Un/Re‐constructing the Agrarian Dream: Going Back‐to‐the‐land With an Organic Marketing Co‐operative in South‐central Pennsylvania, Usa

This paper employs a cultural‐economic approach to understanding the labour model strategies employed by an organic marketing co‐operative in a rural community of south‐central Pennsylvania. The co‐operative is composed of self‐described ‘back‐to‐the‐landers’, who are motivated by an agrarian dream of a better quality of life, making a living off the land and contributing to the environmental sustainability of farming. Organic agriculture as a technical practice with a lucrative market holds the promise of realising these dreams, and the co‐operative functions as an alternative food network that delivers organic produce to a regional market. The members of the co‐operative employ a diversity of labour strategies, some of which reproduce the labour processes and outcomes of the conventional food systems, and others which (sometimes simultaneously) configure new social and economic relations with farm workers.