Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Examines Stalk Market Report (1996–2025), a CSA newsletter archive that blends narrative and numbers to rethink agricultural knowledge beyond quantification, emphasizing relational seasonal practices.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the Stalk Market Report (1996–2025), a weekly newsletter produced by Neu Erth Wormfarm in Reedsburg, Wisconsin and distributed through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. The newsletter documents farming life through crop updates, recipes, drawings, essays, and community announcements, offering a 30-year longitudinal record of agricultural practice.

While contemporary food systems increasingly rely on quantification—yield metrics, carbon accounting, food waste statistics, and policy targets—the Stalk Market Report embeds numerical references within narrative, anecdotal, and relational forms of knowledge. Numbers appear not as authoritative abstractions, but as situated and partial, often destabilized by uncertainty, humor, and the variability of seasonal cycles.

Drawing on this archive, the paper asks: what forms of agricultural knowledge are rendered invisible by quantitative frameworks? What temporalities are suppressed when food systems are reduced to metrics? The SMR foregrounds practices often excluded from quantification, including self-provisioning, shared labor, taste, and affect, while emphasizing the unpredictability and contingency of farming.

The SMR archive is situated alongside other agrarian knowledge infrastructures, including The Greenhorns Agrarian Library in Maine, which contains over 9,000 catalogued volumes and organizes knowledge across disciplines such as food studies, marine ecologies, and political ecology. Relying on cataloging and classification systems that enable navigation and comparison, the SMR archive resists easy indexing, accumulating meaning through repetition, seasonality, and collective authorship over time.

Positioning the SMR as both archive and method, it contributes to critical discussions of food quantification by proposing longitudinal, narrative, and participatory practices as alternative modes of making food systems visible.