Happy Cows: Human-Environment Networks in Agriculture

The 2024 Harold and Florence Mayer Lecture

Agriculture is considered multifunctional when it produces standard commodity goods alongside a broader range of human and ecological services. The degree to which agriculture is successfully multifunctional owes much to feedback among individual decisions, social institutions, and environmental systems. We examine dairy farms to better understand how social relationships and biophysical dynamics interact to spur or hinder growth of multifunctional agriculture in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York. This work blends a variety of methods, including social science surveys, environmental field work, and spatially-explicit modeling. This research advances our understanding of how social networks and ecosocial feedback affect the sustainable development of managed ecosystems.

Presented by Steven Manson, Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota.