Miguel Altieri, et al., Agroecology: The Scientific Basis of Alternative Agriculture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).

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Notes

• Xiii – “Nevertheless, a recent surge in research by agroecologists has shown that traditional farming systems are often based on deep ecological rationales and in many cases exhibit a number of desirable features of socioeconomic stability, biological resilience and productivity.”
• Xiv – “In the developing countries, however, traditional farming systems constitute such settings to a great degree. These complex systems are well adapted to the local conditions, which have allowed peasants to meet their subsistence needs for centuries. If western agriculturalists are to learn about these farming systems, they must do so soon, before this wealth of practical knowledge is irretrievably lost.”
• Xiv-xv – “The scientific discipline that approaches the study of agriculture from an ecological perspective is herein termed ‘agroecology’ or ‘agricultural ecology’ and is defined as a theoretical framework aimed at understanding agricultural processes in the broadest manner. The agroecological approach regards farm system as the fundamental units of study, and in these systems, mineral cycles, energy transformations, biological processes and socioeconomic relationships are investigated and analyzed as a whole. Thus agroecological research is concerned not with maximizing production of a particular commodity, but rather with optimizing the agroecosystem as a whole. This approach shifts the emphasis in agricultural research away from disciplinary and commodity concerns and toward complex interactions among and between people, crops, soil and livestock.”
• Xv – “The purpose of this book is to provide a simple synthesis of the research on novel agroecosystems and technologies and an analysis of ecologically based farms, for the purpose of establishing the scientific basis of alternative agriculture.”
• “Part Three describes the ecological features of various traditional and organic farming systems throughout the world, showing that there are many living models to learn from, both for researchers and farmers. The purposeful blending of traditional and modern knowledge is the starting point in the development of a sustainable agriculture.”
• [CHAPTER 1 – THE EVOLUTION OF AGROECOLOGICAL THOUGHT]
• 1 – Aristotle – “So in natural science, it is the composite thing, the thing as a whole which primarily concerns us, not just the materials of it, which are not found apart from the thing itself.”

 

• “The contemporary use of the term agroecology dates from the 1970s, but the science and the practice of agroecology are as old as the origins of agriculture.”

 

• “As researchers explore indigenous agricultures, which are modified relics of earlier agronomic forms, it is increasingly apparent that many locally developed agricultural systems routinely incorporate mechanisms to accommodate crops to the variability of the natural environment and to protect them from predation and competition.”
• 1-2 – “Why this agricultural heritage has been relatively unimportant in the formal agronomic sciences reflects biases that some contemporary researchers are trying to overcome. Three historical processes have done much to obscure and denigrate the agronomic knowledge that was developed by local peoples and non-western societies:

 

• (1) the destruction of the means of encoding regulating and transmitting agricultural practices;

• (2) the dramatic transformation of many non-western indigenous societies and the production systems on which they were based as a result of demographic collapse, slaving and colonial and market processes;

• And (3) the rise of positivist science.

• 2 – “As a result, there have been few opportunities for the insights developed in a  more holistic agriculture to ‘filter up’ into the formal scientific community. This difficulty is further compounded by unrecognized biases of agronomic researchers related to social factors such as class, ethnicity, culture and gender.”

 

