Fraying Legacies: The State of Indiana Agriculture, 1985 to Today

Abstract

This project applies the concept of sacrifice zones — areas exploited for profit/progress (Hedges and Sacco 2012) — to analyze how decades of consolidation, an aging workforce, and uneven investment have reshaped Indiana's farming landscape.

Policy history, census data, and industry reports reveal how economic and technological forces have transformed family farms into contemporary sacrifice zones, highlighting challenges like generational turnover, farm closures, and rising start-up costs, and considers what the state's sustainable agricultural future might look like.