Case Narratives

Accompanying the growing awareness of agriculture as a complex and many faceted global system is a need to provide tools for educating students able to study and to act with understanding of this system. Case studies provide a key, essential tool for teaching agroecology. The case study approach complements this agroecology curriculum development effort with a critical approach for bringing a diverse audience of students to understand agroecology and to train them in methods for taking action. Case studies can be puzzles to be solved, and depending on the nature of the body of knowledge informing the case study, many have no predetermined correct answer. The purpose of the method is to produce managers who both know and act.

Agroecology students are expected to scrutinize the case study and prepare to discuss strategies and tactics that might be taken to solve problems and conflicts or to take advantage of opportunities for positive development. Many cases will be Wisconsin-based because of ease of research effort, but also because as a very diverse state with a long history of both agriculture and agribusiness and a decidedly mixed urban/rural economy, Wisconsin offers numerous examples of agroecological narratives with multiple lessons about the state of agricultural science, economics, ethics, politics and culture. Potential case study topics include:

• The evolution of the Wisconsin Livestock Siting Law (Act 235), in which local control over land use decisions was significantly diminished. Here farming traditions, dairy processing, local government, and "removing emotion," and "sound science" all meet. (Administrative rules are nearly in place.)
• Ethanol production, an intriguing mix of patriotism, farm profitability, environmentalism, basic arguments over how energy yields are calculated, and the distributive justice of who benefits from government subsidies.
• Farmland preservation, a prominent theme in Wisconsin politics for nearly 3 decades. The most recent turn is the Wisconsin Working Lands Initiative, a major effort to find new mechanisms for modulatine loss of farmland.
• Citizen protests against individual dairy farms in Wisconsin, leading to acrimonious local debates and sophisticated legal actions provided by statewide environmental groups.
• The role of immigrant labor, in which our reliance on an agricultural work force that in many ways remains outside of structures insuring health, education and just pay continues to be a source of concern and controversy to activists, local governments, and school systems. Wisconsin dependence on immigarnt labor is increasing rapidly with changes in the dairy industry and the expanding organic sector.
• The rise of Organic Valley farmers' cooperative and the development of regional organic dairy markets.