Anti-Revolutionary Agriculture: Cultivating Stewardship through Care-Based Agritecture in the Peace Country

Abstract

As subsistence has become detached from agriculture through intensively mechanized and automated mass production, farmers’ ability to identify as ecological stewards through knowledge and care once embedded in farm labour has been diminished. Instead, capitalist ideologies seeking ‘progress’ reproduce constraining systems, forcing farmers to operate within economic pressures in order to sustain their livelihoods. Further, these systems also transform and exploit land, viewing its diversity as “inefficient.” Using White Mountain Wapiti Ranch in northern Alberta as a site of investigation, the grain and domestic elk family farm is analyzed as an ecological mosaic, where its “inefficiencies” are engaged with as qualitative attributes. Temporal and scalar approaches are then applied to integrate agroecological systems within multiple micro-yard sites. These yards and their supporting agritectures emphasize maintenance, repair, and reciprocity with land through their programming and material expression, reintegrating human subsistence within the broader ecological system of the farm.