Agriculture: villain or boon companion?

I’d just like to say I was sorry to see vera booted from the forums as I feel she has some important things to contribute (even if you have to get past an initial ‘spikiness’) and I was getting a lot out of this particular discussion which she prompted. I understand this isn’t the only place on the internet to host that discussion and respect the ‘my house, my rules’ approach taken here. I also agree that Peter’s summation, ‘It’s clear you’re not interested in engaging the community here, on our terms’ does seem fair, judging from vera’s posts so far. I don’t know… I guess I would request that she be allowed to continue posting to this topic if she apologises for the ‘close their eyes’ comment and agrees to reign in her ‘combative’ streak. I don’t know if I’m entitled to make that request or not, but there it is.

To me this feels like a very pertinent conversation to be having right now and excluding differing points of view seems to lead to an unnecessary handicap.

cheers,
Ian

It just occurred to me that I had been interpreting the term “immediate-return” one way, but that in other contexts I interpret it another, and just wondering how we’re using it here in this conversations. I realize it could both refer to the activities of foragers and hunters as immediately having returns, and could also be referring to people making the efforts to immediately transition to hunter-gatherer-gardener lifeways.

And yes, I’m also kind of bummed that vera isn’t in the conversation or the forum now, but I personally don’t have patience for people unwilling to engage in honest conversation. That sort of passive aggression, which I think Peter rightly identified, isn’t the kind of communication we should encourage and practice both here and in our emerging cultures.

Coincidentally, vera’s claim of Oceanic horticulturalists being non-egalitarian reminded me of something I just read and posted on my Facebook, about the Batek people in what is now Malaysia. Okay, they might not be what is classically called horticulturalists, but they’re the epitome of egalitarian, and seem to tend wild yams and similar tubers in abundance.

The Batek also consider it a “crime/offense” to insult others or even hurt their feelings in some way, and perceive it to do real harm. Just throwing that out there.

Dan, I was using “immediate return” in the first way you mention, a reference to a certain broad category of hunter-gatherer (such as, say, the !Kung or Hadza). I think that’s how others above were using it too. Could be wrong. ???

I was interested as well in some of the topics Vera was raising. Clearly she did get a little mad, and expressed it in her post. I can also imagine that it’s hard to always stick with the forum guidelines. (Ask a question, tell your story, interpret generously.) I wonder if everyone understands them the same way. Would it would help to add a couple of examples of wording that “tells your story” – or something of the sort?

Of course Vera did start the thread in the Humanure section, so hell, I don’t know. :-\

Well, having followed her blog for a while, I think throwing out those provocative lines is her way of attempting to ‘engage in honest conversation’. Admittedly it doesn’t always make for a totally pleasant discussion, but I’ve found it helps me to tighten up my own thinking in the long run. Maybe that’s just me though… I agree with the general point about the health and well-being of the group taking precedence over the needs of individuals – the tribe feeds everyone after all. As long as it doesn’t devolve to the point where none of the members get their needs met (as in the current culture), only keeping the thing going through endless self-sacrifice…

Also, I see how this gets into a Jensen-style discussion of defensive rights outweighing offensive rights: what if the ‘need’ of one person’s self-expression comes at the expense of another person’s feelings? Yesterday our local conservation volunteer group played host to a man with some v. irritating, borderline antisocial habits. Opinion varies on whether there’s something ‘wrong’ with him in a medical or psychological sense, but he talks incessantly over everyone, listens poorly, imposes the topics he wants to talk about on every conversation, fails to respond to sometimes quite obvious negative body language in his listeners, and only seems to shut up after you’ve ignored or not responded to him for about five minutes. My experimental approach of listening and attempting to engage with him on his terms only resulted in my ‘taking one for the team’ as others took the opportunity to escape, while he went further & ever-more intensely down the rabbit hole of his own preoccupations and I slowly lost the will to live. Eventually I gave up and followed the others’ example of shutting down until he got bored and found somebody else to talk to. Not a very satisfying outcome from an NVC perspective, but I at least realised that my self-preservation came first!

Anyway, I guess that’s for a different topic. I’ll stop twisting and turning (‘like a twisty turny thing’) now…

I

So… This was the last sort of contentious thread on this forum from a couple year back. I kind of want to continue the discussion here. I do find it fascinating, particularly in terms of how we define “Agriculture”. To me, it specifically relates to tilling of the soil. But maybe there is more than just that? I would particularly like it if Jason Godesky weighed in here.

