Matthew Porter's Graduate Defense Seminar

Matthew Porter, MS Candidate, Rural Sociology, will present Farm Household Motivations and Diversification Strategies of Organic Farmers at the Rural Urban Interface as his Graduate Defense Seminar in 333 Kottman Hall.

After the development of the National Organic Standards, scholars began to increasingly observe consolidation in processing and reliance on less sustainable production practices in organic agriculture. Scholars argued that these forces – consolidation and conventionalization – could push small and medium scale organic producers out of farming by altering the economic incentives of organic production. However, limited scholarly work has been done to analyze the possible impacts of non-economic motivations and the farm diversification strategies of organic farmers. To fill this gap in the literature, I analyze both qualitative and quantitative data to compare the differences of conventional and organic farmers' non-economic motivations and farm diversification strategies  at the Rural Urban Interface