Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
General conceptual “knowledge of orders” is formed by discourses on environmental and
ethical standards, introduced by the IFOAM Principles (2009) and basic standards for
organic farming. The arrangements of artifacts and the practices represent the transfer of the
IFOAM principles (health, ecology, fairness and care) and basic standards into social
practices, which include the ethical discourse and worldviews of the organic movement.
Schatzki (2005, 480) describes this process as follows: “Understandings, rules, ends, and
tasks are incorporated into participants' minds via their 'mental states'; understandings, for
instance, become individual know-how, rules become objects of belief, and ends become
objects of desire”. Principles serve partly as a “must”; norms, regulated by law, serve partly
as recommendations. They represent the cognitive basis of organic farming, which regulates
the practices, and influences the handling of soils and plants. Principles include the human-
nature-relation, based on a deep respect for, and effort to understand nature that includes
the exclusion of chemicals from the production. They represent a result of discourses based
on farmer's long-term observations, practices and research. Their implementation is
discursive, and site-specific agro-ecological conditions, asks for a reflexive use,
reinterpretation and adaptation.
Organic creates and relies upon the creation of social networks (e.g. Jarosz 2000), on and off
the farm, and thereby creates communities of a culture. Consumers communicate with
farmers about products or their worldviews. In other words, each “farmer - consumer
community” involves a practice of sharing time, doings and sayings, which occur in
specified social fields and take place in specific sites (cf. Hörning 2001, 160).
4.4 Transformation towards organic farming
It is simple, but important to understand that the transformation of the farm involves a
move/change from well-understood and long-practiced non-organic activities into a series
of unknown organic and unknown transformation-specific practices. As Schatzki (2006,
1068, 1864) reminds us, the actions constituting a farm history include a practical
understanding of non-organic farming practices, a well-established “know-how” including
knowledge of “non-organic” farming “rules,” as well as a general understanding of the role
of nature in agriculture. In short, since practices are learned, exercised and routinized over
time, moving to different practices requires moving to fundamentally different and new
practice arrangements for which most farmers have no previous experience, knowledge or
supportive social network (Reckwitz 2002a).
If the nature of practices is to establish “a secure and livable everyday life, where we are not
compelled to do the overwhelming task of reflecting on every single act” (Gram-Hanssen
2008, 1182), their radical change, as it is often the case with converting towards organic,
could be described as a temporary stage of a social practice, before re-establishing an
equilibrium which arises after several years practicing organic.
How does change from non-organic to organic farming happen under those circumstances?
Practices always contain the seeds of constant change (Warde 2005, 141), but something
must initiate this change. From the perspective of practice theory, a specific practice-
discourse initiates the adaptation and adoption of practices. In addition, the processes of
change may involve bifurcations, continuous development, fragmentation, contingency, and
conflict (Schatzki 2002). More specifically, the motives for converting to organic are as
diverse as the barriers to converting (Lamine & Bellon 2008; Khaledi 2007; Locke 2006;
Darnhofer et al. 2005) and they are linked as much with the materiality and the discourses of
non-organic agriculture as with the promises and characteristics of organic practices
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