I went to ag school straight from the Bronx to learn how to feed the world and end the famines I saw on TV news. It seemed straightforward: help people grow more food.
In those first years at Cornell, I learned what wheat and corn looked like in a field, how to inseminate a cow and calculate feed formulas, and a whole lot of genetics, biology, chemistry, and economics. I loved it.
After graduation, I ran a small homestead: dairy cow, pigs, chickens, vegetables, pasture, selling surplus from a stall in the early years of the Ithaca farmer’s market. I struggled to adapt the big-ag I’d learned in school to the micro-scale, and kept coming up against systems not only favoring industrial ag, but constraining the small-scale. To help other small-producers, I wrote columns in the local paper, and compiled my adaptations in a smallholder text, Raising Your Own Livestock.
But it wasn’t until I left the US to research food production systems in the West Indies that I began to see that far from feeding the world, industrialized agriculture had been in deep conflict with — even working against — food production for centuries. Inadequate, unhealthy food, poverty, and hunger were not problems to be solved by science and technology.
Far from being solely a technical matter, food production is enmeshed in webs of history, power, and culture reaching across time and continents into day to day lives.
In graduate school (M.S., Ph.D.), I shifted from the technical to social sciences, focusing on community development, helping groups achieve wide-ranging, people-driven goals across food systems, community-based housing, ecological planning, and informal, out-of-school education. I worked, explored, wrote about, and ate a great deal from small production systems in Nevis, WI; Yoff, Senegal; France; and now Mexico. (Projects, publications, and details on LinkedIn.)
Uprooted: Travels at the crossroads of food and agriculture offers stories from my experiences abroad, as I saw the tensions between food production and big ag, human scale versus mass industrial, global corporate versus family and community, environmentally sound versus disastrous. Read more about my journey to and through ag school here, and about principles and practices of sustainable development and food sovereignty.
Living in Michoacán, Mexico, I see these conflicts playing out — often violently, always seriously — every day, with far reaching effects. Please follow my blog, Field and Food: Michoacán, and leave comments!
And the section About Meat tracks my evolution from animal scientist raising her own livestock to becoming an eco-vegetarian, now — still — grappling with ongoing dilemmas about meat.
Uprooted 
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