Fertile Ground: Scaling Agroecology from the Ground Up: Steve Brescia: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store
Agroecology is our best option for creating an agrifood system capable of nurturing people, societies, and the planet. But it is still not widespread. Fertile Ground offers nine case studies, authored by agroecologists from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, that demonstrate how the endogenous practice of agroecology can be “scaled” so that it is known by more farmers, practiced more deeply, and integrated in planning and policy.
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BR
When Richard Norgaard, a founder and leader of the field of ecological economics, retired from UC Berkeley in 2013, he gave a final seminar recapping his career. “We are at a pivotal historical moment, where the accumulation of capital is shaping every earth system process and facet of social life.” Yet the pathway out of this “Econocene,” Norgaard suggested, will not be paved simply with better policy and further research. We need to construct new narratives about what is desirable, valuable, and normal. “We need a whole new story” (Norgaard 2013Norgaard, R. B. 2013. Climate challenged society. Energy & Resources Colloquium, University of California-Berkeley. May 1. [Google Scholar]).
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Fertile Ground, I suggest, is a whole new story for agroecology. Comprised of nine case studies from around the world, it echoes Norgaard’s call by recognizing that agroecology literature is not in short supply. But we lack grounded stories of how to grow agroecology, how to “scale it up.” The authors—a team led by Steve Brescia of Groundswell International—laudably resist the temptation to offer a singular archetype for scaling. They recognize that all too often, proposals to expand sustainable farming displace the farmer-centered logic upon which agroecology depends. So, this book sets out to ask different, ambitious questions: How does agroecology gain traction, expand, and evolve? How does it remain rooted in local and lived experiences while transforming processes at larger social and spatial scales?
In what is arguably the most durable theoretical contribution of this compendium, these questions are explored along three axes of scaling: horizontal, vertical, and depth.
Fertile Ground: Scaling Agroecology from the Ground Up , by Steve Brescia: (2017). Groundswell International. Food First Books, Oakland. ISBN 978-0-93502-826-3. US $14.95
Montenegro De Wit, Maywa
Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 26 November 2017, Vol.41(9-10), p.1185-1188 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Online
When Richard Norgaard, a founder and leader of the field of ecological economics, retired from UC Berkeley in 2013, he gave a final seminar recapping his career. “We are at a pivotal historical moment, where the accumulation of capital is shaping every earth system process and facet of social life.” Yet the pathway out of this “Econocene,” Norgaard suggested, will not be paved simply with better policy and further research. We need to construct new narratives about what is desirable, valuable, and normal. “We need a whole new story” (Norgaard 2013Norgaard, R. B. 2013. Climate challenged society. Energy & Resources Colloquium, University of California-Berkeley. May 1. [Google Scholar]).
---
Fertile Ground, I suggest, is a whole new story for agroecology. Comprised of nine case studies from around the world, it echoes Norgaard’s call by recognizing that agroecology literature is not in short supply. But we lack grounded stories of how to grow agroecology, how to “scale it up.” The authors—a team led by Steve Brescia of Groundswell International—laudably resist the temptation to offer a singular archetype for scaling. They recognize that all too often, proposals to expand sustainable farming displace the farmer-centered logic upon which agroecology depends. So, this book sets out to ask different, ambitious questions: How does agroecology gain traction, expand, and evolve? How does it remain rooted in local and lived experiences while transforming processes at larger social and spatial scales?
In what is arguably the most durable theoretical contribution of this compendium, these questions are explored along three axes of scaling: horizontal, vertical, and depth.
