Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
PCAs, or the Farm Advisors I interviewed used the term “ecology” or
“agroecology,” but they made frequent reference to how they have come
to perceive and manage organisms and their relationships in ecological
systems.
This chapter explains how partnership participants learn to manage
nature, or in Latour's terms, how they “mobilize the world.” Latour
described the first loop of his conceptual model thus because the objects
of scientific study are much more unruly than commonly appreciated, as
the narrative opening this chapter makes clear. Scientific inquiry tries to
bring order to the heterogeneity of nature, or at least to bring order to
knowledge of its diversity. This chapter explains how partnership partic-
ipants shifted their thinking from “technology transfer” to managing
organisms and their relationships in dynamic farming systems. To
“mobilize the world” requires knowledge of the behavior of organisms,
how they are relating, and how farm-management decisions can create
preferred social outcomes.
California's agroecological partnerships are particularly valuable as
case studies because they allow comparative analysis. The 16 different
commodities undertaking partnership have distinct agronomic, social,
and marketing histories.
10
Within the 8 commodities hosting multiple
partnerships, differing social relationships and epistemological assump-
tions have shaped different approaches to organizing agroecological
strategies and practices.
This chapter defines agroecology by describing how partnerships draw
from diverse knowledge sources to develop alternative practices. The
balance of this chapter is organized primarily around the five chief part-
nership strategies listed in table 5.1, with commodity-specific examples.
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Table 5.1
The five chief agroecological strategies of California's agroecological partner-
ships (
N
= 32).
Parnerships facilitate agroecological learning
32
Parnerships facilitate agroecological pest and fertility monitoring
32
Parnerships develop agroecological pest-management techniques
31
Parnerships develop agroecological soil, fertility, and irrigation
22
techniques
Parnerships facilitate agroecological integration of farming systems
22
