At the heart of peasant agriculture there is a range of complex and interdependent cycles of observation, interpretation, readjustment, evaluation and learning. Peasants continuously observe the germination of seeds, the development of crops, and the performance of animals, amongst others. Changes they observe inevitably trigger peasants to ask how and why, which in turn prompts analysis of previous decisions as well as internal and external factors.

Is the calve that looks so promising to be explained by previous decisions regarding the selection, mating and more generally, the genealogy of the animal? Or is it due to the feeding she got so far? Or maybe the absence of diseases? Or the effect of a new, more healthy stable? Peasant farmers ’read’ the dynamics and impact of their own encounter with living nature, or farming, in a twofold way. One way is immediate, short term and applies at the micro level. But farmers also look at the long term, which involves considering the interaction between farms, markets and wider society as well as the role of cooperation. Farmers weigh the possibilities to improve the availability and quality of on-farm natural and social resources and assess what is needed to do so. Both resource use and resource development are taken into account.

Continuous learning

Diversity is central to peasant farming. From observing and analysing this diversity, peasants improve and innovate. This logic governs the selection of seeds and animal breeds, for example. Selection and breeding might lead to practical improvements such as higher yields, fewer losses, and stronger animals. Such improvements provide feedback for analysis, but even futile readjustments render new insights. This process is continuous and results in learning and in new knowledge.

There is always curiosity and the unbeatable drive to do things better

Routine is a mighty tool when farming in a sea of uncertainty. What proved to be useful and reliable in the past will be the compass for today’s activities. But even so, alongside routine there is always curiosity and the unbeatable drive to do things better. Curiosity and drive trigger cycles of observation, interpretation, readjustment, evaluation and learning. This makes peasant farming a permanent search for improvements, novelties, knowledge and progress. Historically, the many small improvements on peasant farms added up to a steady and sustained growth of production. It wasn’t untill peasant agriculture started to get heavily squeezed and its development potential appropriated by others that growth rates diminished until misery abounded.

The art of farming

The learning cycles of observation, interpretation and readjustment are not individual activities. They are socialised through exchange and communication between peasants and often involve comparisons that go beyond the individual farm. In this process, peasants use criteria in order to assess what is better and what is worse. These criteria are never one dimensional, they are rather multifaceted. When it comes to potatoes, for instance, peasants assess taste, storability, performance in the given ecological conditions, appearance, yield, and resistance to pests and diseases. Interestingly, aesthetics are among some of the most important criteria. ‘Healthy looking’ plants, ‘beautiful’ crops, ‘generous’ fields, and ‘noble’ cattle are unambiguous concepts amongst peasants.These criteria are used at multiple levels. Some regard the fields and the animals, others regard the farm as a whole, and yet others regard the community and sometimes even the equilibrium between the agricultural sector and society as a whole. The different balances within the family, between family and farm, between land and animals, between past, present and future also contribute to the aesthetics of the farm.

A well-balanced farm functions as an assurance. It is a promise for the future and a source of feedback. The different levels and the associated balances are clearly interdependent. Together the different criteria compose the ‘moral economy of the peasantry’: determining, in their view, how things should be. These criteria are especially activated if and when things strongly differ from how they should be. The many cycles and the capacity to bring them into balance with each other are the ‘art of farming’ (see book review of ‘The Art of Farming’).

Together they explain why peasant agriculture has historically resulted in ongoing growth and development that is ‘born from within’ or in other words endogenous development. It also explains why peasant farming is often attractive: it is a journey of discovery, a search for new possibilities and it often allows those involved to emancipate, to move forward, to develop themselves as active and knowledgeable actors.

Modernised farming

If the ‘clean part’ is acceptable to peasants then the agricultural sector is likely to be sound. Photo: Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
Although in industrial agriculture such cycles are not completely absent, they have been moved to the margins of the labour process. To begin with, farms have been reduced from diverse wholes to highly specialised units of production that basically convert external inputs into specified output for the food and retail industries. Unlike in peasant agriculture, land is no longer the main resource but has been reduced to the venue where agriculture takes place. Second, the labour process now follows a script written by outsiders. Third, specialisation and standardisation have strongly reduced, if not nearly eliminated, heterogeneity in and between farms, rendering comparisons rather useless.As a result, in this type of farming there is hardly any interest anymore in careful observation, interpretation and readjustment. Growth is now paramount. Development is now exogenous (originating from outside). Modernised agriculture critically depends on the application of resources obtained on the capital market, on the use of external technologies, on knowledge developed elsewhere, on external organisational schemes and logistics and even on the use of external labour. Yield increase of a single crop has become the main indicator of success. The many problems that have resulted from this type of farming are well known.

