Peer-reviewed academic publications are intended for specialist audiences in a variety of fields. Different journals represent different conversations where writers aim to contribute useful cases or arguments that add to the broader understanding of those disciplines. As an environmental anthropologist focusing on food and agriculture, my research appears in anthropology journals dedicated to social science (American Anthropologist, Economic Anthropology), interdisciplinary environmental journals (The Journal of Ethnobiology, Sustainability Science, The Journal of Political Ecology), and journals focusing on agrarian life (The Journal of Agrarian Change, The Journal of Peasant Studies).
While all such research should be free and available to the public, some of the articles linked below are blocked to the public by journal paywalls. In the scientific peer review system, neither authors nor reviewers are paid for their work in creating publications. For many journals, editors are also unpaid. As such, paywalls largely exist to transform the free exchange of ideas and data into scarce commodities held by publishing companies. This is an elitist commodification of knowledge.
Anyone wishing to read this research should email me directly or click the links at the end of the abstracts below to download PDFs of these papers.
Cultivating Knowledge shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, This book uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. This book shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture. Open access available here.
This book was an honorable mention for the 2021 Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association and shortlisted for the 2021 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize
Press: Phys.org, SeedToday, OffGuardian, Salon, Edge Effects, Sapiens, Scientific American
Flachs, Andrew, Ankita Raturi, Megan Low, Valerie Miller, Juliet Norton, Celeste Redmond, and Haley Thomas. 2024. “Digital tools for local farmers: Thinking with spreadsheets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12316.
With the emergence of social distancing, the shutdown of schools and restaurants, and increased anxieties about in-person farmers markets in early 2020, local farmers and food distributors quickly pivoted to digital tools to manage their farms and connect with buyers. In this paper, we explore the role of a seemingly simple digital tool in shaping alternative agrarian relations during the pandemic-induced local food boom: the spreadsheet. Through interviews with farmers and food distributors across urban, periurban, and rural landscapes in the United States (U.S.), we show how spreadsheets and other digital tools have helped farmers manage demand during the COVID-19 pandemic while also presupposing costs, benefits, and efficiencies for these alternative agricultural food spaces. Ultimately, many local farmers found themselves pursuing goals of simplicity, labor efficiency, and expansion-oriented growth as they made sense of their farm data. Reflecting on these values, and the spreadsheet data underlying them, became a point of tension for farmers who place a high importance on diversification, stability, and interpersonal interactions. By attending to how these data are tracked, we gain deeper insights into how farmers and other stakeholders think about agrarian futures: who does the work, what gets planted, who's buying, and who benefits. PDF available here.
Press: FocaalBlog
Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living. The discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create sociopolitical formations—from low-impact hunting–gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture, to colonial plantations and runaway settlements, to contemporary agribusiness and alternative biodynamic agriculture. In this special issue, we propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis to highlight the ways in which plants and people are co-produced. We explore entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant–human lifeworlds co-produce one another—from the processes of racialization in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant–human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant–human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds. PDF available here.
Five hundred years of desire for cotton has reshaped landscapes, built global economic commodity chains, and devalued human life in the name of producing cheap clothing. Since 2001, cotton monocultures in South India have also reorganized genetic codes, continuing centuries of work to maintain the socioecological possibility of extractive agricultural production. This paper combines ethnographic and ethnobiological research in Telangana, India, to center cotton's role in organizing socioecological life for an agrarian world including farmers, farmworkers, plants, soils, buyers, weeds, and animals. Mutually exclusive systems of genetically modified Bt and organic cotton production offer a range of possible organizations of labor, aspiration, reciprocity, and labor. While historically situated in plantation inequalities, cotton production can also make unexpected room for socioecological relationships outside extractive monoculture. PDF available here.
