Final report for GS21-242
Project Information
Excitement over sustainable food systems (SFS) has grown dramatically as a mechanism to combat environmental degradation and increasing risks from climate change. However, to be truly sustainable, equity must be a central component of SFS development. Little research examines equity in SFS 1) in consideration of labor, and 2) within processes of extending the access and benefits of SFS (and financial viability) through slightly longer supply chains (“scaling up”). As a result, momentum to build SFS may uphold systems of inequality rather than dismantle it.
My project narrows this gap. First, using job advertisements in the SFS over the last decade (2010-2019), I examine how social justice and sustainability are incorporated into labor demand and may vary with patterns of wage compensation. As a result, I identify novel strategies for achieving these priorities, with special attention to firms that have already achieved some level of increased scale. Second, I analyze the motivations and impacts of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) for supporting equitable SFS development and scaling. Using successful and unsuccessful grant data, and contextual information about applicants and host communities, I examine whether and how sustainability and economic and environmental justice motivate LFPP efforts. Together these research aims portray ways that equity and sustainability have been pursued at the firm and policy levels, and will yield existing successful strategies as well as areas for improvement for farmers, SFS businesses and non-profits, and policymakers to further enhance equity and sustainability in food systems development.
My first research aim analyzes labor demand in sustainable food systems (SFS) over the last decade in terms of compensation and appeals to sustainability, anti-racism, and demand for carework. These analyses will show the patterns in terms of job type and compensation as they relate to sustainability and social justice. Finally, I will explore these patterns within firms scaling up. The results of which provide a snapshot into the intellectual and physical labor in demand to build and scale sustainable food system over the last decade, the extent to which equity and environment have been a priority within sustainable food systems efforts, and highlight successful strategies among organizations to incorporate wage equity, sustainability, and other forms of social equity. This is the first test of labor quality within efforts to scale up, and the first which examines the role of equity and environment in those efforts.
My second research aim will analyze whether and how sustainability and climate change adaptation, as well as economic and environmental justice, motivate the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Local Food Promotion Program. The program funds organizations seeking to scale up local and regional food efforts, particularly in communities with current and historical patterns of disinvestment. However this program does not have a requirement to incorporate sustainability. This analysis will document the ways that equity and sustainability are imagined within SFS organizations applying for LFPP grants, and how they propose implementing these visions -- serving as another mechanism to uncover novel strategies that not only prioritize equity and sustainability, but have found financial strategies to implement them. By examining what the USDA funded, we also gain insight into how the USDA considers sustainability and equity in SFS development.
Together, these research aims portray how equity and sustainability have been pursued at the firm and policy levels, shedding light on underlying processes of structural change in SFS, and identifying policy implications for enhancing equity and environment in SFS development. Without assessing whether SFS efforts also prioritize equity, we risk replicating current systems of inequality. Further, this research will highlight the innovative ways practitioners (including but not limited to farmers) are already implementing positive social change in sustainability and equity.
Research
My first research aim analyzes labor demand in sustainable food systems (SFS) over the last decade in terms of compensation and appeals to sustainability, anti-racism, and demand for carework. I have already secured the data: 10 years of job opening advertisements in SFS (n = ~40,000 job postings), from a website that hosts “good” job postings in food systems work. Each job is individually vetted and may not include positions in industrial agriculture. Each posting provides the date of posting, location of job, text description of the company and a description of the job advertised. Jobs range from on the farm production jobs, to jobs engaged in media, non-profit work, food service, research, distribution, catering, food production, and others. This data reflects labor demand in alternative food systems. Each job posting has been paired with its Detailed 2018 Standard Occupation Code (SOC) to characterize the work involved based on title and responsibilities. In this classification system, created by Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), all workers are classified into one of 867 detailed occupations according to their responsibilities. Detailed occupations in the same SOC have very similar job duties and can be combined into increasingly general groups: there are 459 broad occupations, 98 minor groups, and 23 major groups. A machine learning algorithm created by the Center for Disease Control for the same purpose was used to externally confirm the accuracy of the occupation coding system. Wages for each job were compared with county-level living wages and local labor market compensation for similar jobs. Qualitative coding identified firms engaged in scaling up.