Contrary to what those making profit from industrial agriculture have us believe, in industrial agriculture the issue of evaluation of the farm is relatively simple. Yields, input use and incomes are assumed to run in parallel. High input use is a prerequisite for high yields, and high yields will lead to good incomes provided the farm size is adequate. This fits well with how the wider global economy is currently organised as high yields ensure that enough raw materials are made available for the food industry, large retail and export, and high input use creates a market for upstream agribusiness such as the seed and chemical industries.

Repeasantisation and agroecology

Alongside industrial agriculture there remain, both in the global north and the global south, large and growing segments of peasant agriculture. This is in part thanks to the agroecological movement.

Agroecology explicitly socialises the processes of observation, interpretation and readjustment

Agroecology reorients farming towards less use of external inputs and improved efficiency of internal resources. Agroecology is, in many respects, about returning to and strengthening peasant farming. It explicitly socialises the processes of observation, interpretation and readjustment through farmer field schools, farmer-to-farmer learning, field visits, experimentation, etc. These types of learning methods are also applied to new issues such as health, animal welfare, climate change, gender equality, product quality, nutrition, and marketing.

What is valid for peasant farming in terms of evaluating the farm is particularly relevant when peasants work with agroecology. Agroecology implies a transition; it is a self-propelling process of change, learning from changes and their effects, continuously translating the enlarged body of knowledge and new experiences into complementary changes.

A beautiful production and a well-balanced farm result in an adequate livelihood, in well-being and in prospects for the future. While incomes are an integral part of all this, peasant farmers perceive income in a very specific way. They are not interested in profits or in the ‘net farm results’ as calculated in standard farm accountancy. As very clearly argued by the Russian scholar Chayanov, incomes are perceived by peasant farmers as the result of their labour (as ‘labour income’). They typically do not calculate their own labour and other internal resources as costs.

The clean part

Strategic for peasant producers is the difference between sold produce and bought inputs; this is often referred to as ‘the clean part’. This income is regarded as ‘clean’ because it is for the peasants and their families themselves. Together with the food produced for the household, it cannot be touched or claimed by others. The concept of the ‘clean part’ was developed by peasants in order to be able to evaluate and control the relation between their farms and the markets. It connects the dynamics in the fields and stables with the well-being of the family.

Peasant farmers perceive income in a very specific way

Assessing the ‘clean part’ is a powerful tool for agroecology, precisely because it highlights the result of a particular double movement that is central to agroecology: reducing external input use and the associated costs, while obtaining better prices for their products. The latter takes place through organising peasant agroecological markets, augmenting quality and adding value, and creating cooperatives. Peasant producers and their families will always ask: how does this income or ‘clean part’ relate to the time, effort and energy we have invested in the labour process?

A farm level comparison
The clean part allows to document the progress through time of agroecological farming. It clearly assesses the differences between ‘traditional’ and agroecological farming. The organisation AS-PTA in Brazil, in collaboration with a team of peasant farmers, has been conducting important and innovative work by comparing an agroecological and a conventional farm.

On the agroecological farm of Luiz, there is considerable production for the market (venda) alongside production for consumption in the family (auto consumo). Production is mainly reliant on internal resources that are produced and reproduced within the farm system (insumos prod.) and external inputs (insumo comp.) only play a minor role. Thus the ‘clean part’ is considerable (11,326 Reais or US$ 3611). This allows for a good level of expenditure for the family (insumos p/ famil.) and for savings, as the clean part is larger than family expenditure. In contrast, Aldo’s specialised farm strongly depends on external inputs. In this respect Aldo’s is indeed a conventional farm where the reliance on external inputs is much higher than in the agroecological farm. The clean part, however, is much smaller and so are self-consumption and family expenditure. Consequently, in the agroecological farm people are better off than in the more entrepreneurial farm that heavily depends on industrial inputs.

The ‘clean part’ may also translate to agriculture as a whole: If the ‘clean part’ is acceptable to peasants, then the agricultural sector is likely to be sound and not in need of perverse subsidies. It means that agriculture will be able to finance its own further development. The agroecological transition has shown the potential to generate a clean part that is both acceptable for individual farmers and able to generate benefits to society as a whole.

If citizens, social organisations, researchers and policy makers are able to apply a similar view when assessing the dynamics and impacts of different types of farming, they will be able to strongly contribute to making clear, to society as a whole, that peasant-led agroecology is not only a promise but equally a necessity for today and for the future.

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (jandouwe.vanderploeg@wur.nl) is Adjunct Professor in the sociology of agriculture at the College of Humanities and Development Studies at China Agricultural University in Beijing.

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As a young African with a farming background, like many out there, I cannot underestimate the contributions of agroecology to the sustainability of our fragile ecosystems. It is undeniable that African land is being destroyed by short sighted industrial monocultures. And it’s evident that agroecology works to preserve the important resources and communities that are destroyed by industrial agriculture.