• 3-4 – “Finally, even when chroniclers and explorers made positive mention of native land use practices, it was difficult to translate these observations in a coherent, non-folkloric and socially acceptable form. The rise of the positivist method in science and the movement of western thought to atomistic and mechanistic perspectives associated with the 18th century enlightenment [sic] dramatically altered the discourse about the natural world.//This transition in epistemologies shifted the view of nature from that of an organic, living entity to one of a machine. Increasingly, this approach emphasized a language of science, a way of talking about the natural world that essentially dismissed other forms of scientific knowledge as superstitions. . . . This position, coupled with an often derogatory view of the abilities of rural peoples generally, and colonized populations in particular, further obscured the richness of many rural knowledge systems whose content was expressed in discursive and symbolic form. By misunderstanding the ecological context, the spatial and cultivar complexity of non-formalized agricultures was frequently reviled as disorder.”
• 4 – “Given this history, one might ask how agroecology managed to re-emerge at all. The ‘rediscovery’ of agroecology is an unusual example of the impact of pre-existing technologies on the sciences, where critically important advances in the understanding of nature resulted from the decision of scientists to study what farmers had already learned how to do (Kuhn 1979). Kuhn points out that in many cases, scientists succeeded in ‘merely validating and explaining, not in improving, techniques developed earlier.’”
• “How disciplines as diverse as anthropology, economics and ecology are reflected in the intellectual pedigree of agroecology is outlined briefly in the next sections in this chapter, but the entire volume shows the influences on agroecological approaches in far more detail.”
• 5 – “At the heart of agroecology is the idea that a crop field is an ecosystem in which ecological processes found in other vegetation formations — such as nutrient cycling, predator/prey interactions, competition, commensalism and successional changes — also occur. . . . The underlying analytic framework owes much to systems theory and the theoretical and practical attempts at integrating the numerous factors that affect agriculture.”

 

• “The results of the interplay between endogenous biological and environmental features of the agricultural field, and exogenous social and economic factors, generate the particular agroecosystem structure. For this reason, a broader perspective is often needed to explain an observed production system.”

 

• 7 – “Agricultural strategies respond not only to environmental, biotic and cultivar constraints, but also reflect human subsistence strategies and economic conditions (Ellen 1982). Factors like labor availability, access and conditions of credit, subsidies, perceived risk, price information, kinship obligations, family size and access to other forms of livelihood are often critical to understanding the logic of a farming system.”
• “Conventional agricultural scientists . . . emphasized a target problem such as soil nutrients or pest outbreaks. This means of addressing agricultural systems has been determined in part by the limited dialogue across disciplinary lines, by the structure of scientific investigation, which tends to atomize research questions, and by an agricultural commodity focus.”
• “Increasingly, however, scientists are recognizing that such a narrow approach could limit agricultural options for rural peoples, and that the ‘target approach’ often carries with it unintended secondary consequences that have often been ecologically damaging and had high social costs. Agroecology research does concentrate on target issues in the agricultural field, but within a wider context that includes ecological and social variables.”

 

• “Agroecology can best be described as an approach that integrates the ideas and methods of several subfields, rather than as a specific discipline. Agroecology can be a normative challenge to existing ways of approaching agricultural issues in several disciplines. It has roots in the agricultural sciences, in the environmental movement, in ecology (particularly in the explosion of research on tropical ecosystems), in the analysis of indigenous agroecosystems and in rural development studies. Each of these areas of inquiry has quite different aims and methodologies, yet taken together, they have all been legitimate and important influences on agroecological thought.”

• 9-10 – [FOUR METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING INDIGENOUS/WESTERN AGRICULTURE + LISTS OF REPRESENTATIVE STUDIES FOR EACH METHODOLOGY]

 

• 10 – “A major intellectual contributor to agroecology has been the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As environmental issues translated into agroecology they infused parts of the agroecology discourse with a critical stance toward production-oriented agronomy, and increased sensitivity to a broad range of resource issues.”
• 11 – “While The Limits to Growth developed a generalized model of the ‘environmental crisis,’ two later seminal volumes had particular relevance to agroecological thought because they outlined visions of an alternative society. These were the Blueprint for Survival (The Ecologist, 1972) and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973). The works incorporated ideas about social organization, economic structure and cultural values into comprehensive, more or less utopian visions. Blueprint for Survival argued for decentralization, smallness of scale and an emphasis on human activities that would involve minimal ecological disruption and maximum conservation of energy and materials.”
• “Toxicity of agrochemicals was only one of the environmental questions, since energy resource use was also becoming an increasingly important topic. The energy costs of particular production systems required evaluation, Pimentel’s 1973 classic study showed that in American agriculture, each kilocalorie of corn was ‘purchased’ at enormous energetic cost of external energy. U.S. production systems were subsequently compared with several other forms of agriculture that were less productive per unit area (in terms of kilocalories per hectare) but much more efficient in terms of return per unit of energy expenditure. The high yields of modern agriculture are purchased at the price of numerous inputs including non-renewable inputs like fossil fuel and phosphorous.”
• 12 – “At the same time, the larger philosophical issues raised by the environmental movement resonated with the reevlatuation of the goals of agricultural development in the U.S. and the Third World, and the technological basis on which these would be carried out. In the developed world these ideas had only moderate impact on the structure of agriculture, because the reliability and availability of agrochemical and energetic inputs to agriculture resulted in minor transformations in the patterns of resource use in agriculture. In situations where farmers and nations were constrained by resources, where regressive distributional structures prevailed and where temperate zone approaches were often inappropriate for local environmental conditions, the agroecology approach seemed particularly relevant.”