Going forward, I will adapt the computational social science methods of sentiment analyses and topic modeling to measure job advertisements’ appeals to gendered work, sustainability, anti-racism (Salganik, 2019). I will create lexicons of words for gendered language and carework, including categories that enable an analysis of masculinized language. I will measure the job advertisements’ incorporation of gendered work, and whether advertisements reveal gendered divisions of labor and compensation patterns. Similarly, I will create lexicons to measure the extent to which job postings appeal to sustainability and antiracism, and how this work is compensated. These analyses will show patterns in terms of job type and compensation for these priorities. Next, I will explore these patterns within firms scaling up. Finally, I will identify firms and occupations that uphold the pillars of sustainability as models of success.
The output from the first research aim includes an assessment of how much sustainability and social justice are centered in labor demand in alternative food systems work between 2010 and 2019 and compensation patterns. This will help identify where and how appeals to these priorities play a role in SFS work and enable a qualitative analysis of jobs and firms that engage in scaling up SFS. The lexicons alone will be a contribution to the research community, as it will be available for others to adapt for alternate analyses. This is the first test of labor quality within efforts to scale up, and the first to examines the role of equity and environment in those efforts, yielding a baseline measurement and existing successful models.
My second research aim will analyze the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP). This program “funds projects that develop, coordinate, and expand local and regional food business enterprises that engage as intermediaries in indirect producer to consumer marketing to help increase access to and availability of locally and regionally produced agricultural products” (United States Department of Agriculture, 2020). The program began in the fiscal year of 2014, and is ongoing today. Funds can be used for planning or implementation purposes; a 25% match is required. Any entity is eligible for the funding. Planning grants typically are less than or equal to $25,000, and provide a year for recipients to use the funds. Implementation grants are up to $200,000 larger and allow for two years to use the funds.
Using grant data provided by the USDA, I will identify how sustainability and climate change adaptation efforts contribute to efforts to scale up SFS, as well as the ways that economic, social, and environmental justice motivate these efforts. By overlaying grant application analyses with socioeconomic information about the host communities and information about the organizations applying for funding, the applications will paint a landscape of how communities understand their food system and hope to change it, and whether and how they center sustainability and equity in these efforts. It will also reveal how the USDA funds SFS work. I will create and implement a coding protocol to analyze grant applications that will combine automatic-text coding with traditional textual analysis techniques from archival research and qualitative research. These analyses will document the ways that equity and sustainability are imagined within AFS organizations and patterns of funding by USDA, as well as the wide range of approaches to implementing these visions. This work will complement existing research analyzing the impact of LFPP funding on farm sales, farms’ vegetable sales, and the number of small farms, as indicators of the grants' ability to foster community economic resilience.
The output from the second research aim includes an assessment of the types of project proposals nationally for scaling up alternative food systems, and their engagement with environment and equity. In addition, it assesses patterns in USDA funding priorities for local and regional food systems, environment, and equity. Finally, it identifies success stories and lessons learned with respect to equity and environment.
Together, these research aims portray how equity and sustainability have been pursued at the firm and policy levels, shedding light on the innovative ways practitioners (including but not limited to farmers) are already implementing positive social change in sustainability and equity. These findings will contribute to an understanding of the underlying processes of structural change in SFS, and identify best practices and policy implications for enhancing equity and environment in SFS development.
For my first research aim, I found the following findings;
research has documented how gendered work plays an important role in sustainable food work and food preparation at home (Bruce and Castellano, 2016), in schools (Gaddis and Coplen, 2018), and in restaurants (Sachs, et al., 2014; Jayaraman, 2016; Jayaraman, 2013). Unfortunately, much of this body of work also reflects how work that is feminized – also called “carework” to denote both nurturing and carefulness – is devaluated; differences in social-economic status and race exacerbate this further (Castellano, 2016). Two trends compound the potential for devaluation of work in sustainable food systems. First, new research documents the ways that the concept of carework has been extended to environmental considerations in farming (Shislery & Sbicca, 2019). Second, many sustainable food systems efforts are orchestrated or run by non-profits, community groups, and/or socially-minded enterprises, which often disproportionately employ women (Petrzelka & Mannon, 2006). We also know that there are negative returns to being in an occupation with a higher percentage of females – at that wages go down as an occupation shifts to becoming a majority female occupation. Relatedly, there are negative returns to jobs that require more nurturant social skills, or care work, in part because they are essentialized as naturally occurring to women and often considered a component of, or an extension of, household work.
