A farm is viable if it can keep its head above water

Defining and Measuring Farm Viability for Small and Mid-Sized Farms

Bibliographic Data

ID6414482
AuthorsAnalena Bruce (0000-0002-4864-4601, University of New Hampshire, corresponding author), Elise Neidecker (University of New Hampshire), Luyue Zheng (0009-0008-9606-9200, University of New Hampshire), Isaac Sohn Leslie (0000-0003-4717-8132, University of Vermont), Alexa Wilhelm (University of New Hampshire)
Year2025
Volume42
Issue2
Pages625-641
Publication date2025-01-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAgriculture and Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0889-048X • E-ISSN: 1572-8366
PublisherSpringer Nature (Netherlands) (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1007/s10460-024-10687-9
OpenAlexW4406437384
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited83

The way farm viability is defined and conceptualized has become increasingly incongruent with the way that small-scale farmers make a living, as their livelihood strategies have evolved and changed in response to broad structural changes over the past several decades. Farm viability is typically defined as meeting the income needs of the farm family as well as supporting the farm’s operating costs. However, our study shows that New England farmers define farm viability as their ability to stay in business and to keep the land in agriculture. In this paper, we bring together the agricultural economics and rural sociological research literature on farm viability and persistence as well as food justice scholarship to advance the development of a more relevant and integrated approach to evaluating the viability of small and mid-sized farms. We present farmers’ own conceptions of farm viability, drawn from 37 interviews with the operators of small farms in New England. While most of the farmers we interviewed conceptualize farm viability as their ability to stay in business, many of them shared broader views of farm viability that integrated the social and environmental sustainability of their enterprises in the face of financial pressures and increased weather extremes from climate change. These were described as their ability to continue farming year after year and keep their land in agriculture, and their ability to maintain their own health and wellbeing as integral to a viable farm enterprise. Farmers emphasized their (in)ability to continue farming from a social sustainability standpoint as directly impacting the viability of their farms. We argue for a shift away from narrow measures of farm viability that are solely based on farm owners’ household income to a broader, multidimensional approach to defining and measuring farm viability that could enable analyses that are relevant to critical sustainability concerns for US agriculture

Agricultural economics · Agricultural science · Biology · Business · Economics · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Head (geology · Natural resource economics · Water resource management · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Environmental Science · Organic Food and Agriculture · Rural development and sustainability

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