Agroecology is gaining interest amongst many small scale farmers in Africa and especially in Uganda where they still mostly control agriculture and food production. They are finding in agroecology elements of traditional African systems, reversing the trend towards monocropping and feeding themselves during lean seasons. Production does not encroach upon the health of their families, communities or natural resources. Unlike the ‘production gospel’ that only benefits seed monopolies and agrochemical dealers, agroecology does not promote profit at the expense of the environment or other people. It is unfortunate that some young producers are swept into believing the propaganda of quick returns from their farms. They turn a blind eye to healthy production techniques and ignore calls for sustainability.

I appeal to all fellow young African farmers, agronomists and food activists to resist the seed of greed sown by multinational profit oriented agro-input dealers that force us to believe that the excessive consumption, waste and extreme destruction of resources we have today is normal and fair. Agroecology offers different ways of farming and eating that safeguard our future and that of those who will come after us.

Edward Mukiibi (ediemukiibi@gmail.com) is the national coordinator of Slow Food in Uganda and the Vice President of Slow Food International.

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Dutch potato breeding model Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) is considered to be particularly relevant to smallholder agriculture in developing countries. PPB involves getting farmers to participate in order to overcome shortcomings in the formal plant breeding system. The potato breeding system in the Netherlands has a long standing tradition of farmer participation in breeding and is often referred to as ‘the hobby breeder model’. The Dutch potato PPB is unique because of private sector involvement and its situation in a modern Western context. Potato breeding in the Netherlands is rooted in decades of breeding by family farmers in their own fields. When public and private sector breeders became increasingly involved, farmer-breeders continued to contribute significantly to developing this potato breeding system, which supplies a large diversity of crop varieties that are grown in very diverse environmental conditions around the world and for different consumer markets.

Farmers’ knowledge and skills are particularly well expressed and vital in breeding in potato which is a very heterogeneous and vegetatively propagated crop. In the Netherlands a new PPB initiative called BioImpuls emerged in 2010, which engages organic potato farmers in a search to develop late blight-resistant varieties for the organic sector. This example supports the argument that farmers’ knowledge can substantially contribute to modern and diversified breeding. While Dutch potato breeding is a special case in various respects, this article indentifies several key attributes which could inform the design of successful PPB programmes in developing countries.

The collaborative potato breeding model in the Netherlands is set in the context of a highly productive agricultural sector. Potatoes are grown by 45% of the Dutch arable farmers and cover more than 150,000 ha of Dutch agricultural land. Forty-six percent of this land is used to grow ware potatoes, 28% starch potatoes and 26% seed potatoes. With an average yield of 46.7 t/ha, Dutch potato yields are among the highest in the world. Approximately 70% of Dutch seed potato production is exported to be grown in diverse environmental conditions around the world and for different consumer markets.

Farmer participation in Dutch potato breeding

The effectiveness of farmer participation in the Dutch potato breeding model in the Netherlands is well illustrated by the share of farmer selected varieties grown there. In 2009, 409 potato varieties were planted for seed potato production. Of these 409 varieties, 293 (almost 75%) have been bred in the Netherlands. Half of those Dutch varieties have been selected by farmer breeders, covering 44% of the total area planted with seed potatoes (Fig. 1). Based on diverse sources of expert information we estimate that 82 farmer-breeders have contributed to this development. Many of the farmer bred varieties have become top varieties. One example is the Spunta variety, which was released in 1967 and still occupies the largest seed acreage (12%). A more recent example of a successful farmer bred variety is Sylvana, which was released on the market in 2008 and is rapidly gaining market share.

Mutual dependency and benefit

The partnership between the commercial breeding programmes and the farmer-breeders was and still is one of mutual dependency and benefit. For the breeding companies the experienced and eager eye of the farmer-breeders is irreplaceable. Their level of expert knowledge is evidenced by the number of varieties registered in the name of farmer-breeders.

Thus, the work of the farmer-breeders provides breeding companies with a high quality and diverse selection capacity at a relatively low cost that involves minimal investment in labour and land (as the farmers work on a no-product/no-pay basis).

Through farmers’ participation, the company breeders can handle many more crossings and seedlings without having to evaluate all of the seedlings themselves. This is particularly relevant for potato breeding, which is largely a matter of numbers because of the high level of genetic heterozygosity and the many varied agronomic and quality traits that potatoes can be selected for.

At the same time, most farmer-breeders do not want to get into the more complicated crossing activities and need the company-breeders for access to improved germplasms with novel characteristics and resistances. The introgression of resistance genes from wild species takes 15–20 years of extensive (back) crossing and selection, which can only be conducted by large commercial companies or by publicly funded breeding research programmes. To an extent, even the independent farmer-breeders depend on larger breeding programmes. The few independent farmer-breeders who still make their own crosses use existing commercial varieties as parental material and source of new genes.

