Two legends of agricultural transformation

Land sparing is a seductive story.

Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky land sharing business. Everybody wins.

A new paper in Agriculture and Human Value calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.

But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it can occasionally shrink to something much tidier: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.

Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit it on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.

Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge and household objectives all shape what farmers can do, and are willing to do. Change one part of the system and you can change the economics of the rest.

So why do we keep reaching for legends?

Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.