Role of social capital in the marketing strategies of vegetable growers

Keywords: social capital, agriculture, diversity, agribusiness, community resilience
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Social capital is implicated in community resilience during times of disasters including economic shocks, as well as in sustaining farming operations. This study is motivated by the observation that diversified growers within local food systems experienced shifts in demand during the pandemic, especially in the ways in which they interacted with the market. Restaurant closures, increased price sensitivity of consumers, and logistics challenges disrupted their conventional operations to which they had to adapt. Media reports suggest that their social connections – those with their local communities as well as other stakeholders in the food system – helped them pivot their marketing operations. This study conceptualizes this ability to sustain operations as a form of social resilience and examines the role of social capital in enabling this. In partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension, we conducted a study of diversified vegetable growers in Upstate New York to understand how different forms of capital impacted the ability to maintain diversified marketing channels. A Herfindahl-Hirschman index of marketing diversity is regressed against social capital forms decomposed using Principal Component Analysis. Results find that although linking capital was associated with a greater diversity of marketing channels, bridging capital was necessary to sustain those operations after the pandemic hit.