Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring On-farm Innovation, Environmental Change, and Rural Livelihood in the US Hop Industry

The goal of this project is to understand the conditions under which some farmers research and develop their own agricultural technologies while others rely on outside research and to examine the innovations yielded by these diverging approaches to agricultural technologies. This project collects data from hop farmers through on-farm visits and in-depth interviews with farm owners and operators to better understand the social and applied scientific worlds of hop growing in the Northwestern and Midwestern United States.