Legal space for farmerbreeders

The use of existing commercial varieties as parental material by those Dutch potato farmer-breeders who make crosses themselves is allowed under the breeder’s exemption in the Breeders’ Rights Act (this exemption is now under pressure from the proposed TTIP free trade agreement between the EU and the US), which states that breeders cannot market protected varieties from other companies but are free to use each other’s varieties for commercial breeding purposes. The Dutch companybreeders and these independent farmer-breeders often know each other from events organised by the companies and the potato breeding associations, and usually describe their relationships as friendly and collegial. Company-breeders even share materials from their programme with some of these independent farmer-breeders. The reasoning is that regardless of whatever success an independent farmer-breeder may have, they will be lagging several years behind the breeders’ efforts anyway. This exchange of breeding materials shows how rivalry and collegiality go hand-in-hand in the Dutch potato breeding sector.

The financial/legal model

Initially, the farmer-breeders received public incentive payments, premiums and awards for successful breeding results. These later developed into royalty payments which are now linked to plant breeders’ rights. The financial arrangements between the associated farmer-breeders and breeding/trading companies is currently organised on a ‘no product/no pay’ basis. A farmer-breeder who receives seedlings from one of the companies usually signs a contract defining the sharing of ownership, the benefits, and the costs of registration if they select a variety that will eventually be registered and marketed. Depending on the way responsibilities are shared, the varieties are registered for breeders’ rights in the name of the farmer-breeder and/or the company responsible for trading and maintenance. The sharing of royalties for a marketed variety varies accordingly. Independent farmer-breeders tend to seek a private arrangement for the clone they offer with one of the trading companies. Since their role in the development of the variety is usually larger or even independent of a commercial breeding programme, their share of the royalties can be considerably more than 50%. They can also opt to be the sole owner and license a trading company to propagate and commercialise their variety.

Current developments

Three factors have contributed to the success of this unique collaboration model: the specific historical context of the Dutch agricultural sector in which public institutional support to private sector breeding stimulated the development of collaborative relationships, a high level of farmer-breeder expertise, and potatoes being a genetically diverse and usually vegetatively propagated crop.

The importance of the potato crop for national food security and export earnings stimulated the potato sector to join forces with Dutch research and government institutions. Different forms of collaboration go back to the early 20th century, but the establishment of the Commission to support breeding and Research of new Potato varieties (COA) in 1938 was a landmark event.

The COA played an important role in coordinating and supporting developing potato breeding systems in the Netherlands, trying to engage more farmer-breeders in potato selection work through extensive and free distribution of seeds, seedlings and clonal material, the provision of technical assistance, and incentive and premium payments.

Over the past decades, there has been a decrease in the number of farmer-breeders as the population ages. However, a renewed urgency to overcome the threat of potato late blight has recently swung the pendulum, triggering new and younger farmers, as well as companies, to become engaged in seed potato selection. This urgency was especially felt by Dutch organic farmers after the dramatic potato late blight incident in 2007. Between 2000 and 2007, 20% of the country’s organic potato growers stopped producing potatoes because there were no late blight resistant cultivars and no alternative fungicides for late blight are permitted in the Netherlands. Availability of disease free varieties became a key issue.

The future: spearheading development of new varieties

Even if the organic sector may have been previously considered too small to justify the development of specific varieties, the sector has taken the initiative to establish a Dutch PPB model through the publicprivate funded project BioImpuls. In this long term programme, six commercial companies, two public research institutes and an increasing number of organic farmer-breeders are collaborating to improve the access and availability of organic potatoes and potato seeds. The purpose of BioImpuls is twofold. First is to develop genitors with new late blight resistance genes from wild relatives, and the second is to support a larger number of organic farmer-breeders in joining the selection programme through offering training courses in selecting potato late blight resistant varieties which have attractive market characteristics such as satisfactory production, good taste, good skin and tuber shape.

Conny Almekinders (Conny.Almekinders@wur.nl) is a researcher at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation department of Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Loes Mertens (loeskemertens@hotmail.com) is an organic plant breeder at Sementes Vivas, Portugal
Jan van Loon (janannyvanloon@hetnet.nl) is a Dutch independent breeder
Edith Lammerts van Bueren (e.lammerts@louisbolk.nl) is senior researcher at Louis Bolk Institute, the Netherlands

This article is based on Almekinders, C.J.M., L. Mertens, J. P. van Loon and E. T. Lammerts van Bueren (2014). Potato breeding in the Netherlands: a successful participatory model with collaboration between farmers and commercial breeders. Food security Volume 6 (4): 515-524. doi 10.1007/s12571-014-0369-x

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‘Amilcar’ is the name of a farmer and of a new variety of bean. The variety, which is praised for its excellent culinary properties, was identified by Amilcar’s wife at an early stage of a bean trial and then improved by Amilcar with the support of researchers. Using genetic marker technology, Zamorano breeders subsequently identified a line of the Amilcar variety that is resistant to bean golden yellow mosaic virus. Disease-resistant Amilcar seed has become a regional commercial success. For Amilcar the farmer, the bean variety is a source of personal pride because it is highly appreciated by his community.

