How Can You Measure What You Can’t Measure?
Kristal Jones
Originally published in Resilience, Issue #45 – Searching for Home Ground
In the early 1940s, Arthur Goldschmidt, an anthropology professor at UCLA, moved east to study the impacts of corporatization of agriculture on rural communities in California’s Central Valley. The purpose of the study of three communities in the region, which came to be titled As You Sow, was to observe and describe the role that family farming played in rural life and the potential social implications of different forms of agricultural production. In a preface to the second edition of the book, written decades later, Goldschmidt noted that his purpose was not to reify or elevate a bucolic rural past in the face of change: “Though the tradition has its endearing charms, it is not without its costs, while urban society has much to commend it. The importance lies, however, in the recognition of both the possible dangers and the inherent values of an urbanized rural society. It is not impossible to salvage the good from tradition and still capture the best that technological efficiency has to offer.”
I think about Goldschimdt’s work often. As a rural sociologist by training, I have always been interested in the social dimensions of agriculture; that is, in the ripple effects that production systems shaped increasingly by external pressures (climate, markets, politics) have on individuals and families and communities. And equally important, in how the histories and visions and priorities of those people shape the production systems and the ecosystem in tune with or in spite of those external pressures. Goldschmidt is often seen as kicking-off rural studies in the United States, but in fact, his central thesis reflects a longer tradition of European social theorists reflecting on the persistence of peasant agriculture (defined as farms and communities that resisted maximizing productivity through mechanization or specialization in the name of community wellbeing and self-sufficiency). Although the framing of both “family farm” and “peasant agriculture” can seem old-fashioned, overly simplistic, and at times exclusionary, the underlying point is more expansive. For many producers, past and present, in most places around the world, agriculture is not simply a job, but is instead a vocation and an avocation rooted in history, place, and community. In other words, agriculture is a way to make and sustain a home.
As an applied social scientist now often working with public and non-profit agencies and organizations to support producers, consumers, and everyone in between in maintaining and enhancing resilient food systems, I spend a lot of time considering what counts as resilient, regenerative, sustainable. It is, in many ways, simplest to boil those dynamic concepts down to a focus on ecosystem structure and function. Rangelands are being managed sustainably if they grow grass every year. But what species, over what time period, in what climatic conditions? Are there birds and bees and prairie dogs in those grasses? How do ranchers define, for their own places, what “counts” as resilient or adaptive or sustainable, inclusive of not only the ecosystem but the human communities living within it? Equally importantly, how do these concepts account for historical disenfranchisement of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples across the West? Can a system be truly resilient if it keeps people out of their home places?
In ways I am still putting my finger on, the “Goldschmidt thesis” resonates for me when I think about the ranchers and land managers I know and have learned from across the Plains and Rockies. These families and communities are managing land sometimes, but not always, as owners, and are building economically-viable businesses in community, through local sales, cooperative marketing, and value-added products. They are building on the multi-generational knowledge of white producers and multi-millennial knowledge of Indigenous producers to manage animals on the landscape in ways that reflect ecological history. They are restoring Native foodways through free-roaming buffalo herds, and they are supporting the many family ranchers whose livelihoods have been built on cattle. In other words, they are merging the knowledge and priorities of past and present in place-specific operations, households, and communities.
To a certain extent, the many ways that resilient and regenerative ranching looks on the landscape reflects a more recent adage: “If you’ve seen one rural community, you’ve seen one rural community.” The ethnographic and place-specific work of rural social scientists and the ongoing creation of rural community resilience reflected in that sentiment, in many ways, stand in high contrast to the increased emphasis across the food system on monitoring, measurement, and data collection. “You can’t monitor what you don’t measure” is an oft-stated principle within land management and one of the reasons that ecological indicators tend to dominate rubrics and lists of metrics that operationalize terms like regenerative, sustainable, resilient, and more recently, climate-smart or climate-friendly. In a recent study for The Nature Conservancy’s Grazing Lands Program, colleagues and I engaged ranchers and ranch employees across the West to ask questions about the ranch management and viability metrics that are most useful to them for their own decision-making and to communicate about their home place to markets, policymakers, and the public. Overwhelmingly, ranchers reported that there are a set of metrics that reflect seasonal decisions, short-term outcomes, and long-term impacts, related to both productivity and ecosystem health. They also emphasized that economic stability is interconnected with other short- or long-term goals related to multidimensional resilience. In other words, being profitable is a necessary — and also not sufficient — condition of resilience.
In interviews and focus group conversations in several projects over the past few years, ranchers discussing the impacts of regenerative practices often mention less tangible or measurable impacts of their practice. In addition to discrete metrics that cover multiple dimensions of ranching and rangeland health, ranchers talk about being able to attend their children’s sporting events in the winter because of later calving seasons, about decreasing the stress on their bodies when they stop growing feed and driving a tractor, and most crucially, about their children and grandchildren’s renewed interest in ranching when they see that it doesn’t have to be as labor and capital intensive as in the past. These and many other outcomes of adaptive practices shift the conversation away from a statement about monitoring what you measure and toward a question: how can you measure what you can’t measure?
This is the central conundrum for many monitoring and data collection frameworks that are requested or required of ranchers interested in participating in various market opportunities, as well as accessing public funds to support conservation practices. Many corporate commitments for sustainability focus on one or a few dimensions of ecosystem structure and function, things like water use, the presence of certain key species of birds or pollinators, and of course, on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A recent emphasis on climate-smart and climate-friendly commodities from the USDA and the private sector further narrows in on GHG emissions as a singular set of metrics that define climate-smart. While these metrics are an accurate reflection of the climate change mitigation impacts of given production practices, the sole focus on CO2 equivalents loses the much richer and more dynamic concepts of resilience and adaptation that make a product and the practices that generated it climate-smart in a holistic sense. Maintaining the soil carbon stocks currently held in grasslands by minimizing conversion to row crops or residential development, for example, is a climate-smart outcome not as easily measured or valued in the existing marketplace and regulatory frameworks around conservation on working lands.
For independent ranchers and the rural communities that they call home, the story around producing climate-smart products will likely require the integration of new technologies and techniques in ways that enable economic viability and staying on the landscape in ways that do not further exacerbate and are able to adapt to a changing climate. That storytelling can focus on an external audience, to consumers and voters and policymakers, with the goal of creating more holistic market programs and investments in rural places. Certifications focused on regenerative agriculture increasingly include producer wellbeing alongside metrics of biodiversity, soil health, and other ecological dimensions of the systems. Equally important, storytelling can also be internal, within the producer or rural community. Talking circles like those organized by Women in Ranching, for example, create space for people to share their stories and create connections that have human rather than market-oriented goals. Finding ways to tell that story with more than just tidy graphs or rates of change requires those of us on the landscape — from ranchers and land managers to rural social scientists and more — to reflect on how and why rural communities persist and adapt without losing the things that make those communities home.