The Transformation to Organic: Insights from Practice Theory - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 188

Nevertheless, our discussion does illustrate the importance of understanding, as Schatzki
(2002, 174) argues, that human, nature and materiality are not separate, but together and
create a material entity and contribute to a social practice. Materiality, its effects on nature,
processes, practicing techniques and individuals and organizations - can be interpreted as a
unit of the social and material (Schatzki 2010, 133).
We have highlighted that organic practices emerge from and rely upon natural objects, rules
and ethical principles. Consequently, we find diverse farm patterns and indeterminate
production processes, adapted to different and complex natural processes; and that these
rules and ethical principles result from various practices. This also explains the discursive
character of the social practices on an organic farm.
Principles serve partly as a “must”, as norms, regulated by law and partly as
recommendations. They represent the cognitive basis of the organic farming approach,
which regulates the practices, and pre-forms the handling with soils and plants. The
principles include the human-nature-relation, cognitively and as a matter of principle, to
respect nature and to exclude synthetic chemicals from production. They represent a result
of discourses based on farmers' long-term observations, practices and research. Their
implementation is discursive, as the site specific conditions require their reflexive use,
reinterpretation and adaptation.
The principles and the basic standards with concrete recommendations about arrangements,
artifacts and practices illustrate a type of on-going practice discourse in contrast to non-
organic agriculture. Neither the principles nor the basic standards are static or carved in
stone. There is discourse surrounding the values and ethics (e.g. Verhoog et al. 2003), the
artifacts and materialities, and the practices. There are discourses and concrete
arrangements which also include evolving human-human relations, e.g., fair relation
between all chain partners, embodied by a specific pricing policy or further investments by
the farmer into ethical values going beyond the basic standards, e.g. social care,
establishment of wildlife habitats in between the production fields or cultivation of
traditional farming practices (Goessinger & Freyer 2008).
In conclusion, we find it appropriate to draw on Schatzki's (2010, 145) observation that
“…one noteworthy outcome of writing histories and analyzing contemporary phenomena
with these experientially resonant concepts (practice theory) is that history and the
contemporary world seem less systematic or ordered and more labyrinthine and contingent
than they do when described and analyzed through the conceptual armature of many other
theories.”
And we close with the notion that practice theory offers new insights into the complex and
multi-layered process of farm transformation. It is seen as one of several relevant theoretical
concepts to support the description and reflections about transformation processes in the
agro-food system.
6. References
Ács, S. 2006. Bio-economic modeling of conversion from conventional to organic arable
farming. PhD-thesis Wageningen University.
Adler, E. 2005. Communitarian International Relations. The epistemic foundation of
International Relations. London/New York: Routledge.