 

• 13 – “Fourth, a number of ecologists have begun to turn their attention to the ecological dynamics of traditional agricultural systems (Gliessman 1982a,b, Altieri and Farrell 1984, Anderson et al. 1987, Marten 1986, Richards, P. 1984 and 1986).”

• 14 – “The limitations of the purely ecological approach are being increasingly overcome as researchers begin to examine peasant and indigenous systems in multidisciplinary teams and from a more holistic perspective (Anderson and Anderson 1983, Hecht et al. 1987, Anderson et al. 1987, Marten 1986, Denevan et al. 1984. These efforts attempt to put agriculture in a social context; they use indigenous local models (and indigenous explanations for why they do particular activities) for developing hypotheses that can then be tested using agronomic and scientific methods. This is a burgeoning research area with major theoretical and applied implications, and a major inspiration to agroecological theory and practice.”

 

• 17 – “Research on the Green Revolution was important in the evolution of agroecological thought because studies of the impact of this technology were instrumental in illuminating the types of biases that predominated in agricultural and development thinking. This research also resulted in the first really multidisciplinary analysis of ecological, social and economic tenure issues and technical change in agriculture by a broad spectrum of analysis. The extraordinary acceleration in peasant social stratification associated with the Green Revolution indicated immediately that this was not a scale-neutral technology, but on that could dramatically transform the basis of rural life for large numbers of people.”
• 20 – “Many field researchers and development practitioners  have been frustrated by these explanations, and have increasingly indicated that the technologies themselves require substantial reevaluation. They have argued that the farmer’s decision to adopt a technology is the true test of its quality. This approach has often been called ‘the farmer first and last’ or ‘farmer back to farmer,’ or ‘indigenous agricultural revolution.’ . . . In practice, this means obtaining information about and understanding the farmers’ perception of the problem, and accepting farmers’ evaluation of the solution.”
• [CHAPTER 2: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS OF AGROECOLOGY]
• 21 – “Scientists rarely contemplate how they know unless a crisis occurs, such as their experiments repeatedly indicate something contrary to existing knowledge, their knowledge does not work as expected when applied in the real world or another way of knowing begins to challenge openly the existing way.”
• “Western agricultural science is not in a crisis, but it has not always worked out as expected. Chemical pest controls have had numerous unforeseen secondary impacts. New varieties of crops requiring more fertilizer and water have resulted in unexpected impacts on soils and groundwater supplies. As a result, many agricultural scientists acknowledge a ‘mild crisis’ because knowledge derived by modern science has not worked as expected when applied in the real world.”

 

• “Agroecology contributes to this ‘mild crisis’ with a challenge to the dominant western way of thinking. This agroecological way of knowing is quite different. Agroecologists are fascinated by agricultural systems that have evolved over centuries, in which people are actively involved. Agroecologists study how people interact in these systems and learn about important relationships through the farmers’ explanations of why they farm as they do.”

