She Grew Up on a Farm. Now She’s Mapping the Forces That Are Quietly Reshaping Rural America.

MacArthur Fellow Loka Ashwood is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research gives rural communities the tools to understand and push back against the corporate forces reshaping their land and livelihoods.

By the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences — summarized for agInnovation

Photo courtesy of THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION

Loka Ashwood grew up between the small towns of Vermont and Industry in rural Illinois, watched the community around her decline, and decided to spend her career figuring out why and what could be done about it.

Now a professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, Ashwood works directly with rural residents to surface the forces behind the challenges they face: poverty, environmental injustice, and the erosion of land ownership at the hands of corporations and extractive industries that often hide behind layers of LLCs.

Her current research has produced a dataset of more than 20,000 relationships and 16,000 entities tracing corporate consolidation across nine agricultural sectors—work that will soon be publicly accessible as an interactive database at acre.apl.wisc.edu. For farmers trying to understand why their input costs keep climbing, or rural communities confronting a proposed industrial facility backed by an unfamiliar LLC, the database is designed to pull back the curtain on who actually benefits from the structures shaping their lives.

She’s also building an online, participatory map of lost rural homesteads in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kentucky, pairing oral histories with GIS mapping to preserve the memory of farmhouses that have been bulldozed or burned, and to connect their disappearance to the broader political and economic story of rural America.

Ashwood’s work is a reminder that land-grant universities serve rural communities in ways that go well beyond crop yields and soil science. Understanding the social and economic forces acting on rural America is itself a form of agricultural research, one that the University of Wisconsin–Madison is uniquely positioned to lead. Read the full profile in GROW magazine.

Read the full story: From a Rural Perspective — GROW Magazine, University of Wisconsin–Madison CALS

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