The concept of “deepening” is most systematically explored in the case of California strawberries, where a farmer and a scientist become colleagues, comrades, and co-conspirators in challenging the dominant regime of methyl-bromide fumigation of the soil. To deepen means moving from industrial practices toward agroecological ones, and in this chapter, Gliessman’s five-level transitions framework (2015) gives granularity to that deepening task. From weaning off chemical inputs, to substituting with bio-based pesticides, to a whole-systems approach of introducing rotations of broccoli, mustard, and alfalfa—each step moves further along the depth axis. The case makes evident several elements engendering agroecological “success”: popular demand (students at UC Santa Cruz convincing their dining services to begin sourcing more local items); institutional support (funding from the newly established UC SARE Program), and perhaps most importantly, the slow and itinerant process of building farmer-scientist trust. As farmer Jim Cochran puts it:
…when Steve came, he really solidified my path, because I was sort of flying blind. I didn’t write down my rotation schedule, I didn’t write down my yield-per- block. I just sort of observed that stuff. He provided the scientific matrix in which to put the information that I was starting to collect. (p. 98)
If Santa Cruz strawberries chart the 20-year collaboration of farmer and researcher, Honduras shows how agroecology achieves breadth when its principles and practices extend horizontally across many farming households and communities. Readers of this journal will likely be familiar with the resilience legacy of Hurricane Mitch. When the storm struck Honduras in 1998, teams of researchers fanned out across the country, collecting data on soil erosion, crop damage, and other impacts. This survey made clear that “agroecology works”: Biodiverse farms fared much better than conventional plots on key ecological indicators. Much less well-known results of the study, however, suggested social and spatial limits. Where the damage originated on unprotected slopes or watersheds upstream, agroecological farmers in the valley were still badly affected. Moreover, only 15% of the land in Honduras was deemed suitable for farming—a finding suggesting that redistributive land reform could give farmers access to better land.
Honduran campesinos understood the need to continue their deepening practices that led to improved resilience. But it also led to the realization that agroecology needs to expand spatially—into wider watersheds and hillsides—and socially, by involving more farmers in communities of shared learning and practice. As documented in other work by Holt-Giménez (2006Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland, CA, New York: Food First Books. [Google Scholar]), several Honduran NGOs mobilized the campesino-a-campesino (farmer to farmer) methodology, borrowing from Guatemala the system of horizontal pedagogy. Farmers and NGOs worked to build model teaching farms called Centers for Teaching Sustainable Agriculture (CEAS), which grew into a network of 30 connected schools (RED-CEAS). They started a national association for the promotion of ecological agriculture now comprised of 20,000 farm families. They brought agroecology into conversation with existing peasant movements for land and territory rights, specifically via organizations like La Via Campesina (LVC) and the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), who have long supported indigenous Lenca communities in their struggles against the neoliberal encroachment of hydroelectric dams, mining projects, and targeted assassinations of their peasant leaders. The Honduran experience illustrates, too, that the different dimensions of scaling are overlapping and interrelated. In this case, campesino-a-campesino learning strengthened the basis for targeted policy interventions and grassroots connections to global agrarian movements—both of which fed back to support the material viability and legitimacy of peasant agroecology.
This vertical scaling—creating an enabling context by “strengthening wider networks or movements, linking farmers more beneficially to local markets, and creating supportive policies” (13)—is also central to the Ghana story. Although the stated objectives of Ghanaian farm policy are to create rural employment, reduce economic risks, and enhance food security, the government—together with the Gates Foundation, the G8 Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and agribusiness partners—has implemented this largely in the form of new Green Revolution policies (c.f. Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2013Holt-Giménez, E., and M. A. Altieri. 2013. Agroecology, food sovereignty and the new green revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37(1):90–102.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]). In addition to commercializing agriculture and opening land to foreign investors and multinationals, these actors have recently formulated a Plant Breeders’ Bill that erodes farmers’ rights to save, improve, and renew their seeds (see also GRAIN and LVC 2015). In response, a local indigenous knowledge NGO has played a central role in promoting agroecology as endogenous development. Traditional chiefs and authorities are particularly important in Ghanaian culture, and the Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development (CIKOD) helped design a farmer-to-farmer strategy across 34 villages, 4 traditional clans, and in connection with agroforestry projects in Nigeria and other parts of Ghana.
Once agroforestry was more widely accepted by local power brokers, visibility and legitimacy at regional and national levels came within reach. A few key strategies stand out. One is how CIKOD and its allies mobilized a variety of mediums and platforms—traditional festivals and local language radio were used to educate a wider public and to organize meetings at district levels. A second strategy was the use of “institutional maps”: the main agri-food actors and institutions in the Upper West region of Ghana were meticulously plotted out to identify opportunities for alliances and potential obstacles to advancing agroforestry. At the national level, the Plant Breeders’ Bill became a galvanizing moment. A broad food sovereignty coalition formed, including civil society organizations, farmers and women’s groups, churches, and scientists who pushed for a more informed vetting of the proposed law. This campaign brought agroecology to the attention of the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s major newspaper, leading to widespread coverage on national radio, television, and newspapers. It also connected CIKOD to the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, which prior to this effort, had been advocating for increased government subsidies to provide smallholders with chemical fertilizers. The horizontal and vertical scalings, these stories show, are less like stepladders than dynamic feedback loops—with some actors like the media playing a prominent role in both.
