This project is one of a set of special awards to junior investigators, of small amounts of money to allow them to initiative a new research agenda. The study will involve twelve months of ethnographic research among Mennonite farmers moving from diverse eastern locations (mainly Pennsylvania) into Wisconsin and buying farms from local families who have given up on the struggle to make a living from agriculture. The PI will conduct participant observation among farming households, both Mennonite immigrants and local Wisconsin families who are selling out. The point of the study is to explain why Wisconsin (non-Mennonite) families give up farming while Mennonite families eagerly purchase the same farms and make a go of it while facing the same markets. The role of family labor in the presumed relative success of the Mennonites will be studied by recording basic input and output data. The role of community organizations and resources in the success and failure of family farms will be studied by consulting local records (census records, commodity, livestock, cooperative and extension reports) and through participant observation. The study will advance our understanding of the role of local culture or ethnic background in economic life, at the same time that it will illuminate our understanding the factors impacting on the success and failure of family farms, a topic of great concern in the US since Jeffersonian times.