Together, these dynamics present a puzzle. In my previous research, I found that roles doing the essential work of AFS development are underpaid. I wanted to understand why. Two possible explanations arose: Based on the anecdotal evidence that women are leading these changes, and that some AFS work represents a different way of thinking of the food system, I wanted to know if we could see this in the job postings themselves – I knew that there is a long literature on gendered language in job postings that contributes to the wage gap. But I wanted to know something slightly different – does care work, regardless of who does it, show up in this work? And can it predict uncompetitive wages? To answer these questions, this paper asks, how does carework manifest in sustainable food systems? Is carework, regardless of who does it, undervalued? Alternatively, Are people instead accepting lower wages in AFS than occupation counterparts in other industries because of a “psychic income” from doing good?
In a previous paper I looked at the type of work involved in alternative food systems by examining job opening advertisements between 2010 and 2019 from the Good Food Jobs website which provides a platform to advertise jobs inalternative food systems. I extracted Information about the hiring organization, and job wages, benefits, skills, and responsibilities from job advertisements when present. There were about 38,000 jobs, 39% of which had wage information. 81% were full time jobs. Postings concentrate in cities and along the coast.
I found a few very important jobs for alternative food systems development . Contrary to industrial farms, AFS farms were smaller, on average, and and most were diversified: they produced many types of vegetables as well as animal products. Diversified farming practices are known to be more sustainable, but also labor-intensive, and to require more coordination from someone like a farm manager across different aspects of the farm. This is shown in how important these two roles are, account for over 7% of all openings, shows us how a sustainable farm might function differently.
Community and Social Service Specialists are directly engaged in work that aims to fulfill uphold those goals of equitable economies, sustainability, and public health. So for example, their work may focus on Community health by engaging with nutrition, food access, and gardening at schools, community gardens, and farmers' markets. Or it may focus on sustainability by supporting land conservation, farmland access, sustainable farming practices, and farmer training programs. Others support economic development by providing local and regional branding and small business incubation support. Finally, community organizers advocated on farming practices or policy arenas at the regional and national level.
General and Operations Managers are defined as supervisory roles in which the responsibilities are too varied to be categorized neatly. Indeed, many of these openings were at novel, and growing, AFS-specific arrangements such as food hubs, farmers markets, farm-to-institution programs, cooperative associations (for growers and consumers), and small businesses.
These roles reflect where a lot of the activity is happening to actually build alternative food systems. And we get a good sense that they are building alternatives. Unfortunately, AFS jobs were found to be under compensated compared to the same role in other industries, and often struggled to earn a living wage or connect to secure career pathways. These jobs in particular were not competitive compared to other industries. Do these roles in particular, which reflect a potential alternative way of building systems, also reflect more carefulness or nurture?
To answer these questions I adapt the computational social science method of sentiment analyses to analyze job advertisements in the sustainable food systems over the last decade. Rather than testing for positive or negative sentiment, I examine labor quality in the contexts of gendered language and appeals to sustainability. Specifically, by creating lexicons of words for gendered language and carework, including categories that enable an analysis of masculine language, I measure job advertisements’ incorporation of gendered work, and whether advertisements reveal gendered divisions of labor and compensation patterns. Similarly, I measure the extent to which job postings appeal to sustainability, and how this work is valued in terms of job quality. Finally, I explore the co-occurrence of appeals to sustainability and gendered work. This will help identify where and how appeals to sustainability and gendered work play a role in sustainable food systems work, with important implications for green jobs policy that aims to support and expand climate resilience in agriculture.
Variances are significantly different between groups, so I used Wilcoxon rank sum test instead of t-test to compare the counts of care phrases for care occupations and non-care occupations, using traditional definitions from the literature. I find that there is no significant difference between these counts. this is in contrast to other areas of labor analysis showing that care work concentrates in “care work occupations” – we can say that many of these jobs have some reference to care work in them, regardless of whether they are traditionally recognized as such.
Next thing I did was pull the 97 occupations that i was able to test in the previous paper for whether their median wages were statistically different from the median wage for their respective occupation and MSA. There were 12 occupations that out performed other industries, most of which were in the food preparation and service sector, as well as Thirty-four AFS occupations that were not competitive. As you can see, some include traditional care work occupations like education and healthcare, but the vast majority are not. The remaining 51 occupations I tested were no different than other industries.
