Continuity and resistance: Central Vermont farmers' motivations for cultivating heirloom vegetables.

Heirloom vegetables have come to play an increasingly important role in the United States' food system, representing many of the values of the alternative agriculture and food movement. Yet few scholars have explored why commercial growers in the US cultivate heirloom varieties, despite the fact that they are often more costly to grow and market than hybrid varieties. This qualitative case study explores why commercial vegetable growers from two different generations choose to cultivate heirloom varieties, and relates their motivations to changes in the political geography and social organization of the local food system. The study is based on ethnographic field work and in-depth interviews with 23 growers from two cohorts: senior growers who grew up on subsistence farms in central Vermont prior to World War II, and younger growers who began to farm in central Vermont after the advent of the alternative agriculture movement in the 1970's. Although scientists argue that we should conserve older, farmer-developed varieties in order to preserve genetic diversity for future breeding efforts, the farmers in this study did not give food security as their primary motivation. Instead, the older generation continues to cultivate and consume varieties from their youth as a means of enacting regional cultural identity, while the younger generation cultivates and saves the seed from a wide range of heirloom, or older, open-pollinated varieties from around the globe for their superior flavors and to practice a personal farming style that embraces a range of varieties and tasks. According the younger growers, they are also using open-pollinated varieties from the past' to resist industrial agriculture and the threats of contamination from genetically modified crops, while simultaneously supporting local seed producers.Ph.D.AgricultureBiological SciencesCultural anthropologyHistorySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125727/2/3208526.pd