Chris Morris featured on Iowa Podcast
Chris Morris featured on Iowa Podcast
Chris Morris, post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Iowa State University, was recently interviewed for Iowa Podcast. Morris spoke about farmer trauma and risk aversion. Morris’s research shows stress from farming has a compounding effect over time and becomes mentally destructive. The resulting trauma not only results in risk averse behavior and higher than average suicide rates, but is passed down. In the podcast, he also touched on intergenerational expectations and the mental health gap in rural Iowa.
Rebecca Schewe from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Rick Walsh from Syracuse University recently published a policy brief with the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs Center for Policy Research. Titled “The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Will Deepen the Farm Crisis, Not Solve It,” the brief addresses how the bill’s changes to agricultural subsidy programs will disproportionately benefit large farms and non-farming investors, accelerating farm loss and consolidation across the United States. The authors propose four reforms policymakers should enact to prevent these devastating consequences, including tightening payment limits and closing loopholes, reinstating income caps, narrowing and enforcing “actively engaged in farming” requirements, and ensuring new base acres go to small and beginning farmers.
Emily Southard, PhD Candidate, Rural Sociology & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and Florence Becot, Nationwide Insurance Early Career Professor Agricultural Safety and Health Program Lead at Pennsylvania State University, recently published an article in the Journal of Agromedicine titled “Caregiving Along the Life Course Among Farming Households.” The study used publicly available survey of 704 farming caregivers in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest to understand the nature of caregiving in this population. They found that caregiving has a variety of impacts based on sociodemographic characteristics, and emphasized that they add to the growing scholarship challenging stereotypes that farming communities are socially tight-knit, self-sufficient, and do not want help.
Erin Gaede from the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently published an articled titled “Housing financial stress and community well-being: Is there an urban-rural dimension” in the Journal of Rural Studies. This research uses a mixed-method research design to examine how housing financial stress impacts community well-being with a focus on rural areas in the U.S. Gaede and her coauthors combine descriptive and statistical analyses with key informant interviews and multiple measures of community well-being. Two key findings came out of the study: housing financial stress is more common in urban areas and among renters, and its impact on community well-being varies across the urban-rural spectrum and by well-being measure. These nuances highlight the need for caution when generalizing about housing financial stress and its effects on the larger community.
Angie Carter, associate professor at Michigan Technological University, has been elected to a 3-year term to serve as the rural sociologist on the North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (NCR-SARE) Administrative Council. NCR-SARE is a USDA-funded grant program whose mission is to strengthen communities, increase farmer/rancher economic viability, and improve the environment by supporting research and education. NCR-SARE’s Administrative Council is responsible for operating the program by appointing a host institution, defining policy, issuing calls for grant proposals, and making decisions about funding proposals.
Dr. Lisa Pruitt, RSS President and Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, recently published an article titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine: Rural Women, Maternal Health, and the Future of Feminist Coalition Building” in the UMKC Law Review. The article discusses how women are largely ignored in most types of research, despite the fact that “rural women are proverbial canaries in the coal mine—at least one category of canaries—when it comes to women’s well-being.” The paper, part of the “Transforming Law, Contesting Exclusion, Shaping Inclusion” collection, argues for the need to bring rural women into feminist coalitions and to help rural women feel empowered about their identities. 
Mary Hendrickson, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security at the University of Missouri, recently published with coauthors a commentary in The Antitrust Bulletin. Titled “Expectation-Based Fairness in Agricultural Markets: Implications for Antitrust Policy,” the article discusses perceptions of fairness by farmers in the context of two case studies: policy changes to water access rights and the use of dicamba in agricultural areas. Their research demonstrates the feasibility of identifying expectation bases, enabling more objective assessments of unfairness claims, which may have policy implications as it relates to antitrust and competition regulations. The authors note that understanding expectation-based fairness claims can help policy-makers evaluate harms not captured by traditional metrics and design more responsive competition and contract policies.
Kelly Wilson, Assistant Research Professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri, and Mary Hendrickson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, recently published an article in the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association publication Choices titled “Trends and Barriers to Underserved Farmers’ Participation in Federal Conservation Programs and Their Association with Policy Changes.” In the article, they and their coauthors reviews national data on historically underserved farmers and ranchers’ participation in federal conservation programs. They use this data to examine how these patterns relate to administrative processes, structural barriers, and recent policy changes. They describe trends in EQIP and CSP participation across producer groups and assesses whether major institutional milestones have been associated with changes in historically underserved farmers and ranchers contract numbers. The overall goal of the article is to provide a clear view of how accessibility has evolved, identify remaining constraints, and inform policy discussions on equity and efficiency in conservation program design.
A recent article in The Guardian titled “US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’” quoted Mary Hendrickson, Professor in Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security. The article discussed how many companies that are trying to build AI data centers have attempted to buy large swaths of farmland. However, farmers have by and large resisted these efforts to purchase their land. Hendrickson provided expert knowledge on the importance of farms to rural families and communities, noting that many farmers feel a responsibility to previous generations and citing the tragedies that occurred during the 1980s farm crisis. She also notes that transforming farmland into AI data centers would likely be irreversible.
Ryanne Pilgeram from the Wilderness Society, along with co-author Mark Haggerty, recently published a report titled “Decoupling and Public Lands: Ensuring the future of public lands while supporting communities who bear the burden of shifting fossil fuel markets.” The report outlines how Congress should establish a permanent fund to manage natural resource revenue so communities can diversify fossil fuel-reliant economies and keep public lands in public hands. Their work highlights that public lands are economically entwined with fossil fuel extraction, which creates incentives to continue fossil fuel development. However, boom-and-bust revenue cycles from fossil fuel markets harm local budgets. They recommend creating a predictable, stable revenue source for resource communities irrespective of market fluctuations via establishing a permanent resource revenue fund and note that decoupling budgets from annual extraction revenues can reduce political pressure to sell or develop public lands.