Good Stewards: Cosmovisions and 'Good Farmer' Moralities

Abstract

Because of the impacts of agriculture for people and ecosystems in the Anthropocene, many have sought to understand farmer motivations and behaviors. In Western cultures, “stewardship” has been shown to be a foundational principle of farmers’ moral identities as “good farmers.” Because stewardship assumes a divine responsibility to care for the earth, exploring farmer “cosmovisions”–their interconnected spiritual, natural, and social worlds–can better illuminate the heterogeneity within and between groups that may not conform to normative scripts of religiosity, spirituality, or life philosophy. The authors take a process-relational approach to ethnographic interviewing to explore stewardship as a foundational value among farmers across a diversity of farms and cosmovisions in the Midwest United States. They identify varied meanings of “stewardship” among relatively distinct assemblages of farming principles and practices.