Participatory Plant Breeding

The economic contraction in Honduras during the 1980s led to a decline in agricultural research and the disappearance of agricultural extension from public sector services. This left the private and not-for-profit sectors to deliver fee-based extension services. These were inaccessible to most family farmers cultivating the steep, marginal hillsides of north-central Honduras. It is these farmers who are most vulnerable to climate change-related food insecurity. Honduran hillside farmers have selected their own seed for countless generations without knowledge of more formalised breeding methods. Farmers select for steady yields, but these also tend to be low. In 1993, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture began to train local teams of farmers in research skills in ‘Local Agricultural Research Committees’ known as CIALs for their Spanish acronym (Comités de Investigación Agricola Local). Shortly afterwards, two local NGOs, the Foundation for Participatory Research with Honduran Farmers (FIPAH) and the Program for Rural Reconstruction (PRR), started to support this initiative through their own programming. In 2000, in collaboration with the Pan-American Agricultural School (Zamorano), scientists at Zamorano and NGO agronomists began to specifically focus the CIAL research on participatory plant breeding. Since then, this research initiative has snowballed into a farmer NGO-scientist synergy that has both made a place for itself in the regional seed market and become indispensable to the country’s research network.

Innovative processes emerge

It is the synergy between farmers, NGOs, and scientists that provides added value to the breeding process

The CIAL research process begins with a participatory diagnosis and ranking of local agricultural problems, which CIAL members decide to address. Experiments take the form of controlled trials in which farmers compare different varieties on their farms. In participatory plant breeding, farmers collaborate with scientists at Zamorano, who may either cross a popular local bean variety with an improved one at farmers’ request, or scientists provide farmers with advanced lines of unreleased materials to choose from. CIAL members, trained in participatory research by NGOs, have learned formal selection techniques allowing them to conduct successive selections on their farms. In order to ensure adaptation to local conditions, new varieties are screened first on a very small scale before selected varieties are tested on a larger scale and finally, successful varieties are propagated. To date, the partnership between Zamorano, NGOs, and CIALs has led to the development of 23 new bean varieties.

Institutionalised co-creation

Often, the participatory plant breeding process shows differences in the criteria used by farmers compared to those typically chosen by the scientific community. For farmers, taste and early maturation play an important role in the selection, whereas breeders generally seek to improve disease resistance, yield, and architecture. By engaging in joint research, farmers and scientists have succeeded in developing varieties that are more adapted to farmers’ needs and conditions, increasing the adoption rate of new beans and reducing the time between research and dissemination of materials.

Research support must be sustained over the long term in order to allow for trusting partnerships to evolve between the different players

This experience has shown that when farmers are put into the driver’s seat and provided with the tools to conduct formal research, they successfully develop the varieties that most suit their needs. This is evidenced, for example, by the selection of drought-tolerant and shorter maturation varieties that do well in poor hillside soils and help farmers ‘to escape the drought’. Additionally, those participating in the program use agroecological management approaches, including making and integrating natural fertilisers and pesticides, as well as introducing greater crop diversity into their fields. As a result, they have managed to substantially reduce ‘los junios’, the hungry period. The CIALs benefit from the strong local demand for varieties generated through participatory plant breeding by the region’s farmers, creating an economic incentive for participatory plant breeding research. Individual actions that lead to innovation, such as the selection of locally suitable varieties, are also motivated by collective values that come from being part of a CIAL and the prestige gained from sharing new varieties with family and friends.

Lessons learned

Typically, agricultural research has characterised farmers as passive recipients of aid rather than mainstays of their own research agendas. Conventional plant breeding is usually supply-driven: new varieties are released without knowing whether or not farmers like them. This mindset not only devalues local knowledge, but also increases existing differences in power relations between farmers and researchers. Participatory plant breeding on the other hand, is demand-driven. In Honduras, giving skilled farmer researchers an important role has not only benefited the formal scientific sector, but has also achieved a fundamental shift away from the top-down model of conventional breeding of the past.

As the Honduran experience shows, participatory plant breeding is not simply adaptive research where farmers fiddle with breeders’ materials. In this context, it is the synergy between farmers, NGOs, and scientists that provides added value to the breeding process. The experience described here underlines the potential of farmer-centred approaches to support climate change adaptation and mitigation. The diversity of varieties created through participatory plant breeding puts them at the cutting edge of climate change adaptation. It also shows us that research support must be sustained over the long-term in order to allow for trusting partnerships to evolve between the different players. Moreover, to incentivise farmers’ long-term engagement in participatory plant breeding research, seed regulatory systems must allow for the development of small seed enterprise.

