Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
For ACIRDS farmers, practicing a high degree of stewardship had
become part of their culture. These farmers have continued to struggle
with very low wheat prices and have been stymied by a lack of rotation
crops that are well adapted to this production region. Also, the entire
infrastructure for grain crops in this region is organized around wheat
production, not a diversity of crops. These producers face a genuine
challenge in figuring out how to market these alternative crops so they
can receive compensation for the additional effort they expend in their
land stewardship. The Ag Horizons team offered scientific expertise, and
the USEPA tried to be supportive, but without some major changes in
agricultural economic policy, it is not clear how much of an impact
ACIRDS's direct seeding efforts will have on regional practices.
Latour's circulatory system of science model helps conceptually organ-
ize the actions of these individuals and institutions, and explains why
they engaged in agroecological partnership activities (figure 1.3). To
implement direct seeding strategies in Washington State required investi-
gating crops, soils, machinery and chemicals, and the behavior of nutri-
ents and water in a specific agricultural region; the participants had to
“mobilize the world” to make progress toward a kind of agriculture
more consistent with their values. To do so, producers had to tap into the
scientific expertise of the Ag Horizons team and Dakota Lakes Farm
researchers; these scientists were open to collaboration with farmers and
each other in social learning to achieve practical outcomes. To create a
more coherent clientele for this kind of knowledge, Kupers and like-
minded farmers organized a support group and cultivated interest with
the Wilke Farm; ACIRDS became a voice for them and helped them to
negotiate with scientists and public agency officials. To fulfill its resource
conservation goals and represent the public, the USEPA had to send its
staff over the Cascades to investigate the institutions structuring conven-
tional agriculture; the CPAI initiative served to mediate between the pub-
lic's desire for agricultural goods with environmental protection (another
form of mobilizing the world). Agricultural science is more than publish-
ing the results of experiments in scientific journals. It also consists of
mobilizing the behavior of many people, technologies, and organisms
toward a common goal. This chapter investigates the motivations of the
human participants in these kinds of networks.
