Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
place, adapting their work to local conditions. 10 This engagement with the
material world also provides actors with skills that can be formally or
informally codifi ed in the form of practice , the second level of analysis.
Some farming practices are quite old: the use of furrows for irrigated agri-
culture began thousands of years ago and is still used to this day. Whether
new or old, however, these ways of interacting with the contingencies
of place represent a kind of investment, and changes to even seemingly
simple practices can lead to large-scale disruption of the overall production
system. In the same way, scientists themselves have considerable interests
in practice, which defi ne their research careers and serve as a kind of struc-
ture for their work (Pickering 1980; 1984). One of the most common ways
for agricultural scientists to convince growers of the value of a new way
of farming is through the use of fi eld trials, experiments that use a plot of
land to test and visually demonstrate the effi cacy of a new practice or
technology (see chapter 5).
These local combinations of land and practice are used to create portable
capital that is valuable and transferable to the third level: institutions outside
of a given place (Bourdieu 1990; 2004). Growers produce crops; those crops
are sold on commodity markets and transformed into wealth. Similarly,
applied agricultural science combines place and practice when testing new
farming techniques to assess their effi cacy. These experiments create new
knowledge that may be translated to other contexts or used to reshape the
very relations of practice and place that produced the knowledge. In each
case, farm commodities and knowledge are relatively stable products that
may be used as capital and exchanged for other forms of capital as well as
to control and reshape the overall ecology itself (Latour 1988; 1990; 1993).
This control is the basis of power, but it is a “fragile power,” and seeing
how capital is produced from the most basic interactions of practice and
place makes it easier to understand why actors may be intensely interested
in the impact of some form of disruption to production. 11 Saying that
“knowledge is power” or “wealth is power” is, in this view, inaccurate;
knowledge and wealth are only as powerful as the places and practices on
which they are based.
The value of an ecological approach to the analysis of industrial agri-
culture is that it does not emphasize place, practice, technology, markets,
politics, or culture over any of the others but instead seeks to understand
the interactive effects of these elements—“ecological determinism” is a
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