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Exploring the social bases of home gardening

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Abstract

The study of alternatives to conventional industrial agricultural production has intensified in recent years. While many types of alternative production systems, and the motivations of individuals to participate in them, have been studied, there are significant gaps in the literature. One such dearth is research on those participating in self-provisioning activities. This study begins to fill the gap by looking at the self-provisioning activity of home gardening using data from the 2008 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Issues. Discerning who household gardeners are is important given the recent economic, cultural, and political climate of the United States. The results show that home gardening occurs throughout the state of Ohio at surprisingly high levels. Bivariate and multivariate analyses reveal several noteworthy associations between gardening and household characteristics, including spatial location, pro-environmental and economic hardship behaviors, and level of participation in localized food systems.

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Notes

  1. Agra Europe (1996) estimates that by 1995, household food production accounted for 42% of the meat, 44% of the milk, 82% of the potatoes, and 90% of the fruit and vegetables consumed in Russia.

  2. We note the potential contradictory nature of this hypothesis with the economic hardship hypotheses. Due to our interest in exploring the social bases of home gardeners we have included both because we anticipate that there may be a unique effect of upper class status after controlling for economic hardship.

  3. We acknowledge that the nature of our question requires us to focus on attributes of the household rather than the individual gardener. Future research should be attentive to exploring the social characteristics of the actual home gardener rather than the household with a garden.

  4. “Core city” was defined as the central city of each urbanized area, with neighboring incorporated places or townships within the urbanized areas labeled suburban. Exurban included the locales immediately adjacent to the urbanized area and extending out from this edge a particular distance, depending on the size of the urbanized areas’ population. The exurban area extended 15 miles if the urban population was less than 500,000 people, 25 miles if the urban population was between 500,000 and 1 million, and 35 miles if the urbanized area had more than 1 million residents. The respondents residing in areas beyond the urban and exurban areas were coded as rural residents.

  5. In relation to our chi-squared test, we utilize this test in its most basic form (i.e., to show our variables in relation to the likelihood that their distribution varies by chance). Hence, increasing levels of significance offers evidence that the variables are distributed by something outside of chance.

  6. To test for the presence of multi-collinearity, a test was performed on the correlation coefficients between the independent variables. All of the correlations between the independent variables were low (<0.3).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 165 Townshend Hall, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Justin L. Schupp

  2. School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Jeff S. Sharp

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  1. Justin L. Schupp
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Correspondence to Justin L. Schupp.

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Schupp, J.L., Sharp, J.S. Exploring the social bases of home gardening. Agric Hum Values 29, 93–105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-011-9321-2

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