Frank Allaire1*, Deborah Stinner††, Benjamin
Stinner††, Joesph Hartzler‡‡, Richard
Moore§§, Casey Hoy††, Jay Dorsey2,
and Fred Hitzhusen**
*The Ohio State University Department of Animal Sciences
††The Ohio State University Department of Entomology, Ohio
Agricultural Research and Development Center
‡‡Shareholder and partner in the Hartzler Family Farms
and Dairy, Smithville, Ohio
§§The Ohio State University Department of Human Community
Resource Development
2The Ohio State University Department of Food, Agricultural, and
Biological Engineering
**The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental,
and Development Economics
The Agroecosystems Management Program is using a case that involves a farm-family enterprise and its agroecosystem and community to discover the kinds of processes needed to manage change at a systems-level. As an experimental unit, this case provides a context for the program to use systems approaches for discovering social and technical processes that are vital to managing change, over time, at a systems-level.
The case presents challenges in learning who the decision-makers are, what their concerns are, and how sustained attention and base-level actions can be mobilized and facilitated consistent with desired systems-level outcomes of its participants. The program facilitates the case by organizing discussion forums, commissioning consultants, and providing scientific information. The intention is to empower a group of citizen volunteers to represent the systems-level vision.
The family-farm business consists of nine shares distributed among six brothers, two sisters, and their parents. The enterprise consists of five farms, dairy plant, and a retail outlet. The program's focus in this case is to understand the interacting elements that involve the economics of various sub enterprises, market outlets, functions performed by farms, ecosystem, and the community, and the perspectives held by the farm family and those of its community. The desire of the decision-makers is to find ways to keep farming as an economically viable livelihood that also provides high-quality, locally produced dairy products using environment-enhancing farming practices.
This case provides the context to use systems approaches to making change. Decision-making process steps include facilitating the generation of vision, discovering barriers, analyzing alternative interventions, motivating agreed-upon interventions, and applying services needed to achieve joint farm-community development. Case-specific technical innovations and the learning processes that appear to be mainly responsible for actions taken will be documented. The social processes that are used to motivate and to sustain a long-term and dynamic interplay between the decision-makers’ learning and action will be documented. It is anticipated that this case will demonstrate that an engagement between university researchers and farm-community representatives can lead to the discovery of the necessary processes needed to influence systems-level change. The specific research is an example of participatory or action research that generates knowledge through a context-specific integration of technical innovation and social processes guided by the interests of community representatives.
1 For more information, contact at: The Ohio State University, 201A Plumb Hall, 2027 Coffey Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1094, 614-292-7142, Fax 614-292-7116, e-mail: allaire.1@osu.edu