ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Fourth generation peanut farmer Luke Green of Banks, Ala., produces organically grown peanuts, markets them in his peanut butter -- Luke's Pure Peanuts -- and his small family farm thrives economically when others around him are closing.

And look at O'Donnell, Texas, where cotton is king but the market is glutted. Growers within the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Co-op are getting higher prices than conventional growers on their organically grown cotton from clothing manufacturers and feminine hygiene product makers.

Duncan Hilchey, senior extension associate in rural sociology in Cornell University's Farming Alternatives Program, says he knows why many peanut growers and cotton farmers are having economic difficulty while Luke Green and the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Co-op are flourishing. It is because the latter two are part of the "new agriculture." Hilchey is giving a talk today titled "The New Agriculture: Forging Links Between Producers and Consumers" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) convention.

Although the new agriculture is growing, the Cornell agricultural researcher still believes it is a fragile and vulnerable segment of the industry. And he believes that with proper economic cultivation, there is room for small family farming to thrive.

New agriculture -- a way for traditional, small family farms to compete in the changing marketplace -- places emphasis on new ideas, entrepreneurship and unique marketing strategies to sustain business, says Hilchey. "I estimate that as much as 15 percent of the farms in the U.S. are engaged in some kind of new-agriculture activity," he says.

Hilchey describes new agriculture as being more oriented toward local markets than conventional agriculture; more labor, land and management intensive; more concerned with high-quality and value-added products and less with quantity (yield) and least cost production practices. Finally, he says new agriculture tends to forge direct market links to consumers.

Specifically, new agriculture activity can have many forms, such as organic farming, community-supported agriculture farms, farmers' markets, small-scale food enterprises, small-scale grower cooperatives and direct marketing of goods produced on the farm.

"Small-scale food enterprises have exploded; it's the only segment of the food manufacturing industry in a growth phase right now," Hilchey says. "From the farm kitchens and home kitchens, most of the innovation in the food industry is coming out of small-scale processors. Large food corporations have all but gutted their research-and-development areas and opted for acquiring and merging with these small-scale food enterprises."

In the mid-1960s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were two dozen farmers' markets in the United States. Today there are 2,200. "When it comes to agricultural direct marketing, we're the envy of the world," Hilchey says.

But the new agriculture is subject to the market's changing winds. Hilchey says supermarkets have recognized that consumers like fresh, local products, and they are beginning to imitate farmers' markets in their own marketing. "For large grocery chains, this is very savvy marketing because if consumers have to make a choice of getting the freshest produce at the farmers' market or at their local chain grocer, the consumers will opt for the grocer simply for convenience," he says.

Consolidation in agriculture also is affecting small farms detrimentally, creating fewer markets, Hilchey says. "Look what's going on in the whole-foods business of marketing organic and natural foods. Businesses are buying each other up, as consolidation in the whole foods industry is happening at a rapid pace."

Small farms are also facing the challenge of global sourcing. Hilchey says that food cooperatives, which once bought their food exclusively from local or regional farms, now often buy their fresh, organic produce from out of the country. "That's a big challenge for agriculture. If you have food cooperative members who are concerned only about price and do not care where their organic carrots are coming from, how do we get mainstream consumers to understand?" he says.

But Hilchey believes he has a prescription for the challenges faced by new agriculture. First, he says, consumer education has to develop. There has been a strong focus on environmental issues and on food safety, but education now must be broadened to encompass the social consequences of consumer choice.

"We have IPM (Integrated Pest Management) labels and organic labels. Why not have a label for American family farms? We have dolphin-friendly tuna, why not farmer-friendly products in the marketplace? It would alert consumers to certain products which support small family farms which, though declining, are still the backbone of the agriculture industry in the U.S.," Hilchey says.

Hilchey offers other suggestions including linking production to emerging market opportunities, like the growing ethnic populations of the Southwest and Northeastern cities; and focusing on new forms of cooperation between farmers, such as flexible marketing networks and so-called "new generation" cooperatives, which are owned by farmers and produce value-added products.

Finally, he says, the university land-grant mission needs to continue to shift from an emphasis on agricultural production to an agricultural development approach, which emphasizes stronger links with consumers, value-added products and less capital intensity.

"Getting the new agriculture approach to be adopted by the mainstream agricultural industry will be hard, but it may be the only salvation for many of the nation's family farms," Hilchey says.