MARGINALITY AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT - THE DECLINE OF DAIRYING IN MICHIGANS NORTH COUNTRY

Dairy farmers and their families in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and in many similar situations in other parts of the world, face an uncertai n future. The region's marginality implies that farmers there must dea l with constraints and problems often more evident and certainly more formidable than those that must be dealt with by farmers in more favou red regions. Further, although the pressures of marginality are extern al to their day-to-day activities of farming, they are not uniformly e xperienced across the region. Thus, investigation of the meaning and d ynamics of marginality requires more than simply taking account of the wider context, detailing the region's linkages to the wider political economy; at a minimum, it requires an appreciation of locality and en terprise variability within the region. There is no monolithic process of marginalization that renders everything equally and unequivocally marginal. Our research on dairying in Michigan's Upper Peninsula makes this quite apparent. More importantly, an understanding of the operat ional constraints and development potentials of dairying in various UP localities (and those of other industries in other regions as well), will better enable researchers and policy makers to propose appropriat e solutions to some of the pressing problems of dairying in the margin .