under the following headings: The Importance of Work, Community, Land and Transportation, Chemicals, Machinery, and Globalization and the State. Roughly half of the articles were contributed by sociologists, including a theoretical analysis of deskilling by Diaz and Stirling, and a wonderful piece by Michigan State University sociology professor Lawrence Busch on 'making nature' through the transformation of rapeseed into canola. There are some very good contributions linking globalization to the current farm crisis, while others explore what is in danger of being lost. Politicians and policy analysts should take note of several articles outlining alternative land tenure and transfer strategies - strategies such as the 'Land Link' program of the Nebraska Center for Rural Affairs - that may help arrest the trend towards ever-larger farms and a subsequent decline in the ability of the farm community to reproduce itself. Scholars interested in the history of prairie co-operatives, agricultural science and technology, and the farm protest movement will not be disappointed, nor will practising agriculturalists who want to learn more about subjects such as organic farming, conservation tillage, or increasing corporate control of the agricultural sector. Although the range of articles in Farm Communities at the Crossroads is one of the collection's strengths, it also represents a weakness. The [End Page 885] quality of writing, research, and analysis of the different articles varies widely, and not all of the contributions will be to everyone's tastes. Historians, for example, may find a lack of historical perspective in the first three sections somewhat disconcerting, while non-sociologists will have to struggle to make sense of the more theoretical pieces. All readers will probably find it difficult to understand how an article on game farming found its way into a section titled 'Chemicals,' or what the story of canola has to do with 'The Importance of Work.' Clearly the disparate nature of the articles submitted for the collection caused some major organizational problems for the editors, and just as clearly, not all of these problems were successfully resolved. Finally, even though the book is designed to help the farm community move forward, some of the contributions seem to advocate a return to the ways of the past. Past farming practices, in particular, are often described in glowing terms even though events such as the Dust Bowl suggest that they were just as destructive as industrial farming practices today. Most of the shortcomings exhibited by Farm Communities at the Crossroads can be found in other collections of conference papers, and none of them seriously detract from the overall utility and significance of the book. The book represents a gold mine of information on the nature of the prairie farm crisis. It offers possible solutions to a number of the problems facing the farm sector today, and it...

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