I used a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test to see whether counts of carework distinguished these categories, and I found that it did. We can see that competitive jobs, despite being mostly in food provisioning occupations, had the least amount of care work involved. No different occupations had more care work counts, but still less than those that were not competitive. Despite those being, for the most part, not considered carework occupations.
I extracted the actual differences using Dunn’s version of a non-parametric Tukey test and adjusting for multiple comparison p-values with the Benjamini-Hochberg method, I find that all differences between groups are also significant.
Next, I regressed the log of the ratio of hourly wages over median wages for that occupation and MSA on the log of counts of care work, and binary indicator variables for my other text dictionaries, as well as fixed effects for occupation, MSA, and year. I clustered the errors by the fixed effects. Care work does not seem to have any influence on whether a job meets median occupation wages, but other things in the job advertisement did. Appeals to positive environmental impacts, and mentions of improving food access work were associated with a 4% decrease in the ratio of wages to median wages, while mentions of working for a great company and DEI efforts were associated with 4 and 2% increases in the wages to median wages ratio, respectively. Since I used the log of the ratio, these indicator variables end up having effect sizes of several percent on a relatively small ratio – often tipping it from being uncompetitive to competitive or vice versa. Obviously this is not causality, the effect of promoting your organization as “one of the best” does not yield increased wages, but it does show what is associated with higher paying jobs, relative to their occupation. These results might show that it might not be care work per se, but actually appeals to “doing good” in the form of environment or food access work, or that perhaps different types of care work need to be broken out, so that food access work is a kind of care work in contrast to say education about food or animal welfare.
The last thing I did was look at mean and median counts of appeals to care work and the environment together for each major occupation category. And I do find that there is some part of the intuition that the most important jobs for building AFS have more mentions of both care and the environment together.
Places that bring together care and the environment are at the forefront of designing AFS, also commonly low-paid. Regardless, wages in the food system are low – need policy investment for it that recognizes it as a public good that can trade on “willingness to do good” and/or “caringness”. And especially that recognizes gendered and racial barriers to contributing to innovation in the food system.
Possible theory explanation:
- Care work is a form of a public good – taking care of our children and elderly, or providing education or healthcare, benefit our entire society. We can extend this type of thinking to environmental work.
- Its possible that AFS development falls into this category as well – though the relationship with carework is not entirely defined, it could also be more generally related to “doing good” and less to do with care work, but still fall into the public good category…
For my second research aim, I found the following findings:
the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) created the Local Food Promotion Program to “fund projects that develop, coordinate, and expand local and regional food business enterprises that engage as intermediaries in indirect producer to consumer marketing to help increase access to and availability of locally and regionally produced agricultural products” (United States Department of Agriculture, 2020). So funds go towards helping organizations to scale up local and regional food efforts, particularly in communities with current and historical patterns of disinvestment.
The program began in the fiscal year of 2014, and is ongoing today. Funds can be used for planning or implementation purposes; a 25% match is required. Any entity is eligible for the funding, so long as they support local and regional business enterprises that process, distribute, aggregate, or store locally or regionally produced products. Planning grants typically are less than or equal to $25,000, and provide a year for recipients to use the funds. Implementation grants are up to $200,000 larger and allow for two years to use the funds. An evaluation of the program by a USDA partner at Kansas State University found really positive economic outcomes.
However this program does not have a requirement to incorporate sustainability or equity goals, though it does ask if projects will serve any “new populations, including ethnic or low income populations” – which begs the question if, taken to its extreme, if scaling these efforts will simply replicate existing scaled up, industrial agricultural systems.
In coding every organization that received a grant by legal structure and their organizational mission to understand the key focus of their work, I found several key foci for successful applicants between 2014-2022:
- Agribusiness development, supply chain, are main focus of grant – see these stay high over time. Other supporting economic foci are: cooperatives, economic development, farmers markets, food delivery, food processing, food service or retail, and some tech companies.
- Community related work also stays high, while community development with respect to food specifically varies quite a bit over the years.
- The number of environmentally motivated organizations goes down over time. This could be because there are more organizations with food as their mission, so there is less of a reason for environmental organizations to focus on food, or for the USDA to fund them. While the backdrop of the sustainable food systems in the face of climate change was a common refrain, few projects examined how to actually make the food system more resilient in terms of climate change mitigation or adaptation.
