Place, work, and civic agriculture: Common fields for cultivation

"Civic agriculture" identifies a diverse and growing body of food and farming enterprises fitted to the needs of local growers, consumers, rural economies, and communities. The term lends shape and legitimacy to development paradigms that exist in opposition to the global, corporately-dominated food system. Civic agriculture also widens the scope of ag-related concerns, moving away from a strictly mechanistic focus on production and capital efficiency, and toward the more holistic reintegration of people in place. To date, researchers and practitioners have attended closely to the economic benefits of new marketing arrangements and institutions (e.g., value-added co-ops, CSAs, and farmer's markets). Local food and farming has a critical role to play in the development of an alternative commerce. At the same time, this is only half the promise of civic agriculture. Civic agriculture can (and should) promote citizenship and environmentalism within both rural and urban settings not only through market-based models of economic behavior, but through common ties to place and physical engagement with that place. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.