Listening for genetic erosion

I came across a study that uses a particularly clever form of longitudinal visual ethnography. Researchers returned, after about 15 years, to the same Australian livestock producers and the same locations that had been photographed in the original study. They recreated the photographs and used the old and new images as prompts for interviews, asking nine farmers to explain what had changed, what had stayed the same, and how they now understood the landscape.

But what particularly caught my attention was what they did with the interviews. They constructed “I-Poems”: by extracting a farmer’s first-person statements from the transcript (I see…”, “I remember…”, “I notice…”, “I feel…”) and arranging them as a poem, they could crystallize how the farmer’s own sense of self and relationship with the landscape had changed over time. It struck me as a remarkably simple but powerful way of turning a mass of interview transcripts into something that vividly captures how people actually experience change.

I wonder whether something similar could add a new dimension to monitoring crop diversity on-farm. There is plenty of work documenting what landraces farmers grow, of course, and much research has explored why some are retained, abandoned or acquired. But imagine revisiting the same farmers and communities every five or ten years, recording their crop diversity alongside interviews and then constructing I-Poems from their own words.

Rather than simply showing that a landrace has disappeared, the poems might reveal how its role and meaning have changed: “I used to grow it, but now…”, “My mother really loved it because…”, “Nobody asks me for it now…”, “I still hang on to a few seeds…”, “I don’t know who has the seed anymore…” Read alongside inventories and photographs from successive visits, these could provide a very different kind of longitudinal record, one that explores not just changes in the amount of crop diversity, but in how farmers value, remember, use and make decisions about it. It could help us understand genetic erosion as the social and cultural process it is.

This wouldn’t be entirely without precedent. In Nepal, the “Gramin Kabita Yatra”, or Rural Poetry Journey, brought poets into farming communities to learn about local landraces and turn farmers’ knowledge and appreciation of them into poems and songs. The difference is that the Nepali poems were primarily a means of communicating the value of crop diversity, whereas I-Poems like the ones in the Australian study could be used as an analytical tool: capturing farmers’ own words to reveal how their relationships with particular crops and varieties change over time, and indeed space. An interesting possibility would be to bring these two traditions together, and use poetry not just to celebrate crop diversity, but to listen for the social processes through which it is maintained, transformed and unfortunately sometimes lost.