Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
pipe dream, just amodest increase in the funding for organic researchwould
provide valuable information that could increase yields, provide stable pro-
duction, and help with distribution. While research funding priorities must
be shifted, a deeper concern is how tomake research truly relevant to organic
farmers.
Even objective researchers do not always make the best decisions. For
example, much research is a cautious reiteration of past studies. As plainly
outlined in
Farming in Nature's Image
by Soule and Piper (1992), there are
two ways to be wrong with statistical analysis. First is to claim there is an
effect when in fact there is none. Second is to claim there is no effect when
in fact there is one, but your methods did not detect it. “To say, 'I didn't
detect an effect,' saves face better than 'I was fooled by the numbers' ” (73).
It is better to be safe and cautious than to go out on a limb and discover
something remarkably new. “So scientists adjust statistics to allow only a
small chance of the first type of error and a larger chance of the second.
This bias protects the status quo” (73). This is particularly detrimental for
organic farming, as it is outside of mainstream research and has been viewed
for so long as nonviable and inconsequential. So if researchers only want to
play it safe, they rarely conduct studies to discover the extraordinary benefits
of organicmethods, and they certainly would not want to find shocking new
statistical data.
Organic agroecosystems are complex, which leads to another problem:
science is most comfortable in reductionist approaches that study distinct,
separate parts of a system. “Where chaos begins, science stops. For as long as
the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered
a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in
the fluctuations of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and
the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side
- these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities” (Gleick 1987,
3). Obviously, organic farming requires a holistic approach that is mostly
outside the narrow disciplinary confines of industrial agricultural research.
We must build research programs that are complementary: “There needs
to be constant feedback between whole systems and components research”
(van Bruggen and Termorshuizen 2003, 154).
In addition to the ecological interactions present on organic farms, eco-
nomic factors are also embedded within the framework of tradition, family,
and community. This is also not recognized within most agricultural eco-
nomic research, “because the concept of sustainability is fundamentally
incompatible with conventional economic theory.” Indeed, “economics is
a unidimensional, consumptive science. There is nothing within economic
[190],
(8)
Lines: 120 to 126
———
0.0pt PgVar
———
Normal Page
PgEnds: T
E
X
[190],
(8)
