The Transformation to Organic: Insights from Practice Theory - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 182

annual crop business, the farmer studies in the Internet the global stock market, contacts the
dealer electronically or by cell phone.
In the socialization of industrialized agriculture, these practices have been for decades non-
discursive. Those who follow this practice are on the one hand path dependent, and on the
other hand supported by the agriculture and food industry (inclusive consumers), research
and education system - all reinforcing this type of farming, partly criticised, but mainly an
accepted habit in current Western societies.
4.3 Organic farming
What are the defining practices of an organic farming system? All organic farms (except for
some large-scale industrial operations, are organized around highly diversified cropping
systems involving more than five different crops organized in a crop rotation and inter-
cropping systems. In this type of farming, each crop plays a different role in mobilizing
nutrients, creating soil fertility, weed-control and pest and disease management. Instead of
mineral fertilizer from outside the farm, organic manure management techniques are
essential to the system of practices.
One scenario of the inter-related and reinforcing practices can be outlined as follows: the
diversity in crop rotation affects the weed diversity. Plant protection and soil fertility
management in turn is related to cropping practices designed to manage long-term soil
fertility (see Freyer et al. 2011). Diversified crop rotations are essential in pest and disease
management. Fields are usually quite diverse in size and structured with a multitude of
crops that play multiple roles in the overall farming system, including the maintenance of
different habitats such as hedges and grass stripes that play a range of roles from soil to
wildlife management. Equally important, no use of synthetic chemicals helps to foster soil
health and diversity; “healthy soils mean healthy plants.” In short, there is a systemic and
systematic set of diversified material interrelationships built into and generated from these
practices. They are all of a specific material quality and require a specific technology in
handling things, artifacts and embodying organic objects.
While crop rotation is part of non-organic farming, it is a pivotal element in organic
practices. Farmers must have an intimate knowledge of their fields, including field histories
(how they “behave” under different conditions over time) that help identify the ways in
which previous cropping practices could influence current cropping practice, such as
planting legumes to fix nitrogen. That is, in an organic system, all the agricultural practices
account for time, both the past and expected future of a field, including each field's
relationships with other fields through organic material transfer or the habitat function for
both pests and beneficials, which move from one field to the other.
In a similar way, plant protection or weed control is not first a matter of using industrial
products. It involves: the arrangement of crops over time and space; the specification of the
tillage system following the specific demand of crops; the biotope diversity in structure and
function and distribution in the landscape; and the history of farming practices and the
current qualities of a soil in a specific field. The farmer is at the center of this process,
bringing old and new perceptions and understandings and an ever evolving discovery and
understanding of organic practices. Organic farming becomes a self- referential rethinking
of practice and inter-objective relations with nature. In many cases, organic farmer's
neighbors who often practice non-organic, offer little or no advice or relevant experience
from which to learn.