Sally Humphries, Juan Carlos Rosas and Marvin Gomez

Sally Humphries (shumphri@uoguelph.ca) is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph, Canada.
Juan Carlos Rosas (jcrosas@zamorano.edu) is Professor of Genetics and Plant Breeding at the Escuela Agricola Panamericana, Zamorano, Honduras.
Marvin Gomez (marvincernapm@yahoo.es) is an agronomist with the Foundation for Participatory Research with Honduran Farmers (FIPAH). He is USC Canada’s project head in Central America.

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The central coast of California, with its Mediterranean climate, is an important strawberry growing region. Strawberry production here, as in many other locales, is highly dependent on expensive, energy-intensive, and environmentally harmful off-farm inputs. The current system of industrial, conventional strawberry production in California can be traced back to the early 1960s. Before that time, growers treated strawberries as a perennial crop, rotating each field out of strawberries for several years. However, when the soil fumigant methyl bromide (MeBr) was introduced in the 1960s, growers started to manage strawberries as an annual crop, planted year after year and fumigated with this pesticide on the same piece of land. In the early 1980s, as interest in organic food became a potential market force in agriculture and issues of pesticide safety and environmental quality came to the fore, farmers began to respond. For 30 years, the University of California, Santa Cruz has been working with farmers to study this process.

In this context, a particularly fruitful partnership emerged between the two of us: an academic (Steve Gliessman) and a strawberry farmer (Jim Cochran). It was serendipitous that Jim’s first plantings at Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California were just over the fence dividing his field from the home Steve was living in at the time. Over that fence our talk about the transition to organic strawberry production led to the first side-by-side comparative trial. At Jim’s farm, our thinking and our practices evolved, using his land, varieties and practices, his workers, and many of his resources.

This article tells the story of our journey of co-creation. From this collaboration, grounded theory about levels in the transition process to sustainability emerged as our thinking evolved. We believe these levels provide useful insight into how to scale out or scale up the agroecological transition process, as well as insight into the changing role of science (see table).

Level 1: Input reduction

Even before our partnership began, extensive research was carried out to discover more effective ways of controlling pests and diseases so that industrial inputs could be reduced and their environmental impacts lessened.

Level 2: Input substitution

During the first few years of our farmer-researcher partnership, which began in 1986, we worked together in a comparative trial of strawberries going through the 3-year conversion process required for organic certification. Jim was growing strawberries using conventional inputs and management side by side with strawberries grown under organic management. In the organic plots, each conventional input or practice was substituted with an organic equivalent. For example, rather than control the two-spotted spider mite with a miticide, beneficial predator mites (Phytoseiulis persimilis) were released into the organic plots and this was monitored. By the end of the third year, ideal rates and release amounts for the predator—now the norm for the industry—had been worked out.

However, the agroecosystem was still basically a monoculture of strawberries, and problems with disease increased. The big question was whether the strawberry production system could be strengthened through diversification.

Co-creation from the perspective of farmer Jim Cochran

“As a farmer, I will notice something in my fields and ask Steve about it. Many years ago I took over a ranch and it was half planted in artichokes and half planted in Brussels sprouts. I plowed the field, grew a cover crop and planted strawberries in the whole field. I noticed that the strawberry plants in the Brussels sprout half were doing much better than the plants in the artichoke half. I remembered having read something about crop rotations, so I asked Steve. People had stopped crop rotation more than 50 years ago when they began to apply chemicals, so it was sort of lost knowledge. Steve set up trials on my land and started looking at that particular crop rotation. He eventually found evidence that it was effective and that it wouldn’t be necessary to use chemicals anymore. This is the ideal way for a collaboration to work.

One of the larger goals of our collaboration which I definitely supported, was to change the farming system. At that time there was no information available. If I went to the farm advisor asking about particular crop rotations, he was no help. He would say: “Jim you are crazy, the solution to that is to fumigate and it works like a charm”. When I told him I don’t want to do it that way he would say “well then, I am sorry, I can’t offer you that much”. So 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.”

Level 3: Redesign

It was at this point in the early 1990s that a whole-system approach began to come into play. Based on the concept that ecosystem stability comes about through the dynamic interaction of all the components of the system, we jointly conceived of ways to design resistance to the problems created by the monoculture system. Jim realised he needed to partially return to the traditional practice of crop rotations that had been used before the appearance of MeBr. Based on Steve’s earlier alleopathy research, we redesigned the system with diversity and complexity that would help make the rotations more effective, and in some cases, shorter.

We designed the crop rotations using crops in the mustard family in the rotations and as cover crops, so that their toxic natural products could be produced on the farm. It took more research to choose the right species and show the best impacts, and understand the ecology of interactions.

Rather than rely on externally sourced biopesticides, we incorporated natural control agents, keeping them present and active on a continuous basis. Perhaps the most novel redesign idea was the introduction of rows of alfalfa into the strawberry fields as trap crops for the western tarnished plant bug (Lygus hesperus). Some of these changes came from agroecological research, and others were based on ‘re-learning’ some of the practices used for strawberry production before the 1960s.