How about swidden, aka slash and burn cultivation? Still a field (ager) of sorts, but there’s a rotation system in place to allow high forest to make a comeback. It doesn’t even have to be grains (see: manioc) and there’s plenty of ‘unofficial’ crops to make use of while the area goes through the various fallow stages back to the climax ecosystem. Funnily enough Vera recently sent me an in-depth piece about the Karen people - rice farmers in the Thai highlands which might be of interest:

http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~aslan/karen/karenpmp.htm

There’s some antagonism evident in their social rituals, many of which are about encouraging the rice plants and warding off incursions from wildlife or disease, but still they have strong animist perceptions and a great sensitivity to the ethics of their actions within the wider living community:

After the New Year is celebrated, the village chief begins to survey forest fallow for dry (upland) rice farming. All the villagers follow his lead and survey their new farm lands. There are many taboos regarding the choosing of forest fallow for cultivation. For example, people will not cultivate forest fallow that has caught fire, fallow that produces wild bananas, forest in mountain passes, forest in watershed areas (described as places where green frogs incubate their eggs, and so on). While surveying, fallow will not be chosen if the person hears deer barking, a "s'pgauz" bird singing, or sees a snake crossing the path. Moreover, in the night following the survey of the fallow, it is considered a sign of bad luck to dream about forest fire or the breaking of machetes that are used to cut down trees. In contrast, dreaming about elephants or about flooding is a good sign that means the surveyed fallow land should be cultivated. The Karen have many taboos regarding the selection of forest fallow for farming because they want to choose the best fallow, and also minimize impacts on the forest and the wild life.

It reminds me of Jason’s way of defining horticulture as a system that involves, at some point, moving away from the ‘ground zero’ of annual tillage and allowing succession to take place, even if this is limited or managed. Some kind of fallow, basically. The Karen make use of hundreds of plants and animals who move into their zones of cultivation, for food, medicine, building materials, clothing etc. As such, an appreciation of these other beings is built into their subsistence practice (and therefore into cultural practices and spiritual awareness). If they were to concentrate on rice full-time, all of that would go out the window and they would begin to view most wildlife with the extreme suspicion and hostility that’s so common among western farmers.

I think the crux of this whole conversation was in misinterpreting horticulture and agriculture (or redefining them).

To me, agriculture is a tool of horticulturalists, so in that was is “sustainable”, in that they don’t solely rely on it. To me, most of the cultures Vera mentions, and even the Karen appear to be horticulturalists. I may be mistaken but I really do think it’s important to make the distinctions. Perhaps its a particular kind of agriculture that is more unsustainable, like plowing fields instead of burning, etc?

I particularly enjoy their classifications of 4 styles, with the Karen using mostly “Short-cultivation, long fallow”.

Preparation of a dry rice field:
  • Branches of large trees are cut, the roots are not dug out
  • The soil is not ploughed
  • 28 rice species and 100 vegetable species are available for use
  • Usable wood is harvested for firewood

To me, that is more a horticultural practice of using agriculture, than full-blown agriculture like the Type 3 and Type 2. Very interesting classification system here! This is a great link.

It makes me wonder about population density and expansion. What happens when you can’t fallow fields anymore, but still need them to produce? Is this what created the need for the plow? To dig deeper for nutrients? Etc? Lots of great questions coming out of this.

Basically on topic, a factor I just read about in Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, is that our definition of the terms “sedentary” and “nomadic” are kind of warped. “Nomadic” hunter/gatherers tend to have seasonal rounds, while basically living in the same general area, essentially forever. “Sedentary” peoples, such as European agriculturalists tend to constantly be moving on/expanding, never really developing a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the creatures that make up the landbase they’re occupying.

Also, this has been touched on somewhat, but I’d like to emphasize that I don’t think that there is necessarily one factor that we can point to as crucial at all times and places. Ecosystems are much more complex than that. Agriculture is obviously a huge one, though it is greatly exacerbated by a perception of time as being linear. Hunting/gathering is obviously going to tend to encourage biodiversity, though 7 billion hunter/gatherers will decimate the ecosystem we have now, just in different ways than 7 billion agriculturalists do.

All good points Ben.

I particularly like the nomad/sedentism perspective. I’ve thought that about Nomads for a long time now, but the ever-moving “sedentary” agriculturalist bit is great.

Here is an interesting article I came across today on new information about the origins of agriculture. There are some of the terms defined in here slightly differently than I have seen in the past. It’s a dense article I’m wading through it now.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659964

Here is a link to the entire journal, which has many articles on the origin of agriculture and relate to this conversation.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658481

just reading Jason Godesky’s essay on definitions, and here’s a question.

