The 'land question' on the prairies amidst intersecting crises: perspectives of grain and oilseed farmers in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across the Prairie Provinces, concern is growing as investor actors of various stripes continue to show interest in purchasing farmland, in addition to the broader trends of increased rates of tenant farming, and farmland concentration. These tenure changes are not being closely monitored at the provincial level. Due to the inaccessibility of the land titles data in Alberta, it is not yet possible to do a quantitative analysis of tenure changes, as has been done in Saskatchewan. This study instead hones in at the community level in three regions of Alberta through 40 interviews, primarily with grain and oilseed farmers. The interviews reveal that financial players -- investor actors, as well as banks -- are pushing up the price of farmland, creating a widening gap between its market value and productive value. I argue that irrespective of the landlord, tenant farming arrangements will not allow the kinds of transformations to alternatives that are necessary in the face of the farm income crisis as well as the climate crisis. I also analyze the unravelling of rural community structures under neoliberalism, and consider how these changes impede the collective action needed to push for transformation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".