As Canada’s agricultural sector becomes increasingly consolidated and corporatized, small-scale farmers face mounting challenges, including land inaccessibility, rising input costs, market exclusion, and policy gaps. In Alberta, where agro-industrialism dominates, a growing number of farmers are pursuing ecologically and socially grounded alternatives rooted in community and care. This paper draws on five years of participatory and experiential research with regenerative farms in Treaty 7 Territory to examine how relational foodways are cultivated and sustained through practices of cooperation. Focusing on both informal and formal forms of collaboration, including shared labor, mentorship, collective land management, and knowledge exchange, the study demonstrates how social cooperation functions as a critical infrastructure for navigating and resisting an exclusionary agrarian political economy. The paper also situates regenerative agriculture as a contested and uneven field, highlighting tensions related to economic viability, market dependence, and the limits of collaborative networks within broader agro-industrial systems. By foregrounding cooperation as both a generative and constrained practice, this article contributes to scholarship on alternative agri-food systems by advancing relational foodways as a framework for understanding how farmers rework agrarian futures beyond extraction and competition.
Chelsea Rozanski (Wed,) studied this question.