Please join us for an E-IPER dissertation defense by Karli Moore: "From the Farm: Innovation and Sustainability in Tribal Agriculture."

In-person: Y2E2 299

Virtual: Zoom webinar (password: 044573)

ABSTRACT

Agriculture is changing rapidly in response to climate pressures, emerging technologies, and volatile markets. Tribal agricultural systems offer an important perspective on these transitions because they are shaped not only by production goals, but also by multifaceted community priorities and long-standing relationships to land. This dissertation examines how Tribal agricultural communities engage with technical and governance innovations. Drawing on mixed methods social science research, I explore how agricultural innovations are perceived, evaluated, and discussed in practice, and how those discussions shape understandings of sustainability.

In the first chapter, I interview Tribal agricultural professionals to assess opportunities and barriers for agrivoltaics - the co-location of agricultural production and solar energy generation - on Tribal lands and develop a geospatial analysis of priority areas for future exploration. We find that participants are willing to investigate agrivoltaics systems that contribute to increased food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and economic development. In the second chapter, I conduct focus groups with row-crop farmers and develop a farmer-informed techno-economic assessment to examine how producers evaluate enhanced rock weathering, a climate-smart agricultural practice. We find that farmers are more likely to adopt enhanced rock weathering when the practice aligns with existing economic priorities, risk thresholds, and operational realities. In the third chapter, I interview Lumbee tribal members with diverse relationships to agriculture to understand community expectations for the Lumbee Tribe’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources and how those expectations shape the broader concept of Tribal agricultural governance.

Across these cases, I show that sustainability transitions depend not only on technical feasibility, but also on how innovations align with local priorities, practical realities and governance structures of agricultural communities.