 

• 22 – “Western thought on knowledge has several other important characteristics. First, there has always been a strong emphasis on useful knowledge. Second, western science is always interest in universal phenomena. These two characteristics are complementary, for universal knowledge is more useful because it can be applied anywhere. Third, the world can be perceived as consisting of many atomistic parts that can be described and ‘known’ independently of each other. Fourth, the parts are related in a systematic manner that can be known. Knowing, in this case, entails being able to predict the effect on the whole system of a change in one of the parts. Prediction requires that the system can be described in a manner that is manageable and logical, so that ‘if this, then that’ statements can be made. For knowledge to be universal, neither the nature of the parts nor the nature of the relationships can change. The relative proportion of the parts and relative strengths of the relationships, however, can change.”
• 22-3 – With nature unchanging, knowledge about nature can accumulate over time. The idea that science is cumulative, that we are coming closer and closer to knowing all there is to know about the parts and relations in nature, is deeply embedded in western thought. Once in a while, scientists lament that there may be an infinite amount to know, but few question that we do not continue to know more about the unchanging principles of nature. This belief in the accumulation of scientific knowledge complements the western belief in progress.”
• 25 – “Within this broad coevolutionary world view, how do agroecologists know? They do not know universal truth, for each agroecosystem they study has a different coevolutionary history. They know that the nature of the parts can only be understood in the context of the coevolution of the whole. Parts and relations change with time . . .. These changes reflect the decisions of people conditioned by their values, beliefs, organization and technology. As a result, the concepts of objective knowledge and objectivity are moot.”
• [SECTION: BLENDING WESTERN AND ‘TRADITIONAL’ KNOWLEDGE]
• “In the absence of a consensus about epistemological beliefs, agroecologists have resorted to pragmatism. Western knowledge is not rejected, for the mechanical world view has given us many insights, and conventional agricultural explanations help the agroecologist understand traditional systems as well. At the same time, agroecologists are receptive to the explanations of traditional peoples. Traditional knowledge may not survive western tests. Traditional knowledge may not generate testable hypotheses; when it does, the hypotheses may be refuted; and the knowledge — typically contained in myths and social expectations — may not even be internally consistent. But traditional knowledge has survived the test of time — the selective pressures of droughts, downpours, blights and pest invasions — and usually for more centuries than western knowledge has survived.”
• “Agroecology shares its epistemological base with the anthropological subdiscipline of cultural ecology where evolution of culture is explained with reference to the environment and the evolution of the environment is explained with reference to culture.”
• 26 – Six premises that explicitly define the field of agroecology:

 

• Biological and social systems, as systems, have agricultural potential

• This potential has been captured by traditional farmers through a process of trial, error, selection and cultural learning.

• Social and biological systems have coevolved such that each depends upon feedback from the other. Knowledge, embodied in traditional cultures through cultural learning, stimulates and regulates the feedback from social to biological systems.

• The nature of the potential of social and biological systems can best be understood, given the present state of formal social and biological knowledge, by studying how traditional farming cultures have captured the potential.

• Formal social and biological knowledge, the knowledge and some of the inputs developed by conventional agricultural sciences, and experience with western agricultural technologies and institutions can be combined to improve both traditional and modern agroecosystems.

• Agricultural development through agroecology will maintain more cultural and biological options for the future and have fewer detrimental cultural, biological and environmental effects than conventional agricultural science approaches alone.”

 

• [CHAPTER 6: TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURE]

 

• 69 – “Traditional farmers are much more innovative than many agriculturalists believe. Many scientists in developed countries are beginning to show interest in traditional agriculture, especially in small-scale mixed crop systems, as they search for ways to remedy deficiencies in modern agriculture. This transfer of learning must occur rapidly, however, or this wealth of practical knowledge will be lost forever.”

 

• 88-9 – “It is difficult to separate the study of traditional agricultural systems from the study of the cultures that nurture them. It is important to recognize both the complexity and the sophistication of the production systems.”
• 89 – “Polycultures and agroforestry patterns are not developed at random; rather, they are based on a deep understanding of agricultural interactions guided by complex ethnobotanical classification systems. These classification systems have allowed peasants to assign each landscape unit a given productive practice, thus obtaining a diversity of plant products through a multiple use strategy.”