In this special issue, which interrogates sustainability in contemporary agri-food systems, we ask what benefits arise from an analysis of humans as full members of the web of life experiencing structural differences in precarity and responsibility for global ecological change. Many colonial-capitalist agricultures have proven to be disastrously unstable as a result of their intrinsic political and ecological violence: newly vulnerable wildfire landscapes from California to Australia stem not only from emissions-related global climate change but also from the genocide of Indigenous caretakers; agrarian crises in the United States, Brazil, and India stem not only from water extraction but land dispossession in the interest of monocrop expansion. As Black feminist and other scholars of the capitalist plantation have shown across centuries (Davis et al. 2019; Jegathesan 2021; Li and Semedi 2021; McKittrick 2013; Wolford 2021), these systems tried to replicate hierarchies of race, gender, and class in extractive farm fields through violence and surveillance. And yet, those scholars also describe how plantations failed to completely sever links of community and care. It is thus in repairing and reorienting to these connections that the Necrocene, the era of death and destruction, falters and a new era of living and caring offers solutions to a sustainable future (Blanco-Wells 2021). We call this new era the “Naíocene.” PDF available here.
Much sustainable development in agri-food systems is predicated upon increasing the production of agricultural commodities amid changing climates, political organization, and markets. While this growth in exports is critical for the expansion of alternative production supply chains like certified organic commodities markets, the long-term success of alternative agriculture development programs in helping farmers achieve a range of rural aspirations depends not on sociotechnical fixes for specific ecological problems, but on the creative and performative reorganizations of labor and value in farm spaces. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long term, provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of alternative agricultural development or persistent smallholder farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. This paper draws on research with organic cotton and coffee farmers in India, as well as a brief case study with small-scale heritage farmers in Bosnia, to argue that sustainability, broadly conceived, must account for factors beyond resource-efficiency or yields. Small-scale organic farming in India and household allotments in Bosnia will never outperform agri-food commodities producers with respect to profits, yields, or sustained growth. However, a degrowth perspective suggests that these are the wrong metrics for sustainability. Efforts that keep farmers in place and with local autonomy are best positioned to ensure that small-scale farmers can continue to manage agricultural landscapes over the long term. PDF available here.
Press: The Hans India
Adolescent substance use has long been a top public health priority. In Indiana, concerning recent trends show high rates of youth alcohol consumption coupled with increasing use of opioids, synthetic marijuana, and over-the-counter drugs. Based on research indicating that parent-based prevention efforts may be a particularly effective way to target adolescent substance use, and in a direct effort to address Indiana’s 2017 Strategic Plan to Address Substance Use, we conducted an applied research study targeting parents’ knowledge regarding adolescent substance use in Indiana. This community-based applied research study included: (i) a needs assessment of Indiana Extension Educators’ concerns regarding adolescent substance use, (ii) creation and dissemination of an evidence-informed parent education program on adolescent substance use in collaboration with Purdue Extension (a key community stakeholder), and (iii) qualitative focus group discussions at the end of each program that assessed the challenges families face regarding adolescent substance use, the types of information and resources they wish they had, and the usefulness of our program. The needs assessment revealed that Indiana communities would most benefit from education regarding ways to spot and monitor substance use in teens, and strategies to communicate with teens about substance use. Additionally, Extension Educators thought that existing resources to tackle substance use largely did not match the needs of Indiana communities. Qualitative analysis of the focus group discussions across 8 pilot programs revealed five important themes: (1) The need for current, evidence-informed information regarding adolescent substance use among parents and youth-involved professionals in Indiana, (2) Concern regarding Indiana adolescents’ ease of access to substances and lack of healthy recreational activities, (3) Communicating with teens about substance use is crucial but difficult to implement, (4) Indiana communities’ need to prioritize funding for evidence-informed prevention programming, and (5) The need for community-based parent and caregiver support groups. Overall, the program was well-received and participants indicated that there was a strong need for this programming in their communities, but suggested collaborating with schools or similar local community stakeholders to increase attendance. Findings from this pilot study can inform future community-based adolescent substance use prevention efforts state-wide. PDF available here.
