Welcome
My name is Loka Ashwood. I am a sociologist at the University of Kentucky. My work develops action-centered methodologies that help frontline communities overcome environmental injustices and strengthen democracy.
For-Profit Democracy
My book poses a question: “Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States?” I offer a simple explanation: when corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property, animosity toward the state rules.
You can find out more by visiting my For-Profit Democracy page and checking out the Publishers Weekly review.
An Invitation to Environmental Sociology
I joined with three co-authors to write the sixth edition of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology. Visit the textbook’s page to learn more about the delivery of the book through participatory examples, like raising and selling cattle locally in my home community.
Related
Recent Releases
Access Your Copy For Free: Empty Fields, Empty Promises
“[Right-to-Farm] laws have benefited from division: the eater from the grower, the dweller from the farmer, the feeder from the fed, the agri- from the -culture… [and] benefited the takers—large-scale corporate agribusiness—at the expense of the doers, people who live and dwell proximate to where they grow food” (p. 30).
Check out what the Right-to-Farm means in your state and the impact of these laws nationally, by downloading a free copy of our book, Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm. Jump to the end, “Democratizing Agriculture,” to consider how to create an agriculture of home to achieve Agricultural, Rural and Environmental (ARE) justice.
Coming September 2023: Empty Fields, Empty Promises
The right to farm is essential to everyone’s survival. Since the late 1970s, states across the nation have adopted so-called right-to-farm laws to limit nuisance suits loosely related to agriculture. But since their adoption, there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis of what these laws do and who they benefit. Together, Aimee Imlay, Lindsay Kuehn, Allen Franco, Dani Diamond and I offer the first national analysis and guide to these laws. We reveal that they generally benefit the largest operators, like processing plants, while traditional farmers benefit the least. Disfavored most of all are those seeking to defend their homes and environment against multinational corporations that use right-to-farm laws to strip neighboring owners of their property rights. Through what we call the “midburden,” right-to-farm laws dispossess the many in favor of the few, paving the path to rural poverty.
Empty Fields, Empty Promises summarizes every state’s right-to-farm laws to help readers track and navigate their local and regional legal landscape. The book concludes by offering paths forward for a more distributed and democratic agrifood system that achieves agricultural, rural, and environmental justice.
Pre-order your copy from University of North Carolina Press here.
Big Ag’s Dependence on Big Finance
Tracking down financial relationships between monopolies and oligopolies in agriculture is key to tackling their power and avoiding systemic crises in food.
Andy Pilny, John Canfield, Mariyam Jamila, Ryan Thomson and I found that the Farm Credit System, a U.S government sponsored enterprise, is the top loan provider (via UCC filings) to the largest pork conglomerates. This includes firms like Smithfield, held by WH Group Ltd., which largely traces back to ownership in China. Outside of the Farm Credit System, the same big banks dominate the network, tying Big Ag into Big Finance.
We identify systemic risk and dependency between the top ten pork powerhouses, making the entire network vulnerable to collapse if any one big player falters. The pork network is highly consolidated already. But these companies are positioned to become even more powerful.
Taking on consolidation to give small farmers and local rural businesses a chance requires coming to terms with our government support systems and banks with unhinged investment power. The public deserves to know who the ultimate beneficiaries of this risky and highly consolidated system that puts eaters, farmers, and rural communities at risk. Read the paper in full here.
Corporate Landowners and their Powerful Creditors
Who owns the land is increasingly more about what owns it and credits it. Along with my co-authors John Canfield, Madeleine Fairbairn, and Kathy De Master, we follow the money. In an article recently published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, we trace corporations listed in tax parcel data back to their corporate family tree. We analyze parent and grandparent owners (when relevant) and also their creditors. We find that less than 30% of land owned by legal entities in our rural Illinois case study area traces back to local owners; further, we find that most business firms trace back to individual people or corporate owners with different addresses from those listed in tax parcel data. Taken together, this makes it hard to figure out who is responsible or is making the money, which is particularly problematic for rural communities.
Corporate Transfer of Capital
We detail how corporate structure gives business firms a leg up through complex webs of subsidiaries that limit their culpability in the event of wrongdoing. The most complex of corporate land holders like Farmland Partners (the self proclaimed largest publicly traded firm that barters in land) use their own subsidiaries to make loans to other subsidiaries. This allows them to make investments that an outside lender (like a traditional bank) might find too risky and hesitate to fund. Further, these exchanges of capital within the corporate web require little financial disclosure. The figure below details how Farmland Partners employs both internal capital markets (Farmland Partners Operating Partnership and PH Farms) and external capital markets (like Rabo and New York Life) to fund its land purchases. The acreage figures are specific to the case-study area of McDonough and Fulton counties in Illinois.
Rural Impact
Taken together, the law gives business firms advantages that smaller landowners and farmers do not have. In effect, local ownership moves away from rural communities, and with that the access and resources they so desperately need and deserve. Further, anti-corporate farming laws may be only a superficial solution to slowing down corporate ownership, because access to internal and external markets underlies financial investment in land.
“No matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or neither”: Pragmatic politics in opposition to industrial animal production
Looking for rural transformation? Certainly, the government is a part of it. But arguably more important is mutual aid: rural people’s capacity to enact it in their everyday lives and affront forces that prevent the flourishing of reciprocity. Read about two groups that beat the odds by using pragmatic politics to stop industrial hog feeding operations, forthcoming in a special issue on rural emancipation in the Journal of Rural Studies.
Property rights and rural justice: A study of U.S. right-to-farm laws
Property rights remain a centerpiece of the American experience, perhaps particularly so for those who live in rural America. Right-to-Farm laws, which exist in every state, substantially alter the meaning of property rights by constraining the capacity of owners to enjoy their property according to values such as health, home, environment, and even family farms (as traditionally conceived). Our article most notably finds that these laws tend to constrain local governance; disadvantage multi-generational farms and property holders wedded to the sustenance of a specific place; advantage production and profit oriented companies; provide no explicit protection for family farmers; and protect any owner: international, corporate or otherwise. For more details, check out our article recently published in the Journal of Rural Studies.
Rural Conservatism or Anarchism?
Are rural people simply more conservative? Certainly, their voting record seems to suggest as much. But such a view misses much about the politics of rural America, especially when one tries to think outside of the ever deepening dichotomy between liberal and conservative. This paper attempts as much, arguing that there are anarchist politics in rural America, facilitated by the long-standing tendency of the state to favor the large (often urban) at the expense of the small (often rural). Those who like to imagine a stateless society form anti-state perspectives, meaning that they don’t like the state and seek less of it. But, anti-statists often don’t see eye to eye on how to achieve a stateless end. Since there is no truly stateless political platform, anti-state views are readily manipulated to garner votes.
Check out the article here!
Note, though, that the early view publication PDF is missing important lines in the table, making it difficult to understand. Here is the correct one: 