- With respect to equity, the grant program performs better. Early on (2014-2015), there is a focus on underserved communities, including Tribal support and Black farmers. From 2016-2019, projects continue with these supports and add support for socially disadvantaged farmers and beginning farmers, and Latino/Hispanic populations with funding for entrepreneurship and supply chain supports. In 2020-2022, woman-owned projects are also increasingly supported, which is relevant to the care work component of my project.
- There are a good number of organizations focused on farmland and farmers technical abilities, and the farms themselves; a number of organizations related to food insecurity and health and human services; and a segment of governments and higher education organizations, raising questions about who has capacity to apply for these grants.
The types of proposed projects validate that both organizations and the USDA are trying to scale up local and regional food systems. These projects include food hubs, mobile markets, processing facilities, community supported fisheries (CFAs) and CSAs, farm-to-institution programs (foodbank, school, hospital/clinics, daycares, and detention centers), virtual marketplaces and pop-up markets, farmer cooperatives, technical assistance, business development, and marketing efforts.
- counties that were home to an LFPP grant recipient were not more likely to have increased number of small farms or sales from small farms than counties that were home to unsuccessful grant applicants, but they were more likely to have increased local or regionally-oriented farms and farm sales than counties without any applicants.
- The LFPP grant structure emphasizes the economic expansion opportunities of scaling up local and regional food system, and often misses an opportunity highlight the equity and environmental benefits that may be provided by grant recipient programs. Indeed, it is difficult to document environmental or equity benefits when much of the application is focused on market expansion. However, LFPP strongly encourages grant applicants to demonstrate connections with to people living in "low-income and low-access" areas. This shows a commitment to equity that could be deepened to consider additional ways of serving people living in communities that have been historically disinvested in, and to connect these investments with environmental and financial sustainability goals.
- Grant applicants however, see many ways to "sneak" equity and sustainability into this program, and have had a lot of success in doing so.
- Grant applicants document difficulties with the application process, and many refer to the challenge of only organizations with a significant level of capacity being able to apply to the grant program.
During the course of this project, I learned significantly about the complex relationships between gender, labor, environment, and food systems. In developing methods for analyzing and measuring the extent to which care work may be either a component of a particular job in the sustainable food system, I also realized that even as carework may not be a responsibility of a job, it may be the motivational factor for partaking in one. These two factors are different, and difficult to analyze separately, but my work builds a foundation to understand equitable food systems jobs in a number of ways, with clear policy implications for supporting sustainable food systems labor better.
Second, by analyzing the LFPP grant application process and outcomes, we have learned a significant amount about the difficulties that applicants face and the ways that the USDA prioritizes different areas of sustainable food systems work, whether it is cultural components of the food system or resilience in the face of climate change. All of these must be undergirded by an ability to eventually become a financially sustainable small business.
One very exciting component of these grant programs is the role of experimentation in building new food systems, particularly with a more inclusive framework for who participates in and builds new ways for our food system to function. Better transparency in program outcomes and project-specific support to share out the lessons learned could go a long way in helping scale and grow sustainable and equitable food systems.
To that end, the economic focus should be build upon specific values - economy that is inclusive of many populations and sustainability goals. For example, in many ways, sustainability is presumed under the term “local” with little text spent defining local or any sustainability goals or outcomes. A few delineated food mile criteria or used organic as criteria for partners to work with, but almost all technical assistance to farmers focused on business skills for scaling and planning rather than sustainability. Incorporating sustainability components, even gentle ones, could enhance the grant program's ability to seed experiments that center economic development and inclusion and sustainability.
For equity, there were a lot of great programs being supported through LFPP, though there may be a missed opportunity to identify more clear criteria beyond jobs created and markets expanded for what these projects should accomplish. For example, many grants indicated challenges with staffing turnover, and few noted whether jobs created offered living wages.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
I conducted interviews with over 100 LFPP grant applicants or successful grant recipients.
I presented my findings at 4 peer reviewed conferences.
I have two drafts that will be ready to submit to peer-reviewed journals in the coming months.