Level 4: Alternative food networks

Consumers have been a very important force in the transition towards sustainability. Jim began to sell organic strawberries at Farmers’ Markets, where he could sell directly to consumers and capture a larger percentage of the sales price. Later he added to this other approaches that were even more direct, such as on-farm strawberry picking and a farm stand that includes the sale of processed products such as pies and jams. Later, students at the UC Santa Cruz convinced the campus dining service managers to integrate local, organic, and fair-trade items—including Jim’s organic strawberries—into the meal service.

Level 5: Rebuilding the food system

The knowledge partnership has brought about immense changes. However, several sustainability challenges are connected with this dramatic growth in strawberry production that can only be dealt with at the next level. For example, soil erosion and nutrient leaching have been observed in organic strawberries planted over a large area. Groundwater depletion and salt water intrusion into aquifers in strawberry growing regions is occurring. What might be called ‘level-5 thinking’ should include consideration of such issues, as part of a concern for the health of the entire system. And this must include more complex social issues such as labour and food justice. As early as in 1998, Jim has integrated social justice into his farming practices through a contract with the United Farm Workers (www.ufw.org), and 15 years later he also received AJP certification (www.agriculturaljusticeproject.org). Continuously linking research, practice and social change The results of our partnership extended far beyond Jim’s farm. In the early days of our collaboration, we held farmer field days to showcase both our research findings and the farming practices. Jim’s success became an incentive for other local growers to begin transitioning their farms, especially using substitution in order to gain organic certification. Over the years, our research results were published, we have participated in a variety of workshops, conferences, and short courses on organic strawberry production, and we used the farm as a place to continuously link research and practice.

In the two central coast counties of the US, where so many strawberries are grown, there were a total of 35,630 organic-certified acres in 2012, more than seven times the organic acreage recorded in 1997. The total farm gate revenue from organic farming in these counties was $247.7 million in 2012, representing a dramatic increase of more than 2000 % from 1997. A parallel increase in organic strawberry production occurred over this same time period.

When Jim first decided to transition to organic farming, everyone told him that it was not possible to successfully grow commercial organic strawberries.

And when we joined forces in 1986, we were considered to be too radical in our thinking if not actually crazy. But in fact, one of the most valuable parts of the collaboration has been having a friend with the same line of thinking. It really was a two way co-creation, with research results being presented to Jim, discussions back and forth about possible changes in the farming practices and systems, bringing in research ideas from other projects, sharing them and coming up with possible ways to put them to work on the farm, etc. We helped to keep each other going over 30 years of challenges. Through our partnership, we both evolved in our understanding and reasoning behind change processes toward sustainability.

Building this relationship took time, trust, flexibility, and a willingness to share knowledge, values, and belief systems. Such a participatory and action-oriented relationship is an essential component of the way agroecology must operate in order to promote either the scaling out to other farmers, or scaling up in the food system to promote real change. We have had to constantly be on the look out for co-option and concentration, by the large-scale vertically integrated and market oriented strawberry industry, or conventional agricultural research universities.

We have had many conversations over the years about how we have done agroecology together. We both are committed to maintaining and nurturing our strong belief in the need for whole food system change. We have learned together that agroecology is not just an academic activity. It is the broad integration of research, farming practice, and social change actions. Without all three, it is not really agroecology.

Steve Gliessman (gliess@ucsc.edu) was the founding director of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Agroecology Program, one of the first formal agroecology programs in the world. He was the Alfred and Ruth Heller Professor of Agroecology in the Department of Environmental Studies at UCSC until his retirement in 2012.

Jim Cochran (jimcochran50@hotmail.com) is the owner of Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California, and the first commercial organic strawberry farmer in California.

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Dialogue amongst the different members of The Food Sovereignty Alliance, India resulted in co-creating knowledge, strategies and actions to strengthen our food sovereignty and cope with climate change. The Food Sovereignty Alliance, India works to reclaim and democratise local community control over food and agriculture systems . Members of our alliance include organised groups of Dalit people, Adivasis, small and marginal farmers, pastoralists, and co-producers. The co-producers are a political constituency of the alliance, who may not be directly engaged with food production themselves, but work in solidarity with the Alliance. Co-creating knowledge is a key element in our movement through which innovative and creative solutions emerge. I share one such example through this article in which, through co-creation of knowledge, we developed our own way of assessing the impacts of climate change and strengthening our coping strategies in our villages.

Rejecting top-down solutions

The establishment of REDD/ REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation programme), in 2010, as a key strategy to combat climate change, has been applauded by world leaders. In practice, REDD entails sinking carbon in standing stocks of trees, and raising new plantations, often on indigenous territories. From previous such models of carbon trade that had been tested in their territories, indigenous peoples were aware of how such policies and programs alienated Adivasis from their territories and forests. They had been forced to relinquish customary practices and forest governance, undermining indigenous resilience and climate coping strategies and threatening local food sovereignty.

