high-modernist-agriculture

The chapter critiques state-driven high-modernist agriculture for its radical simplification of complex natural and social agricultural systems, which fails to accommodate local environmental and social variability, especially in the Third World. It contrasts traditional agricultural practices that fostered genetic diversity through landraces, providing resilience and adaptability, with twentieth-century industrial agriculture characterized by mechanization, monocropping, and genetic uniformity. This industrial model leads to increased vulnerability to crop epidemics, necessitating heavy pesticide use and paradoxically relying on informal genetic diversity despite its emphasis on standardization.

The chapter critiques the hegemonic high-modernist agricultural model that prioritized large-scale mechanization and monocropping, highlighting its failures due to abstraction and disregard for local contexts. It contrasts this with indigenous polyculture practices, particularly in tropical regions like West Africa and Guatemala, which embody sophisticated ecological knowledge, sustainability, and social embeddedness. The chapter emphasizes the ecological and social benefits of polyculture, its resilience, and the colonial and modernist dismissal of these systems based on superficial visual assessments rather than empirical understanding.

The chapter critiques the imposition of high-modernist scientific agriculture and state simplifications on complex, adaptive local farming practices, emphasizing the failure of uniform genotypic models to accommodate ecological and social diversity. It highlights the indispensable role of practical knowledge (mētis) developed through experience and local experimentation, arguing that formal scientific approaches and state schemes often dismiss and undermine this knowledge, leading to social and ecological failures. The chapter underscores the political struggle between centralized scientific knowledge and the adaptive, craft-based skills of farmers, advocating for the integration and respect of indigenous and experiential knowledge in agricultural science and planning.