Project Outcomes
For my first research aim, I found the following findings;
research has documented how gendered work plays an important role in sustainable food work and food preparation at home (Bruce and Castellano, 2016), in schools (Gaddis and Coplen, 2018), and in restaurants (Sachs, et al., 2014; Jayaraman, 2016; Jayaraman, 2013). Unfortunately, much of this body of work also reflects how work that is feminized – also called “carework” to denote both nurturing and carefulness – is devaluated; differences in social-economic status and race exacerbate this further (Castellano, 2016). Two trends compound the potential for devaluation of work in sustainable food systems. First, new research documents the ways that the concept of carework has been extended to environmental considerations in farming (Shislery & Sbicca, 2019). Second, many sustainable food systems efforts are orchestrated or run by non-profits, community groups, and/or socially-minded enterprises, which often disproportionately employ women (Petrzelka & Mannon, 2006). We also know that there are negative returns to being in an occupation with a higher percentage of females – at that wages go down as an occupation shifts to becoming a majority female occupation. Relatedly, there are negative returns to jobs that require more nurturant social skills, or care work, in part because they are essentialized as naturally occurring to women and often considered a component of, or an extension of, household work.
Together, these dynamics present a puzzle. In my previous research, I found that roles doing the essential work of AFS development are underpaid. I wanted to understand why. Two possible explanations arose: Based on the anecdotal evidence that women are leading these changes, and that some AFS work represents a different way of thinking of the food system, I wanted to know if we could see this in the job postings themselves – I knew that there is a long literature on gendered language in job postings that contributes to the wage gap. But I wanted to know something slightly different – does care work, regardless of who does it, show up in this work? And can it predict uncompetitive wages? To answer these questions, this paper asks, how does carework manifest in sustainable food systems? Is carework, regardless of who does it, undervalued? Alternatively, Are people instead accepting lower wages in AFS than occupation counterparts in other industries because of a “psychic income” from doing good?
In a previous paper I looked at the type of work involved in alternative food systems by examining job opening advertisements between 2010 and 2019 from the Good Food Jobs website which provides a platform to advertise jobs in alternative food systems. I extracted Information about the hiring organization, and job wages, benefits, skills, and responsibilities from job advertisements when present. There were about 38,000 jobs, 39% of which had wage information. 81% were full time jobs. Postings concentrate in cities and along the coast.
I found a few very important jobs for alternative food systems development . Contrary to industrial farms, AFS farms were smaller, on average, and and most were diversified: they produced many types of vegetables as well as animal products. Diversified farming practices are known to be more sustainable, but also labor-intensive, and to require more coordination from someone like a farm manager across different aspects of the farm. This is shown in how important these two roles are, account for over 7% of all openings, shows us how a sustainable farm might function differently.
Community and Social Service Specialists are directly engaged in work that aims to fulfill uphold those goals of equitable economies, sustainability, and public health. So for example, their work may focus on Community health by engaging with nutrition, food access, and gardening at schools, community gardens, and farmers' markets. Or it may focus on sustainability by supporting land conservation, farmland access, sustainable farming practices, and farmer training programs. Others support economic development by providing local and regional branding and small business incubation support. Finally, community organizers advocated on farming practices or policy arenas at the regional and national level.
General and Operations Managers are defined as supervisory roles in which the responsibilities are too varied to be categorized neatly. Indeed, many of these openings were at novel, and growing, AFS-specific arrangements such as food hubs, farmers markets, farm-to-institution programs, cooperative associations (for growers and consumers), and small businesses.
These roles reflect where a lot of the activity is happening to actually build alternative food systems. And we get a good sense that they are building alternatives. Unfortunately, AFS jobs were found to be under compensated compared to the same role in other industries, and often struggled to earn a living wage or connect to secure career pathways. These jobs in particular were not competitive compared to other industries. Do these roles in particular, which reflect a potential alternative way of building systems, also reflect more carefulness or nurture?
To answer these questions I adapt the computational social science method of sentiment analyses to analyze job advertisements in the sustainable food systems over the last decade. Rather than testing for positive or negative sentiment, I examine labor quality in the contexts of gendered language and appeals to sustainability. Specifically, by creating lexicons of words for gendered language and carework, including categories that enable an analysis of masculine language, I measure job advertisements’ incorporation of gendered work, and whether advertisements reveal gendered divisions of labor and compensation patterns. Similarly, I measure the extent to which job postings appeal to sustainability, and how this work is valued in terms of job quality. Finally, I explore the co-occurrence of appeals to sustainability and gendered work. This will help identify where and how appeals to sustainability and gendered work play a role in sustainable food systems work, with important implications for green jobs policy that aims to support and expand climate resilience in agriculture.
Variances are significantly different between groups, so I used Wilcoxon rank sum test instead of t-test to compare the counts of care phrases for care occupations and non-care occupations, using traditional definitions from the literature. I find that there is no significant difference between these counts. this is in contrast to other areas of labor analysis showing that care work concentrates in “care work occupations” – we can say that many of these jobs have some reference to care work in them, regardless of whether they are traditionally recognized as such.