An indigenous alternative

In 2010, Adivasi Aikya Vedika, a member of the Food Sovereignty Alliance, was invited by the Indigenous Peoples Biocultural Climate Change Assessment (IPCCA), to join a global initiative of indigenous peoples to assess climate change impacts and also to develop indigenous peoples’ response strategies to extreme climatic events drawing from their knowledge, experience, wisdom and worldviews. The Adivasi community became deeply involved in identifying a framework of enquiry to facilitate local assessments of climatic impacts and response strategies. Intense dialogue amongst the different Adivasi communities and co-producers resulted in the idea of reconnecting with the indigenous rhythm of life or ‘life cycle’. This life cycle is a representation of how the community members live their lives, based on the Adivasi worldview. It describes their relationship to their territories, seasons, food, forests, and the cultural cycles of life, in time and space.

In the course of one of the dialogues, at a meeting of Adivasi elders and youth, different groups were busy drawing their communities’ life cycles on paper and we realised that this life cycle was in fact a lived, dynamic, indigenous epistemology that could be used by communities to assess and record the impacts of climate change in their indigenous territories and on their lives. There was tremendous excitement. Young people from the community took the lead in creating a collective vision of their communities’ cycle of life. They began working with both male and female elders of the community recording their narratives and memories in spoken word, art, poetry, stories or songs. They translated all of this onto paper and on their walls. There was unanimous consensus of a circular representation of the life cycle.

In the case of some of the indigenous communities there existed another layer of information of ‘how it was 70-80 years ago’, which came from existing literature. For instance, books about Gonds the Chenchus and the Konda Reddis, include intricate descriptions of people’s lives, centred around their relationship to their territories and seasonal cycles. This was used by the community as additional information about climatic events on the life cycle.

The life cycle in action

After illustrating the cycle as ‘we know it is’, according to the communities’ experience, the young folks of the community began to use the life cycle to assess in real time, the trends each year. This was done by recording what was happening in the present and comparing it with established life cycles. They compared the flowering and fruiting of trees, the appearance or not of birds and insects, the onset or delay of weather patterns, and sowing and harvesting cycles. They also used the life cycle to identify forces that threaten or strengthen indigenous resilience. Most significantly what emerged was that villages with strong functioning village councils were far more resilient than villages with poorly functioning village councils. For instance, village councils which had rejected plantations showed higher diversity of food crops and thus resilience to climatic changes, than villages where individual families were persuaded to replace food crops with plantations on their lands.

They used the life cycle to identify forces that threaten or strengthen indigenous resilience

The life cycles illustrate the resilience of communities in the face of climatic variability. For instance, in 2012, the Savara community of Bondiguda village recorded how in the month of Lologain (approximately, the month of May), the usual season to sow diverse food crops, rains were scarce (see Savara Adivasi Life cycle illustration above). Around the same time, the community recorded how the forest department tried to convince, and in many instances force, the community to raise tree plantations on their food crop lands, saying this would bring both money and rains. The constant refrain of the forest department is that growing trees will bring more rain. Discussions in the village revealed that despite the scarce rains and the pressures of the forest department, the village residents preferred not to establish tree plantations on agricultural land and instead continued to grow food. This continued planting ensured that there was food for the year, and seeds for the future. In this case, the life cycle exercise also made visible communities’ commitment to autonomous food production despite external pressures to use the land for other purposes.

The life cycle approach not only continues to be used by the Adivasi communities to develop the idea, but it has also been adopted in other territories. It has proven to be an extremely effective approach for a number of reasons. It readily captured impacts of climate change, but this was just the first step of the process. The life cycles have been a critical tool for communities to discuss their own lives and situations. They have been a means for the communities to understand their own resilience and to share their innovative adaptation strategies with each other.

The life cycle exercise also made visible communities’ commitment to autonomous food production despite external pressures to use the land for other purposes

They help communities to actively assert their knowledge and strategies in the wake of climate change, offering concrete proposals that build indigenous resilience as well as mitigate the effects of climate change. In other instances it also stimulated intense discussions on steps to be taken by the community to halt and prevent the entry of mining, dam and plantation projects.

Road ahead

A major challenge continues to be state and global policies that refuse to recognise these indigenous approaches and epistemologies as valid. States are still determined to push false carbon trade arrangements, such as REDD/REDD+ as the solution to climate change, despite evidence of another way forward based on Adivasi peoples worldviews and life practice. However, through the life cycles, communities are increasingly able to confidentally reject the government’s climate change proposals.

Dr Sagari R Ramdas

Dr Sagari R Ramdas (sagari.ramdas@gmail.com) is a veterinary scientist, a member of the Food Sovereignty Alliance, India, and is learning to be a farmer.

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