UK farmers indicated to me that such practices might give them an edge in meeting food safety concerns, but would be simply impossible due to how they would change the farm’s outward face. Part and parcel of this issue, UK “right to roam” laws grant the public the right to walk freely across privately owned parcels of land, along with their domestic animals. This comparatively open and unsecured way of managing farms would make many of the secure fencing and private property-based exclusion measures common in CA incongruous with the English rural landscape, and, in some cases, potentially illegal or flat out impossible to implement. When I surveyed on-farm practices for food safety and conservation, UK farmers were especially unlikely to remove vegetation from around ditches, ponds, and field margins. When I asked them why, farmers indicated to me that the idea of doing so seemed to conflict not only with the right to roam, but also with a popularly held idea of the proper role of a farm as a wild environment. During our interviews UK farmers often noted that local community-level rules governing the cosmetic appearance of agricultural fields and associated facilities would prohibit the removal of vegetation around field margins, ponds and watercourses which otherwise serve a scenic purpose. Even without that constraint, treating the farm as something other than a wild place did not seem right to the majority of farmers I spoke with. Those who did not espouse this view operated the largest farms in my sample, and were those most likely to protect their crops under the cover of large scale glasshouses. California’s longstanding legacy as a highly capitalized agricultural economy dominated since its founding by large farms, commodity crops, drying weed and production-oriented agricultural methods has created a long-standing capitalist framing and sense of separation between agricultural and residential or recreational lands .

Farming in California is clustered into areas of historical agricultural intensification, far from the population centers of urban and suburban living. On these dedicated agricultural expanses, land management decisions are somewhat insulated from conflicting suburban views of what agriculture should be or should look like. The sheer amount of land available for agricultural use in the United States generally and California specifically has allowed agriculture to make its own rules, less concerned with sharing space with nearby towns. California farmers I interviewed indicated that they were consumed entirely by the challenge of maintaining the land they have while producing the crop their buyers wanted to see, in the ways required by law, standards, and buyer requests. They primarily focused on economics and capacity when deciding how to do so, and what it looked like to anyone outside of the farming lifestyle was essentially immaterial. Illustrating this difference, the California farmers I interviewed agreed with their UK counterparts that agricultural lands can serve a valuable purpose as wildlife habitat if practices such as clearing buffer strips and erecting wildlife exclusion fences are not undertaken, but this fact was most often mentioned by them as a serious liability rather than a competing desired outcome. At best, it was noted as a fraught conflict between different sets of values; on the one hand, there were what they saw as the ideals of environmental health, or romanticized notions of productive wilderness and movements ‘back to the land’, and on the other side came the discordant reality of what is feasible on tight economic margins and large commercial contracts, and what is simply too risky to—quite literally—bet the farm on. Their explanations highlighted values echoed by my UK sample: commitment to safe food, respect for nature, and the desire to protect both the long-term financial and ecological viability of their farms. However, California farmers in my sample did not mention being motivated at all by values associated with the scenic appearance of their fields, or the accessibility of their land for recreational value.

These values did not appear to be strong motivators for their practices in comparison with the clearly articulated expectations of food safety audits and buyer requirements.Lastly, as my field work progressed, I found growing evidence that farm ownership patterns may be having a specific impact on certain kinds of food safety efforts. Specifically, farmers with a deep personal connection to the land they farmed described their on-farm food safety practices in language that made explicit reference to environmental health as a component of safe food. Since the late 19 century with the advent of modern farming technologies and increasing th concentration of populations in urban centers, many the industrialized nations of the Global North have experienced a sharp decline in the percentage of their populations working in agriculture . Falling numbers for population working in agriculture come on the heels of rising farm productivity and the development and proliferation of non-agricultural employment opportunities, all of which combine to endanger family farm ownership and the transgenerational transfer of farming knowledge. However, UK regulators and trade associations stressed for me that the majority of the farmland in the UK is nevertheless still family-owned and operated, often by families that have run their farms for generations. “It’s a long game,” I was told by one trade association representative who worked closely with farms. “This land has been theirs for a long time.” My archival research echoed this finding, and my interviews bore this out as well. Most of my UK farms still under direct family ownership. In 7 several cases, I interviewed the farm’s owner, who was also the on-site harvest manager, and who shared a surname with the commercial name of the farm. Several more of my UK interviewees represented associations of several small family farms that had banded together to achieve economies of scale in a competitive agricultural market, but in a way that preserved individual family management of original family-held lands. Once this history was spelled out, I could see that the names of these companies often reflected their conglomerate nature through acronyms or group nouns composed of the sum of their parts. Importantly though, each family remained in control of the land it had brought to the association. Management decisions were still made at the local level, by the manager of each individual farm.