So here we have a workable definition: agriculture is cultivation by means of catastrophe. Tillage emulates catastrophe, and the plow is a catastrophe-emulating machine. By contrast, horticulture is cultivation by means of succession. Fallowing allows succession to advance; the lack of tillage and the plow is merely the lack of artificially-induced catastrophe to set back succession.

how does this fit in with the fire used in a place like the pacific northwest’s oak/camas prairies? it seems to me like those habitats are ones dependent on the catastrophe of fire, and that without it they would be succeeded by the douglas fir/redcedar/etc. forests, which seems to fit with the definition of agriculture. but this seems funny to me since the outcome is a very diverse ecology with hundreds of different plants (and the more mobile creatures that live with them, as opposed to say, a corn field…

Yes, it felt strange to think of the Karen as horticulturalists, being predominantly rice farmers (for some reason I picture horticulturalists more as veg and root-crop growers) but they fit the definition… It didn’t occur to me that you could farm grains as part of a rotational system, rather than insisting on their continued cultivation on the same piece of land year after year. On the sustainability question, the main claim in the article related to soil erosion:

The results of research conducted by Chanpen Chutima Teewin of the impacts of the Karen people's rice cultivation method on soil surface showed that the rotational farming system of the Karen currently causes soil erosion below the accepted standard level (0.2 tonnes/rai/year). The study stated that the rice cultivation method of the Karen and Lua peoples uses the land in a manner which does not cause soil erosion, and that this was achieved by growing plants that do not disturb the soil, by digging holes to plant seeds, and by growing a variety of plants, such as fertilizing plants and ground-cover plants. This cultivation method is effective in lowering and preventing soil erosion in highland areas. Chanpen's study states that of ten areas studied, six areas had soil erosion that did not exceed the accepted standard, and four areas had very little soil erosion.

I suppose 0.2 tonnes/rai/year still represents some soil erosion, even at a small rate, but probably the other plant communities that come in during the fallow years build up the soil to compensate, so the overall effect might be to build topsoil rather than strip it away totally. Impressive for hill farming! By contrast the ‘type 4’ rice farming of ‘Long cultivation-very long fallow or abandonment’ seems to support clicketyclack’s point about sedentary vs. nomadic people:

With the exception of the fourth type, the practice of these farming models require the farmers to establish permanent settlements.

Makes sense really - if your food-growing system depletes the soil beyond repair you have to move on once it’s exhausted. Agriculturalists as the true nomads, who’d-a thought it!

Interesting question - fire is obviously also a source of ‘catastrophe’. The only major differences I can think of at the moment are that, unlike plough cultivation, fire doesn’t disturb the soil in the same way (perhaps the microbial/fungal life would survive a light burn? - I don’t know), and it doesn’t totally reset the ecological clock because the big trees are left (in the oak system at least).

Will check out that new ag stuff in a bit. Looks v. interesting at first glance!

cheers,
I

I think the main premise behind the terms agri and horti are what you are creating with the catastrophe. Horticulturalists use agricultural practices of catastrophe to start succession over, then work on every level of succession for their food production. Agriculturalists rely solely on the first level of succession (agri = field). The oak savannas of the NW were not fields, they were mixed woodlands. Also, as Ian said, fire has a different effect on the soil than tilling. Root digging sticks were used in camas prairies, but they don’t have the same scale as tillage.

Keep in mind that agriculture one of many tools of the horticulturalist. Once they only use that tool more than 50%-60% of the time, they become “agriculturalists.” At least, that is my understanding.

I would be curious to know what the Karen’s percentage is in terms of rice production. What else are they eating? Are they exporting rice as a cash crop to purchase other food or is it grown just for their communities?

Found this: http://www.hilltribe.org/karen/karen-vocation.php

Traditionally, most Karen work as farmers--a profession that allows them to be indepedent and free. Liviing in the mountains and forests, they plant according to the seasons and the soil conditions of the area. Traditionally, the food they produce has been for personal consumption, not for sale to others. This holds true for raising animals. Chickens, pigs, etc. would be consumed by the family raising them, or amongst friends and relatives in the village.
However:
The ancient profession of farming amongst the Karen has begun to change, keeping in step with major changes in technology and market forces. The Karen no longer farm simply for self-sufficiency, but have now become commercial farmers, attempting to produce as much as possible for shipment to the market. In order to accomplish this, they have had to start using greater and greater amounts of land and use modern technologies to replace more traditional ways. In the past, for example, water buffaloes were used to plow the fields. Now, modern gas-powered machines have replaced them. These changes have caused Karen farmers to begin competing both against the clock and against each other, each farmer trying to produce the greatest yield possible.
Though it sounds like they're talking about the lowland farmers here (apparently there are lots of Karen spread through Burma and Thailand - [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people]wiki[/url]), those who had already converted to flooding rice paddies and re-using the same piece of land. Other depressingly familiar changes include movement from gift economy to cash and wage labour and the embracing of tourism. But the previous article suggests it's more 'traditional' up in the hills. Or at least it was back in 2004... There was this ominous bit:
However, currently, the level of economic development is increasing in the communities, and the introduction into highland areas of many new plant species which require increasingly frequent use of the land, cause soil disruption, and require the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will result in more intense use of the land. The long-term, permanent use of the land, as opposed to the rotational cultivation system, will cause the death of the land and invasion by plant pests.
Culture erosion = soil erosion and vice versa. It's happening everywhere :( >:(

