Local Agency and Trajectories of Agricultural Change at the Rural-Urban Interface in the United States † Douglas Jackson-Smith Associate Professor of Sociology, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA Author Contact Information: doug.jackson-smith@usu.edu Jill Clark, Jeff Sharp and Shoshanah Inwood Respectively, Doctoral Student in Geography, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology, and Doctoral Student in Rural Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. Introduction Agriculture has long been a focus for social scientists and geographers interested in dynamics of social and economic change in rural communities and landscapes. The vast and growing literature on the dynamics of structural change in agriculture suggests that there are a number of significant macro-structural forces that influence the pace and trajectory of contemporary farm restructuring in the United States and other advanced industrial societies. For example, in a competitive capitalist economy new technological innovations (Cochrane 1993), national agricultural policies (Potter and Tilzey 2005) and increasing vertical integration and globalization of the larger agro-food system (Goodman and Watts 1997) are thought to generate intractable pressures for further consolidation of farm production onto larger, more specialized and capital-intensive units of production. At the same time there is a growing appreciation for the fact that agricultural and demographic trends can be highly variable across the rural landscapes of these countries. This suggests that macro-structural forces are not monolithic and allow for considerable local variation in agricultural outcomes. Marsden and colleagues have argued that regional differentiation reflects the emergence of social and economic networks as well as the response of local governance institutions to internal and external forces of change (Marsden 1999, 2006; Murdoch 2006). In much of the literature, production agriculture is conceptualized as a quintessentially rural economic sector. Nevertheless, the impacts of urbanization are a key dynamic in contemporary explanations of this newly differentiated countryside. For example, the spatial expansion of urban areas and other demographic trends associated with counter-urbanization have led to the growth of non-farming populations in many formerly agricultural regions. In these areas, traditional productivist agricultural activities are seen as largely incompatible with the new urban † Paper presented at the Transitions in Urban Agriculture conference, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands, October 26-28, 2008. This research was supported by USDA CSREES National Research Initiative Grant # 2005-35401-15272 under the Prosperity for Small and Medium-Sized Farms Program.