The complexity of such feedbacks is central to many social studies of agrarian change. And political ecologists especially, I surmise, will find much to appreciate in Fertile Ground. Each chapter begins with a map of the case region, a description of its ecological habitats, and a nutshell political–economy history. This context is often glossed over in big NGO reports, many of which focus on the technical practices, favoring the “key outcomes” or “lessons learned” to the detriment of contextualized political ecology. For that is what the text expresses and offers—political ecology in practice, where farmers’ everyday decisions, actions, and hopes are mediated by contingent social and environmental factors at local to global scales.
This does not mean Fertile Ground is without flaws. I was intrigued by the meshing in Table 1 (p. 190) of depth, horizontal, and vertical axes with agroecology’s science, practice, and social movement. But the matrix seems less analytically helpful than notionally “cool.” For one, it is not immediately apparent where markets and policies—two key aspects of vertical scaling—fit within a typology of science, practice, and movement. Beyond this table, vertical scaling could use more conceptual refinement throughout the book. The text is strongest when detailing the deepening of agroecology practices and the lateral dissemination of farmer field schools and campesino-a-campesinonetworks. The leap to higher-order movement building, market development, and articulating with state institutions remains somewhat ad hoc. To be sure, this is as much a weakness of agroecology as of the book. By now, pathways to achieve biologically diverse farms and to spread farmer knowledge have achieved some replicability. We know farmer-to-farmer works. Pathways to transform apparatuses of the state, civil society, and markets are more contingent and challenging to foresee, plan for, or replicate. They will require further experimentation by agroecologists everywhere: What kinds of approaches gain traction, why, and how? Can we develop ways to test strategies systematically, and to adjust them based on what movements learn? In the absence of such learning, it will be easy for prevailing power structures to co-opt or enervate the very essence of what makes agroecology an alternative.
This critique notwithstanding, Fertile Ground is an evocative and welcome addition to the agroecology canon. In giving us diverse stories of agroecology’s successes, struggles, and evolutions around the world, I especially appreciate that it seldom sugarcoats. Brescia’s concluding remarks deliver a compact summary of the differential circumstances faced by farmers in the Global North and South, of the precarity that undergirds the skepticism of many peasant farmers—and therefore, the need to demonstrably show that agroecology can and does work. Not all is rosy: Ghanaian agroforesters are struggling for financial support. In California, farmer Cochran runs up against labor relations over which he has little control or the capture of the organic market by large-scale growers. Hondurans endure state violence, drug trafficking, and outmigration. Yet in most or all cases, the failures are not because of agroecology, but because of the remaining obstacles to it. In other words, we are not suddenly discovering that biodiversity destroys the soil, or that polyculture does not yield enough. What we are learning is that scaling—in any dimension—requires patience, humility, organizing, and mobilizing across diverse social groups with diverse expertise, and diverse strategies for dismantling dominant structures from the outside and from within. By bringing these often-abstract concepts into story form—in the words of farmers like Burkina Faso’s Fatoumata Batta, Haiti’s Silmène Veillard, and Mali’s Salif Aly Guindo—these cases suggest not only that another world is possible, but somewhere on the planet, people are growing it.
References
Gliessman, S. R. 2015. Agroecology: The ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group.
[Google Scholar]
GRAIN, and LVC (La Via Campesina). 2015. Seed laws that criminalize farmers: Resistance and fight back. http://viacampesina.org/en/images/stories/pdf/2015-Seed%20laws%20booklet%20EN.pdf.
[Google Scholar]
Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland, CA, New York: Food First Books.
[Google Scholar]
Holt-Giménez, E., and M. A. Altieri. 2013. Agroecology, food sovereignty and the new green revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37(1):90–102.
[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®],
, [Google Scholar]
Norgaard, R. B. 2013. Climate challenged society. Energy & Resources Colloquium, University of California-Berkeley. May 1.