Next thing I did was pull the 97 occupations that i was able to test in the previous paper for whether their median wages were statistically different from the median wage for their respective occupation and MSA. There were 12 occupations that out performed other industries, most of which were in the food preparation and service sector, as well as Thirty-four AFS occupations that were not competitive. As you can see, some include traditional care work occupations like education and healthcare, but the vast majority are not. The remaining 51 occupations I tested were no different than other industries.
I used a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test to see whether counts of carework distinguished these categories, and I found that it did. We can see that competitive jobs, despite being mostly in food provisioning occupations, had the least amount of care work involved. No different occupations had more care work counts, but still less than those that were not competitive. Despite those being, for the most part, not considered carework occupations.
I extracted the actual differences using Dunn’s version of a non-parametric Tukey test and adjusting for multiple comparison p-values with the Benjamini-Hochberg method, I find that all differences between groups are also significant.
Next, I regressed the log of the ratio of hourly wages over median wages for that occupation and MSA on the log of counts of care work, and binary indicator variables for my other text dictionaries, as well as fixed effects for occupation, MSA, and year. I clustered the errors by the fixed effects. Care work does not seem to have any influence on whether a job meets median occupation wages, but other things in the job advertisement did. Appeals to positive environmental impacts, and mentions of improving food access work were associated with a 4% decrease in the ratio of wages to median wages, while mentions of working for a great company and DEI efforts were associated with 4 and 2% increases in the wages to median wages ratio, respectively. Since I used the log of the ratio, these indicator variables end up having effect sizes of several percent on a relatively small ratio – often tipping it from being uncompetitive to competitive or vice versa. Obviously this is not causality, the effect of promoting your organization as “one of the best” does not yield increased wages, but it does show what is associated with higher paying jobs, relative to their occupation. These results might show that it might not be care work per se, but actually appeals to “doing good” in the form of environment or food access work, or that perhaps different types of care work need to be broken out, so that food access work is a kind of care work in contrast to say education about food or animal welfare.
The last thing I did was look at mean and median counts of appeals to care work and the environment together for each major occupation category. And I do find that there is some part of the intuition that the most important jobs for building AFS have more mentions of both care and the environment together.
Places that bring together care and the environment are at the forefront of designing AFS, also commonly low-paid. Regardless, wages in the food system are low – need policy investment for it that recognizes it as a public good that can trade on “willingness to do good” and/or “caringness”. And especially that recognizes gendered and racial barriers to contributing to innovation in the food system.
Possible theory explanation:
- Care work is a form of a public good – taking care of our children and elderly, or providing education or healthcare, benefit our entire society. We can extend this type of thinking to environmental work.
- Its possible that AFS development falls into this category as well – though the relationship with carework is not entirely defined, it could also be more generally related to “doing good” and less to do with care work, but still fall into the public good category…
For my second research aim, I found the following findings:
the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) created the Local Food Promotion Program to “fund projects that develop, coordinate, and expand local and regional food business enterprises that engage as intermediaries in indirect producer to consumer marketing to help increase access to and availability of locally and regionally produced agricultural products” (United States Department of Agriculture, 2020). So funds go towards helping organizations to scale up local and regional food efforts, particularly in communities with current and historical patterns of disinvestment.
The program began in the fiscal year of 2014, and is ongoing today. Funds can be used for planning or implementation purposes; a 25% match is required. Any entity is eligible for the funding, so long as they support local and regional business enterprises that process, distribute, aggregate, or store locally or regionally produced products. Planning grants typically are less than or equal to $25,000, and provide a year for recipients to use the funds. Implementation grants are up to $200,000 larger and allow for two years to use the funds. An evaluation of the program by a USDA partner at Kansas State University found really positive economic outcomes.
However this program does not have a requirement to incorporate sustainability or equity goals, though it does ask if projects will serve any “new populations, including ethnic or low income populations” – which begs the question if, taken to its extreme, if scaling these efforts will simply replicate existing scaled up, industrial agricultural systems.
In coding every organization that received a grant by legal structure and their organizational mission to understand the key focus of their work, I found several key foci for successful applicants between 2014-2022:
- Agribusiness development, supply chain, are main focus of grant – see these stay high over time. Other supporting economic foci are: cooperatives, economic development, farmers markets, food delivery, food processing, food service or retail, and some tech companies.
