I don’t know how I missed this! I’ve skimmed but think I will read it tomorrow morning – with coffee!

Congratulations on the kudos from your prof. First impression – is great!

Take care,
Liz

The most detailed comment was about farmers’ resistance to change. In the paper I said “Part of the resistance is financial, because some changes require the purchase of new equipment”. The comment added that farmers may have already purchased costly equipment so they might be reluctant to change to a system that requires less equipment. It’s an interesting point when considering farmer likelihood to accept a less tech-centric approach.

pdiff, thanks for your comments.

The definition of sustainable is pretty hard to pin down, but I do like Gordon Conway’s definition: “Sustainability is the intersection of high resilience, stability, productivity, and equity.” I decided not to tackle the definition in this paper

Interdisciplinarity, according to the things we read in my sus ag class, means that you mix humanities and science – so really almost no one is interdisciplinary by this standard. Many departments do have interdisciplinarity to some degree, such as soil scientists working with agronomists, etc.

I totally agree that reductionism and capitalism go hand in hand. I often find that people’s complaints against so-called conventional ag are really complaints about capitalism.

Some other thoughts:

Anastasia said:

Reductionism in agriculture does not require interdisciplinary work except at the most shallow level. It is typical for conventional agricultural research to focus on a narrow subject area within one discipline. Phelan (2009, p. 4) states that reductionism in agriculture “is reflected in the structure of agricultural colleges of U.S. and European universities, which are almost universally divided into disciplines, if not departments, of soil science, agronomy, horticulture, weed science, entomology, and plant pathology.”

I’d have to disagree here. It may have been typical when Leopold was writing in 1949, but it is definitely not now. For most researchers, a narrow focus is simply not feasible given the reality of obtaining grant moneys. Large interdisciplinary studies are what commonly gets the funding in ag. Academic administrators also now push for this, as it makes them look good to be cooperating within and between institutions.

Phelan, as quoted, is evidently still living in that 1949 past. Colleges are broken up mainly for administrative and efficiency purposes. Would you, as a geneticist, want your research and program to be judged and managed by an ag economist? It just doesn’t make sense in many ways. And in my somewhat long experience in such colleges, I can’t think of any undergraduate or graduate programs that don’t have cross-discipline training. Does he really think that the pathologist can teach about a disease without delving into the life cycles and biology of alternative plant hosts or potential invertebrate vectors, for example? Courses in ecology and ecosystems are also now common in agricultural colleges.

Anastasia said:

Understanding the analytical frameworks of relativism and objectivism and holism and reductionism can help us to better communicate about sustainability.

This is perhaps true, but, IMO, not entirely accurate. The so called “conventional” agricultural system of the west may be based on simplistic interpretations of objectivism and reductionism, but that is not what drives it. For that, I would say you have to look to capitalism. The Monsantos of the world don’t focus on single parts such as a fertilizer or herbicide or seed because of a reductionist philosophy. They do so because those are things they can sell. If you came up with a way to sell the mythical “holistic” method in a nice neat package, they would jump on it and abandon the “reductionist” methods with looking back.

On the other side, such companies worry about and investigate the affects of those single input methods more than people realize. But they don’t do it because of any loyalty to the holistic ideal. They do it out of legal, regulatory, and liability concerns.

My point is that, while your framing may help in the discussion, the only real change will come from understanding and adapting to the underlying motivations of modern agriculture. It is not enough to simply identify conventional ag as reductionist. We must understand why it is so. That way we can either gear the holistic, “sustainable” approach toward the capitalistic system, or coerce that system using it’s motivations to better fit the sustainable approach.

Pdiff