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From Arusha, Tanzania to Baron, Wisconsin:
Working with Smallholder Farmers to Improve their Marketing Opportunities

By James Barham, SNRE Alum

It was definitely a strange set of circumstances that landed me about a month ago in the small rural town of Baron, Wisconsin. It was all the more strange that in this town of about 8,000 people, many of whom make their livelihood as dairy farmers, that I would be sitting in a Somali-owned restaurant, eating a traditionally prepared goat dish, and chatting with some of these farmers about the market potential for selling halal-slaughtered goat meat to a growing refugee and new immigrant population. I was in Baron as part of my work for the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, which involved studying how small farmers were joining together to establish alternative distribution systems that could effectively link producers to consumers. By no stretch of the imagination could I have envisioned that one day I would have a job at the USDA, working with small-scale and resource-limited producers to improve their direct marketing opportunities.

In July 2006, my wife and I returned to the US after spending about a year and half in Arusha, Tanzania, where I was carrying out my dissertation fieldwork. My research involved studying a government-sponsored program that was attempting to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers through a number of market-oriented interventions. Instead of returning to the University of Florida, we moved to Washington, D.C. where my wife had gotten a job, and thus put me in the enviable position of being to work exclusively on my dissertation without worrying about how to put food on the table. As occurs to most graduate students when the end is scarily close in sight, I become consumed with thoughts of how I was going to take what I learned through my years as a "professional student" and turn it into meaningful job.

With almost all my experience focused on international agricultural development work, primarily in the Middle East and Africa, I assumed my best shot for a job would be with an international research institute or a development-oriented NGO. I hadn't really given much thought to actually working with farmers in the U.S., when a chance encounter with a friend of a friend got me interested in the work that non-profits and the US government are doing with refugee and immigrant farmers. It was through this chance encounter and a subsequent conference (that this friend of a friend was able to get me into) that I met a lady working at the USDA. Explaining to a possible employer that you have a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Ecology can make for a tough sell. There's no immediate recognition of what you are or what you do, as opposed to saying you are an anthropologist, economist, agronomist, biologist, etc. But not being easily categorized can also be a great advantage. As in the case with the lady I met from the USDA, I quickly explained to her that my degree was a primarily a mix of agricultural economics and anthropology, and followed this with a quick summary of the type of work I did in Tanzania and how bringing an ecological perspective founded on systems thinking, helped me to better understand how markets are structured and function. If you practice your "pitch" enough times, you are bound to find a great number of people (of course, not everyone!) that will appreciate and value the interdisciplinary nature of the work we do at SNRE. In the end, my pitch had the desired effect, eventually landing me my present job at the USDA.

I honestly don't know how many SNRE students will actually read this piece, but for those of you who do, rest assured that your studies, experiences, and the skill sets you develop as an SNRE student will find a ready audience of employers. One of the key lessons I learned from my work in the field of international development was that interventions often fail due to fundamental breakdowns in communication between the respective stakeholders. The technocrats, economists, environmentalists, politicians, other social and natural scientists rarely seem to speak the same language, and even if by chance they do, it is seldom spoken on behalf of the people they expect to help. This deep-seated constraint to development was one of the main reasons I decided to pursue a degree in Interdisciplinary Ecology. I knew through my coursework, research, and other experiences that I would learn a myriad of perspectives, enabling me to create bridges between these diverse disciplines, and to find a common language among them. As a SNRE student, you are uniquely poised to develop this skill set, which should serve you well as you take the step from SNRE graduate to whatever future employment that brings meaning and purpose for you and others.