Several times my questions about farm management could only be answered by my initial interviewee for their section of the farm’s land, and I had to be routed to another family within the association to hear about management on their portion of the farmland . My work in CA suggested a subtle difference here, which was outside the scope of my research and would need to be verified and explored further. Family farm ownership is certainly not unknown in CA, nor is it especially uncommon. Several of my CA interviewees represented family-owned farms, even if the farm had never carried the surname of the individuals running it. Even one of the CA farms I spoke at length with, that was among the largest and the most factory-run and thus potentially the farthest from a pastoral family farming ideal, had started at one point as family farm and grown through land acquisitions. What I found important here was that the land had been acquired, not simply joined together in name. What had been a large number of independent holdings, some of which may have originally been family operated, was now a large conglomerate run by managers who do not and have never had a personal family association with the land they now manage. One of the farm managers I spoke with who worked for a CA grower that splits its production between California and Arizona depending on time of year, vertical growing systems told me that he moves to Arizona when the season there begins. Neither place is home, he reported; his family is in Georgia. This is a job.8 Scholars examining the sociology of rural agriculture have noted instances of this difference in other places and at other times. Comparing environmental regulation in the UK and US in the mid 1980s, David Vogel notes that greater population density and less available arable land in the UK has been a factor in making conservation and land use issues take center stage more easily than in the US . In the US, Julie Guthman has explored the history of California farming and its lack of a true family-farm agrarian past at any point. Instead, farming in CA has been pushed toward larger-scale and more production-oriented models that focus on large farms and high valuable crops, in part because of the high property values of CA land . From the descriptions offered by my interviewees, it appeared that persistent differences in how farmland is held and operated in CA and in the UK could be partly responsible for influencing farmers’ decisions about the importance of maintaining environmental sustainability practices alongside food safety requirements. If some degree of continued family ownership and personal connection to both the past and future of the land increases family farmers’ ability to think about food safety requirements with a long-term sustainability framing, this difference in land ownership patterns could be creating an environment where US farms’ environmental future is more likely to be discounted in favor of present food safety and economic concerns. However, UK farmers have already experienced and responded in their own ways to market pressures that have incentivized larger landholdings and more intensive production, finding ways to adapt that still preserve family ownership. As the UK grapples with the coming challenge of competing on a global marketplace as a single nation apart from EU common market, it is unlikely that these pressures will lessen. Thus, UK agriculture may be in a transitional period, and headed for a new period of changes in historical patterns of family farm ownership.In the years since my research first began, the state and non-state food safety controls examined in my study have undergone several important changes with the goal of reducing the duplicative and redundant landscape of safety controls active in the fresh produce market. One of the first such efforts was the Global Food Safety Initiative bench marking effort. Since its launch in May of 2000, GFSI bench marking has attempted to certify for equivalence many disparate food safety standards operating in multiple food supply chains around the world. GFSI gained recognition in 2007 after seven major global retailers announced they would accept any GFSI-bench marked safety standard. Nevertheless, wider acceptance difficulties remained, and 9 events such as the 2006 outbreak of E. coli in California spinach caused a further proliferation of standards rather than an easy convergence around fewer standards or robust bench marking. After a lengthy and remarkably inclusive multi-stakeholder process with the goal of identifying a single safety standard that could serve as a commonly accepted guaranteed of good practices in any national or international market, the United Fresh Harmonized GAP Standardwas created in 2016. In partnership with GlobalG.A.P., the Harmonized Produce Safety Standard was born , and later became the USDA Harmonized GAP standard. However, the multi-stakeholder harmonized safety standard created in the aforementioned process was not unified for long; in the course of obtaining GFSI bench marking, GlobalG.A.P. was forced to update its harmonized standard to a version different from that adopted by the rest of its partners in the original harmonization process, creating a proprietary GlobalG.A.P. 10 harmonized standard alongside the USDA Harmonized GAP standard. The differences between those two standards were small, but in essence, there were still multiple standards even after the harmonization efforts and the attempts to use bench marking to level playing fields between different standards. In the context of my research, the private standard for which I gathered the most evidence of positive outcomes in farmer experience and environmental sustainability, the Tesco NURTURE program, has also now been subsumed under the umbrella of the most recent Global G.A.P. HPSS. The Tesco NURTURE program provided much of the basis for my conclusions favoring the results from private standards that use a balance of regulatory styles and a wide view of food safety that includes environmental considerations. Both Global G.A.P. and NURTURE were among my category 4, representing standards that were the most balanced in both style and focus. As a module within the newest version of the Global G.A.P. standard, NURTURE’s transformation is an early example of one possible outcome of ongoing efforts to achieve harmonization between the many overlapping food safety standards current active in fresh produce markets.