[Google Scholar]
…when Steve came, he really solidified my path, because I was sort of flying blind. I didn’t write down my rotation schedule, I didn’t write down my yield-per- block. I just sort of observed that stuff. He provided the scientific matrix in which to put the information that I was starting to collect. (p. 98)
If Santa Cruz strawberries chart the 20-year collaboration of farmer and researcher, Honduras shows how agroecology achieves breadth when its principles and practices extend horizontally across many farming households and communities. Readers of this journal will likely be familiar with the resilience legacy of Hurricane Mitch. When the storm struck Honduras in 1998, teams of researchers fanned out across the country, collecting data on soil erosion, crop damage, and other impacts. This survey made clear that “agroecology works”: Biodiverse farms fared much better than conventional plots on key ecological indicators. Much less well-known results of the study, however, suggested social and spatial limits. Where the damage originated on unprotected slopes or watersheds upstream, agroecological farmers in the valley were still badly affected. Moreover, only 15% of the land in Honduras was deemed suitable for farming—a finding suggesting that redistributive land reform could give farmers access to better land.
Honduran campesinos understood the need to continue their deepening practices that led to improved resilience. But it also led to the realization that agroecology needs to expand spatially—into wider watersheds and hillsides—and socially, by involving more farmers in communities of shared learning and practice. As documented in other work by Holt-Giménez (2006Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland, CA, New York: Food First Books. [Google Scholar]), several Honduran NGOs mobilized the campesino-a-campesino (farmer to farmer) methodology, borrowing from Guatemala the system of horizontal pedagogy. Farmers and NGOs worked to build model teaching farms called Centers for Teaching Sustainable Agriculture (CEAS), which grew into a network of 30 connected schools (RED-CEAS). They started a national association for the promotion of ecological agriculture now comprised of 20,000 farm families. They brought agroecology into conversation with existing peasant movements for land and territory rights, specifically via organizations like La Via Campesina (LVC) and the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), who have long supported indigenous Lenca communities in their struggles against the neoliberal encroachment of hydroelectric dams, mining projects, and targeted assassinations of their peasant leaders. The Honduran experience illustrates, too, that the different dimensions of scaling are overlapping and interrelated. In this case, campesino-a-campesino learning strengthened the basis for targeted policy interventions and grassroots connections to global agrarian movements—both of which fed back to support the material viability and legitimacy of peasant agroecology.
This vertical scaling—creating an enabling context by “strengthening wider networks or movements, linking farmers more beneficially to local markets, and creating supportive policies” (13)—is also central to the Ghana story. Although the stated objectives of Ghanaian farm policy are to create rural employment, reduce economic risks, and enhance food security, the government—together with the Gates Foundation, the G8 Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and agribusiness partners—has implemented this largely in the form of new Green Revolution policies (c.f. Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2013Holt-Giménez, E., and M. A. Altieri. 2013. Agroecology, food sovereignty and the new green revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37(1):90–102.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]). In addition to commercializing agriculture and opening land to foreign investors and multinationals, these actors have recently formulated a Plant Breeders’ Bill that erodes farmers’ rights to save, improve, and renew their seeds (see also GRAIN and LVC 2015). In response, a local indigenous knowledge NGO has played a central role in promoting agroecology as endogenous development. Traditional chiefs and authorities are particularly important in Ghanaian culture, and the Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development (CIKOD) helped design a farmer-to-farmer strategy across 34 villages, 4 traditional clans, and in connection with agroforestry projects in Nigeria and other parts of Ghana.
Once agroforestry was more widely accepted by local power brokers, visibility and legitimacy at regional and national levels came within reach. A few key strategies stand out. One is how CIKOD and its allies mobilized a variety of mediums and platforms—traditional festivals and local language radio were used to educate a wider public and to organize meetings at district levels. A second strategy was the use of “institutional maps”: the main agri-food actors and institutions in the Upper West region of Ghana were meticulously plotted out to identify opportunities for alliances and potential obstacles to advancing agroforestry. At the national level, the Plant Breeders’ Bill became a galvanizing moment. A broad food sovereignty coalition formed, including civil society organizations, farmers and women’s groups, churches, and scientists who pushed for a more informed vetting of the proposed law. This campaign brought agroecology to the attention of the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s major newspaper, leading to widespread coverage on national radio, television, and newspapers. It also connected CIKOD to the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, which prior to this effort, had been advocating for increased government subsidies to provide smallholders with chemical fertilizers. The horizontal and vertical scalings, these stories show, are less like stepladders than dynamic feedback loops—with some actors like the media playing a prominent role in both.
