BREAOUT SESSION: The Sustainability Paradox: Experiences of Farmers in Vermont

Sustainability holds great social significance for both consumers and farmers, but economic sustainability proves to be much more challenging. A team of UVM researchers conducted a study on the experiences of farmers in Vermont in hopes to address the tensions in trying to achieve sustainability and seek to understand how participatory research can help. The study focused on farms engaged in consumer-facing agriculture (CFA), which includes farms utilizing agritourism and direct markets sales. Interviews with six CFA farms in Vermont focused on how they understand, measure, and apply sustainability in farm management. These farmers expressed great difficulty in contributing to the goals of sustainability while remaining economically viable, and that these problems are difficult and even stigmatized to talk about. The results from this study were compared against recent interview data from seven additional farms in Vermont as well data from the NASS census regarding farm finances to address larger patterns concerning farm viability. With ecological vitality at the foundation of both social and economic systems, factors like climate change, increasingly unreliable weather, extreme storms, and other ecological crises mean that these farms face growing precarity that affect both production and farmer well-being. Researchers examined the impacts on the health and well-being of farmers who find deep meaning in being socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable but experience cognitive and practical dissonance in realizing they cannot achieve these aims. This session explored these issues through a facilitated discussion with deep questioning of agricultural sustainability and its implications. The session included three of the farmer research participants to keep the discussion grounded in farmer experiences, while creating dialogue among researchers and farmers on how to move forward. Panelists discussed how Land Grant universities could recenter agricultural research and advocacy to support rather than scrutinize farmers who are already fulfilling essential human needs and providing ecosystem services. Considering the results of this study, they called for revisiting and reframing the concept of sustainability and its central role in the discourse of agriculture and food systems.