"Once Our Land is Gone, It's Gone": Farmer Perspectives on Growth, Embeddedness, And the Future of Food in the Great Salt Lake Basin

The Great Salt Lake Basin hosts a knot of intensifying pressures on agriculturalists—including economic constraints, as even arable land is increasingly valuable for development, and ecological constraints, as aridification and climate change affect the conditions in which food can grow. Given the unique relationship farmers have with the land as its modern-day stewards, their perspectives on the nature and consequences of these pressures offer profound insights into how the region might responsibly navigate its resource management and food systems moving through the future. In the first paper, I draw upon 15 interviews with commodity farmers to understand their experiences with water scarcity, expanding real estate development, and land use transition, culminating in an argument for moving beyond a growth-oriented economy. In the second, I draw upon 16 interviews with smallholder farmers to probe their experiences with profit-orientation and environmental ethics, framed by opposing types of embeddedness in community and economy. Taken together, these dual perspectives offer sound evidence for the ways the goals of globalized capitalism negatively affect farmers. Further, they illustrate the insulating effect of community embeddedness upon ecologically responsible food systems from those very logics. Using frameworks of “post-growth” and “embeddedness,” this thesis contributes to the growing social science scholarship on the Great Salt Lake Basin by criticizing current economic conditions and proposing ways forward that might safeguard the food systems that the Basin supports.