Do You See What I See? Examining the Epistemic Barriers to Sustainable Agriculture*

Abstract

This paper examines the epistemic barriers to sustainable agriculture, which are those aspects of food production that are not readily revealed by direct perception: such as decreases in rates of soil and nutrient loss, increases in levels of beneficial soil micro‐organisms, and reductions in the amount of chemicals leaching into the water table. While many of sustainable agriculture's most touted benefits cannot easily or immediately be seen by producers, the opposite can be said of the benefits of conventional agriculture: from, for example, weed‐free rows and pest‐free fields to tall stalks, large yields, and commodity uniformity. Yet, while its benefits are readily apparent to many operators, the costs of conventional agricultural production often are not because conventional agriculture partly externalizes those costs to society at large. This paper investigates how the tension between the “visible” and the “nonvisible” plays out in the debate between sustainable and conventional agriculture. It concludes by suggesting potential solutions to overcoming these epistemic barriers, so as to make the epistemologically distant aspects of sustainable (namely, the benefits of) and conventional (namely, the costs of) agriculture more visible to all.

Concepts of Sustainability, Motivations for Pest Management Approaches, and Implications for Communicating Change

“…Economic factors influencing adoption may include economic lock-in (10), avoidance of risk (15,48), lack of efficacy to market demands (42), and more generally, a lack of fit to context (27,60). Other literature suggests that farmers' ideological motivations are the most important source of their decisions, with moderating effects imposed by economic and market-related factors, and social processes restricting or increasing information availability (1,7,8,10,12,14,22,29,37).…”

Performance versus Values in Sustainability Transformation of Food Systems

“…Many conflicts within organic agriculture, such as the questions of transport from areas with better production conditions versus zero-miles consumption, the use of irrigation versus preserving water resources, and leaching of nutrients versus animal welfare in outdoor pig production, can be seen as debates around which practices perform best within an instrumental rationale. Similarly, there are tensions between between production forms due to "epistemic barriers", the fact that not all aspects of sustainability are equally readily revealed [98]. However, there are also tensions reflecting more fundamental divergences between performance-based and values-based approaches.…”

What Food is to be Kept Safe and for Whom? Food-Safety Governance in an Unsafe Food System

“…This epistemic transformation is needed not least because the benefits of the global food system are visible on supermarket shelves and most of the health, social justice and ecological costs are usually invisible, unless, for example CSO organizations such as Fair Trade's networks campaign make them visible. Food-safety governance seems trapped by modernist traditions of trying to control nature, an approach which now create barriers to dealing with the new kinds of safety problems of late modernity [23,24,49,60,[84][85][86][87]. It will need to be reframed in the context of our profound interdependence with the natural world and the inescapable requirement of confronting social injustice [88].…”