"Farmers need the Land": Georgia's agricultural future in the patchy Anthropocene

This paper examines the ways that food systems experts (n = 9) and farmers working with conventional and alternative methods (n = 21) in the U.S. state of Georgia articulate connections between climate change, agriculture, and land loss. While originally seeking to understand differences in the perspectives on climate and food system futures articulated by stakeholders with varying approaches to agriculture, this paper explores the thematic convergences that emerged among participants as we discussed their visions of the future. Steering interviews away from purely technical or environmental dimensions of climate change, our conversations with participants began looping back to anxieties about the future of agricultural land loss in the region. These coalesced around land loss driven by development of solar fields, continued (sub)urban sprawl, and investment in farmland from entities outside the state. These environmental, economic, and social transformations, we argue, are inherently interconnected and invite analysis and solutions-oriented thinking to contextualize the entanglements between our global moment and the needs and wants of food systems stakeholders in specific places. To this end, we engage the lens of the "patchy Anthropocene" (Tsing et al., 2019) to understand the interconnectivities that food systems stakeholders articulate between land loss and food futures. Approaching the socio-environmental entanglements of climate change and agricultural futures through a patchy Anthropocene approach, we note, can help re-imagine how policies related to climate smart agriculture can be enriched to meet the futures our participants were worried about.