The complexity of such feedbacks is central to many social studies of agrarian change. And political ecologists especially, I surmise, will find much to appreciate in Fertile Ground. Each chapter begins with a map of the case region, a description of its ecological habitats, and a nutshell political–economy history. This context is often glossed over in big NGO reports, many of which focus on the technical practices, favoring the “key outcomes” or “lessons learned” to the detriment of contextualized political ecology. For that is what the text expresses and offers—political ecology in practice, where farmers’ everyday decisions, actions, and hopes are mediated by contingent social and environmental factors at local to global scales.
This does not mean Fertile Ground is without flaws. I was intrigued by the meshing in Table 1 (p. 190) of depth, horizontal, and vertical axes with agroecology’s science, practice, and social movement. But the matrix seems less analytically helpful than notionally “cool.” For one, it is not immediately apparent where markets and policies—two key aspects of vertical scaling—fit within a typology of science, practice, and movement. Beyond this table, vertical scaling could use more conceptual refinement throughout the book. The text is strongest when detailing the deepening of agroecology practices and the lateral dissemination of farmer field schools and campesino-a-campesinonetworks. The leap to higher-order movement building, market development, and articulating with state institutions remains somewhat ad hoc. To be sure, this is as much a weakness of agroecology as of the book. By now, pathways to achieve biologically diverse farms and to spread farmer knowledge have achieved some replicability. We know farmer-to-farmer works. Pathways to transform apparatuses of the state, civil society, and markets are more contingent and challenging to foresee, plan for, or replicate. They will require further experimentation by agroecologists everywhere: What kinds of approaches gain traction, why, and how? Can we develop ways to test strategies systematically, and to adjust them based on what movements learn? In the absence of such learning, it will be easy for prevailing power structures to co-opt or enervate the very essence of what makes agroecology an alternative.
This critique notwithstanding, Fertile Ground is an evocative and welcome addition to the agroecology canon. In giving us diverse stories of agroecology’s successes, struggles, and evolutions around the world, I especially appreciate that it seldom sugarcoats. Brescia’s concluding remarks deliver a compact summary of the differential circumstances faced by farmers in the Global North and South, of the precarity that undergirds the skepticism of many peasant farmers—and therefore, the need to demonstrably show that agroecology can and does work. Not all is rosy: Ghanaian agroforesters are struggling for financial support. In California, farmer Cochran runs up against labor relations over which he has little control or the capture of the organic market by large-scale growers. Hondurans endure state violence, drug trafficking, and outmigration. Yet in most or all cases, the failures are not because of agroecology, but because of the remaining obstacles to it. In other words, we are not suddenly discovering that biodiversity destroys the soil, or that polyculture does not yield enough. What we are learning is that scaling—in any dimension—requires patience, humility, organizing, and mobilizing across diverse social groups with diverse expertise, and diverse strategies for dismantling dominant structures from the outside and from within. By bringing these often-abstract concepts into story form—in the words of farmers like Burkina Faso’s Fatoumata Batta, Haiti’s Silmène Veillard, and Mali’s Salif Aly Guindo—these cases suggest not only that another world is possible, but somewhere on the planet, people are growing it.
---
References
Gliessman, S. R. 2015. Agroecology: The ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group.
[Google Scholar]
GRAIN, and LVC (La Via Campesina). 2015. Seed laws that criminalize farmers: Resistance and fight back. http://viacampesina.org/en/images/stories/pdf/2015-Seed%20laws%20booklet%20EN.pdf.
[Google Scholar]
Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland, CA, New York: Food First Books.
[Google Scholar]
Holt-Giménez, E., and M. A. Altieri. 2013. Agroecology, food sovereignty and the new green revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37(1):90–102.
[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®],
, [Google Scholar]
Norgaard, R. B. 2013. Climate challenged society. Energy & Resources Colloquium, University of California-Berkeley. May 1.
[Google Scholar]
