Conservative Resistance to Monopoly Power and Environmental Legislation: U.S. Farmer Organizations and the Metaphorical State

Beginning with the Grange in 1867, agricultural movements in the United States were central to the growth of anti-monopoly resistance and financial populism. Yet today, at a time when a vibrant (and militant) agroecology movement spreads across Europe, Africa, and Latin America such a response is largely absent in the United States. Though individual farmers are aware of the ecological harms due to current production techniques, the American Farm Bureau Federation, by far the country’s largest agricultural organization, has dedicated great resources to slowing governmental response to climate change. Instead of fighting for prosperity through sustainability, the AFBF routinely aligns itself with the monopolistic agri-food industry in opposition to sustainable agricultural reform.Utilizing comparative metaphor analysis, this article traces the ideological impediments to a progressive ecological farm movement in the United States. By contrasting the rhetorical approaches of the Grange movement and the American Farm Bureau Federation, we can better understand the role of conservative political ideology in farmer resistance to ecological protections. Though U.S. farm politic is wedded to a set of frames which inhibit structural power analysis, a finer grained evaluation of their conservative views of the state points a path of least resistance for farmer-led ecological reform