Another good quote I found as I’m writing the Tending the Wild article, that relates to this discussion:

“As many researchers have noted in recent years, past generations of scholars tended to equate cultivation with the familiar practices and geometric patterns that characterized European agriculture (Blaut 1993; Butzer 1990; Denevan 1992; Doolittle 1992). In turn, past scholars tended to dismiss many of the unfamiliar and seemingly chaotic anthropogenic plant communities encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas as “nonagricultural.” European cultivation was the measure by which all other practices were judged, and scholars commonly presumed that cultivation had emanated from within a small number of “civilized” societies. Increasingly, these notions have been discredited. Further, recent researchers have come to accept that foraging, hunting, low-intensity plant cultivation, and intensive agriculture are not mutually exclusive activities. Among peoples called hunter-gatherers, therefore, the emergence of plant cultivation did not always eclipse efficient and preexisting modes of subsistence; often, the development of cultivation merely augmented the outcomes of hunting and gathering, thereby contributing to the overall temporal stability and spatial concentraction of food resources. A growing body of archaeological evidence likewise confirms that, in many different times and in many different places, plant cultivation persisted alongside other subsistence strategies for millenia without demanding a transition to agriculture (despite an abundance of evolutionary models that have suggested the contrary). In many cases past and present, hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies and low-intensity plant cultivation can be “overlapping, interdependent, contemporaneous, coequal, and complemantary” (Sponsel 1989:45). Past attempts to categorize all the world’s peoples as “hunter-gatherers,” “pastoralists,” or “cultivators,” it seems, represent heuristic efforts of limited value that often conceal as much as they reveal.” - Nancy Turner & Douglas Deur, Keeping it Living

Print-ready PDF pamphlet of Peter’s Horticulture vs. Agriculture and Jason Godesky’s Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter: http://oplopanaxpublishing.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/horticulture-agriculture-permaculture/

I had never been understanding that distinction, talking of agriculture and that this was understood differently, for something that would not be really good as cultivation otherwise might be. So while earlier posts from me weren’t getting any response that wouldn’t have been merely because of religious differences, as I might have thought, but then over differences with my thoughts for the need for cultivating for food and basic necessities from plants that could be growing for that. I emphasize coming to what is most sustainable with speaking of its importance. Civilization cannot go on the way it is going, and the way civilization is, there won’t be enough change from it now. As many as possible should break from that for the most sustainability, the most certainty would be for all people to do so, though that is more than I believe can be hoped for. The only way there could be sustainability for the many people that should come to such change for that is with cultivating plants for those needs. This world will never support the many people that would depend on using animals for it, as they do with the industries, which are leading more than anything to the probable disasters that would come. All the people depending on hunting animals as they do depend on the industries for that will not be better, in the sense that it will still ruin environments. Nothing will sustain more people than with cultivation of plants for those needs. With enough growing dependence on animals can be completely diminished, and many people are showing it can be done. And I speak of a vision to promote that does not depend on technology for equipment for farming, and not with use of monocrops, but a very natural level of farming that is compatible with having all the natural environments. But it will mean great simplicity at even a primitive level, but in communities living this way, as people have lived for thousands of years, this will work well and people can be tighter as communities and happier that way even than people are with their entertainment in the world with modern culture.

I have spoken of this even through such medium with anarchists and what seem to be anarcho-primitivists, they don’t really get how I can say things as this, and also preppers or survivalists, they don’t get it either, but it seems to me some will get that there must be what is most sustainable even for the most people, not just thinking of surviving and having a way for that which can’t include many others, and so with it working just with many people doomed or dying off. I don’t know for sure if others can see it but I see that I can hope for what is better.

I no longer use WordPress as I did for blogging. I had a lot of difficulty with the device I use posting with that site. I still have communicated in much the same way through my own forum, with few others having joined.

http://positiveprimitivistradchristian.freeforums.org

Thanks to woozeltracker for letting me know this forum is on again! :slight_smile:
I reread my essay, still agree with it. I tried to wrestle with the terms ag and horti last year or so, not sure if it was any use. I am now assuming that ag=intensive cultivation (as in ratcheting, aka the growth economy) and horti= non-intensive cultivation (more like a steady-state economy, or one that fluctuates up and down dep. on feedback). I figure the damage to the land happens when people keep on intensifying despite the feedback from the land.

It seems to me this is an easy to understand way of putting it. This way, then, the Easter Islanders would be ag people because they kept on intensifying, even though they did not have fields, just gardens and chickens.

Thanks, Peter, for the links. Will check them out.