Agroecological Community
Let us farm and spare us all the extras.

In a search for financial autonomy, farmers have extended their own business model with extra activities: bed and breakfast, management services, subsidies, tourism. Farmers’ autonomy is not a feature of the farm but depends on the context in which farmers operate. How can we enable a context where the food producing part of a farmer’s business model is not pushed out by other more lucrative activities? How can we consider the autonomy of farmers beyond the individual business case and think about the structural conditions that make farming possible, starting with the availability of land at a fair price, for long periods of time? How do we turn the current state of economic dependency into opportunities for farmers cooperation?  In urbanised environments, organising control over resources such as water, organic matter, or even land, collectively and in relation to other actors rather than at the level of individual farms, might actually strengthen the autonomy of agroecological farmers.