Discovering successful food production practices in a northeastern Arizona community using the positive deviance approach

Despite the many recent calls for reform, the scale of the food shortage problem and the complexity of our current food system are daunting and remain unsustainable. We find ourselves deeply dependent on corporate food producers who in turn depend on fossil fuels, a limited resource, to produce and transport their products. We rely on a food economy that imports and exports the vast majority of the food we eat, despite the growing evidence that small farms provide the most nutritional foods to their locales most efficiently. Dependency on vulnerable and fluctuating food supplies is an intractable problem and severely exacerbated in communities with a history of poverty. It is critical and useful to explore the local agricultural experience in order to find a solution to the food shortage problem. This study seeks to answer the question: How can we address the food shortage problem through more successful food production practices?;This qualitative, exploratory, inductively designed study seeks to answer the larger question of how we can address the food shortage problem in one community of small direct farmers using the positive deviance approach (PD). Positive deviance is a self-organizing, problem solving approach based on discovering wisdom already existing within a community, rather than bringing in experts to intervene.;In PD Study (Phase 1) a community of food producers, Small Direct Farmers of Apache and Navajo Counties, self-identified their problem: local farmers can't make a living selling good food locally. The community also successfully self-identified a positive deviant food producer and her successful food production practice.;In the process of seeking a solution to a common problem, the community increased its capacity to collaborate, self-organize, communicate, bring others to the group and reach out to the larger community. This was an extremely valuable unintended consequence of the positive deviant approach.;The study concludes with a brief description of Phase 2 of this study, the community's self-designed plan to share the deviant practice with the larger community. This study addresses the larger research question as it discovers a practice that will enhance food production in this northeastern Arizona community.