- Community related work also stays high, while community development with respect to food specifically varies quite a bit over the years.
- The number of environmentally motivated organizations goes down over time. This could be because there are more organizations with food as their mission, so there is less of a reason for environmental organizations to focus on food, or for the USDA to fund them. While the backdrop of the sustainable food systems in the face of climate change was a common refrain, few projects examined how to actually make the food system more resilient in terms of climate change mitigation or adaptation.
- With respect to equity, the grant program performs better. Early on (2014-2015), there is a focus on underserved communities, including Tribal support and Black farmers. From 2016-2019, projects continue with these supports and add support for socially disadvantaged farmers and beginning farmers, and Latino/Hispanic populations with funding for entrepreneurship and supply chain supports. In 2020-2022, woman-owned projects are also increasingly supported, which is relevant to the care work component of my project.
- There are a good number of organizations focused on farmland and farmers technical abilities, and the farms themselves; a number of organizations related to food insecurity and health and human services; and a segment of governments and higher education organizations, raising questions about who has capacity to apply for these grants.
The types of proposed projects validate that both organizations and the USDA are trying to scale up local and regional food systems. These projects include food hubs, mobile markets, processing facilities, community supported fisheries (CFAs) and CSAs, farm-to-institution programs (foodbank, school, hospital/clinics, daycares, and detention centers), virtual marketplaces and pop-up markets, farmer cooperatives, technical assistance, business development, and marketing efforts.
- counties that were home to an LFPP grant recipient were not more likely to have increased number of small farms or sales from small farms than counties that were home to unsuccessful grant applicants, but they were more likely to have increased local or regionally-oriented farms and farm sales than counties without any applicants.
- The LFPP grant structure emphasizes the economic expansion opportunities of scaling up local and regional food system, and often misses an opportunity highlight the equity and environmental benefits that may be provided by grant recipient programs. Indeed, it is difficult to document environmental or equity benefits when much of the application is focused on market expansion. However, LFPP strongly encourages grant applicants to demonstrate connections with to people living in "low-income and low-access" areas. This shows a commitment to equity that could be deepened to consider additional ways of serving people living in communities that have been historically disinvested in, and to connect these investments with environmental and financial sustainability goals.
- Grant applicants however, see many ways to "sneak" equity and sustainability into this program, and have had a lot of success in doing so.
- Grant applicants document difficulties with the application process, and many refer to the challenge of only organizations with a significant level of capacity being able to apply to the grant program.
During the course of this project, I learned significantly about the complex relationships between gender, labor, environment, and food systems. In developing methods for analyzing and measuring the extent to which care work may be either a component of a particular job in the sustainable food system, I also realized that even as carework may not be a responsibility of a job, it may be the motivational factor for partaking in one. These two factors are different, and difficult to analyze separately, but my work builds a foundation to understand equitable food systems jobs in a number of ways, with clear policy implications for supporting sustainable food systems labor better.
Second, by analyzing the LFPP grant application process and outcomes, we have learned a significant amount about the difficulties that applicants face and the ways that the USDA prioritizes different areas of sustainable food systems work, whether it is cultural components of the food system or resilience in the face of climate change. All of these must be undergirded by an ability to eventually become a financially sustainable small business.
One very exciting component of these grant programs is the role of experimentation in building new food systems, particularly with a more inclusive framework for who participates in and builds new ways for our food system to function. Better transparency in program outcomes and project-specific support to share out the lessons learned could go a long way in helping scale and grow sustainable and equitable food systems.
To that end, the economic focus should be build upon specific values - economy that is inclusive of many populations and sustainability goals. For example, in many ways, sustainability is presumed under the term “local” with little text spent defining local or any sustainability goals or outcomes. A few delineated food mile criteria or used organic as criteria for partners to work with, but almost all technical assistance to farmers focused on business skills for scaling and planning rather than sustainability. Incorporating sustainability components, even gentle ones, could enhance the grant program's ability to seed experiments that center economic development and inclusion and sustainability.
For equity, there were a lot of great programs being supported through LFPP, though there may be a missed opportunity to identify more clear criteria beyond jobs created and markets expanded for what these projects should accomplish. For example, many grants indicated challenges with staffing turnover, and few noted whether jobs created offered living wages.