Customer Reviews

Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (California Studies in Critical Human Geography)

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Well, everything you think you know about organic agriculture gets brilliantly demolished and reformulated in this innovative and ground breaking book. Think you know about small family farmers in California? Well, get ready to learn about the real corporate farming tradition, especially in the Central Valley. Think a new generation of organic farms makes for some sort of new utopia? Well, you're living in an "agrarian dream" if you think conditions for agricultural workers get transformed automatically in a more "organic" world.

I eat organic food all the time and myth after myth that I have accepted gets exposed in this book. Think the regulators are always on the side of the little guy? Think eating organic food automatically creates a more sustainable food system? Think you're "going back to nature" if you eat organic? Well, Guthman lays out how all of us have to think critically and take concerted action if we really want to change the power relations of today's industrial agriculture.

And yet I finished this book more exhilirated and inspired to
think about and work toward a new world of sustainable agriculture. And with my eyes now wide open that when I'm eating an organic apple that doesn't transform the world or ease the exploitation of those working the land. I see this as a seminal work in showing us clearly how to tear off our blinders and move from our agrarian "dreams' to a new agrarian reality.

I agree with the previous reviewer, this book did a great job of exposing the hypocrisy of 'Big Ag' in organic agriculture without seeming the author was biased or selling an agenda. I am an aspiring organic farmer myself, and found this book informative about both the history of organic agriculture as a movement and its march towards mainstream acceptance, along with the corporate infiltration that comes with it. I thought the author did a good job of not just detailing the current state of organic agriculture in California, but in explaining the seemingly inevitability of its development to today's conditions. This is a great read for anyone interested in the economics of organic agriculture or farming in general.

I'm currently writing my dissertation on the dynamics of the local organic movement in Southern Arizona. This book was a wonderful resource in helping me frame my literature review.