Papers by Danielle Diamond
Environmental Justice, 2021
Years of community-driven research and participatory action have shed an important light on the c... more Years of community-driven research and participatory action have shed an important light on the copious negative health issues burdening communities adjacent to industrial agriculture. Rural communities in Wisconsin and Delaware have helped us in establishing an emerging source of pollution toward environmental justice communities-biogas. Biogas is being falsely marketed as a renewable energy solution to solve the problems of an already polluting industry, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (''CAFOs''). This greenwashing is problematic for many reasons and is in itself an environmental justice issue. The production of biomethane from manure-to-energy projects, such as manure digesters, is hazardous to local communities, locks farmers into more debt, and perpetuates the expansion of our current harmful agriculture practices, while increasing fossil fuel infrastructure by entrenching CAFOs with pipelines for the gas that is produced. In this article, we breakdown why biogas is not sustainable, how manure-to-energy projects perpetuate environmental injustices, examine current state policies on manure-to-energy projects, and how policy can be improved to protect frontline communities and farmers.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2019
Are property rights merely a tool of the market economy, disempowering those with the least in ru... more Are property rights merely a tool of the market economy, disempowering those with the least in rural places and further lining the pockets of those with the most? Most rural scholarship, on the aggregate, argues that yes, property rights dispossess the many in favor of the few. We, though, find the situation to be much more nuanced in our analysis of U.S. right-to-farm laws, the first of its kind. An overlooked dimension of property rights-the capacity to claim trespass on property through nuisance-enables rural people to defend their rights to clean air and water and the use and enjoyment of their property in the face of large-scale, industrial agricultural operators. Our analysis of statutes in all 50 U.S. states finds that right-to-farm laws, while largely purported to defend family farmers, reduce rural people's capacity to protect their land through nuisance actions in defense of their environmental, health, and community rights. We argue that property rights, when properly protected from nuisance, can help rural people push back against the market economy in defense of their health and environmental rights when other political means falter. Recognizing as much helps reveal a relationship between property rights and justice that currently is overlooked by rural scholars.
Rural Sociology, 2013
Scholars largely assume that hog production is following the same industrialization process as th... more Scholars largely assume that hog production is following the same industrialization process as the integrated poultry industry. Since the collapse of hog farming in the 1990s, academics have anticipated that producers will eventually become trapped in contracts that leave the integrator with full control over the production process. Embedded in this prediction is an assumption that hog farmers respond to these productive pressures individually. Our analysis of the Carthage Management System suggests a different path for the hog commodity chain. The Carthage Management System is a conglomeration of business management firms that bring finishing hog farmers together to form limited liability corporations (LLCs) in the breed‐to‐wean stage of hog production. We use a sociology of agrifood framework to suggest that the nuances of hog production encourage the use of what we call folding corporations to limit liability in ways that profoundly transform the family farm. Corporations and ind...
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Papers by Danielle Diamond