How knowledge deficit interventions fail to resolve beginning farmer challenges

At a 50-acre farm in the California Central Coast1 region, I spoke with Alejandra, who personifies the ideal outcome of the beginning farmer movement. Coming to the United States in the mid-1980s, she described herself as the latest of “three generations of migrant farmworkers” from the Mexican state of Guerrero, following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, who emigrated for contract labor in earlier decades. In 1995, with the Rural Development Center in Salinas, she completed a 3-year training course in organic agricultural practices. Since then, she has successfully distributed her farm products to high-value urban farmer’s markets and restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Building on this success, she acquired a loan to purchase a parcel with a homesite near Hollister, where land prices are far lower than the prime farmlands of the Central Coast valleys. This drive to gain new skills and knowledge allowed her to find an alternative to the monotony of working as a field laborer, becoming a diversified farmer in her own right. But her story is also punctuated by a series of structural challenges that defy her expertise, willingness, and capacity. Abstract Beginning farmer initiatives like the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program (BFRDP), farm incubators, and small-scale marketing innovations offer new entrant farmers agricultural training, marketing and business assistance, and farmland loans. These programs align with alternative food movement goals to revitalize the anemic U.S. small farm sector and repopulate landscapes with socially and environmentally diversified farms. Yet even as these initiatives seek to support prospective farmers with tools for success through a knowledge dissemination model, they remain mostly individualistic and entrepreneurial measures that overlook structural barriers to productive and economic success within U.S. agriculture. Analysis of the BFRDP’s funding history and discourse reveals a “knowledge deficit” based program focused on the technical rather than the structural aspects of beginning farming. This is contrasted with qualitative analysis of beginning farmer experiences in California’s Central Coast region. The discrepancies between the farmer experiences and national structure of the BFRDP program ultimately reveal a policy mismatch between the needs of some beginning farmers and the programs intended to support them.