Soils in urban settings are often degraded, which can prevent growers from optimizing the health and productivity of their crops. In this study, we investigated whether amending soil with a locally made leaf-mold compost could (a) improve soil chemical and biological properties, (b) increase survival of a microbial inoculant with plant growth promoting and disease suppressive capabilities, and (c) enhance the yield and quality of a tomato crop. Results were promising, with dramatically greater concentrations of active soil organic matter (SOM) and marketable fruit in plots receiving the amendment in both years of the study. Foliar disease severity was also lower in compost-amended plots in the second year of the trial. Inoculating tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) transplants with Trichoderma harzianumT-22 reduced deaths that are due to transplant stress in one of the cultivars evaluated, and the compost sup-ported greater populations of this microbe in soil demonstrating that it is possible toenhance the efficacy of beneficial microbial inoculants in field settings using targeted practices. These results indicate that urban farmers can improve the productivity of their farms by amending soils with leaf mold compost, which will help ensure the long-term sustainability of urban farming initiatives. However, all composts should be tested to ensure they do not contain toxic levels of heavy metals or pathogens, and farmers should avoid overapplication since this can reduce crop health and lead to environmental challenges. PDF available here.
Crisis provides opportunities for social and environmental reorganization. States claimed responsibility for much agrarian development during the first half of the 20th century through massive development projects in countries like India and the United States, but rural communities now encounter a plurality of legitimate responses to crisis. As Max Weber and his critics have shown, crises are opportunities for charismatic actors who may appear in the form of programs, tools, plants, and leaders – provided they assemble a passionate coalition of political supporters and offer a way to fulfill an aspiration derailed by the crisis. Plural models of alternative agrarian development reorganize political, social, and ecological relationships through commodities and didactic educational programs. In each case, charisma is tied to political relationships with potential for both collective action and violent Othering. Case studies from Indian agriculture at three scales show how such crises break from state and local programs, and how charismatic entities capitalize on that void to forge new alliances. PDF available here.
Genetic modification (GM) of crop plants is frequently described by its proponents as a continuation of the ancient process of domestication. While domestication, crop breeding, and GM all modify the genomes and phenotypes of plants, GM fundamentally differs from domestication in terms of the biological and sociopolitical processes by which change occurs, and the subsequent impacts on agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty. We review the history of domestication, crop breeding, and GM, and show that crop breeding and GM are continuous with each other in many important ways, but represent a momentous break from domestication because they move plant evolution off of farms and into centralized institutions. The social contexts in which these processes unfold dictate who holds rights to germplasm and agricultural knowledge, shape incentives to effect particular kinds of changes in our crops, and create or constrict biodiversity. Presenting GM as a continuation of domestication puts forward a false equivalency that fundamentally misrepresents how domestication, crop breeding, and GM occur. In doing so, this narrative diminishes public understanding of these important processes and obscures the effects of industrial agriculture on in situ biodiversity and the practice of farming. This misrepresentation is used in public-facing science communication by representatives of the biotechnology industry to silence meaningful debate on GM by convincing the public that it is the continuation of an age-old process that underlies all agricultural societies. PDF available here.
Press Coverage: The Counter, The Conversation
Flachs, Andrew. 2021. “The political ecology of genetically modified and organic cotton in India as agents of agrarian transformation.“ In The Political Ecology of Industrial Crops. Abubakari Ahmed and Alexandros Gasparatos, eds. Pp 153-172. New York: Routledge.
This chapter situates this friction as a historical process and uses a political ecology lens to outline how these solutions were adapted (or not) to local needs and logics in agriculture. The “Methodology” section outlines the analytical lens used in this chapter. The “Results and discussion” section begins with a historical analysis of agricultural change and development in the Indian cotton sector, and particularly how off - farm interests (including the state and private sector) have influenced farmer learning through seed technologies and how farmers have reworked these technologies to make them succeed in their own fields (see “Cotton in the colonial and postcolonial eras”). The sub- sections “Genetically modified cotton” through “Organic cotton” focus on GM and organic cotton agriculture as particular examples of solutions to agrarian distress through two ethnographic case studies in agricultural learning in Telangana (a state in South India). “Cooperative decision- making for agricultural stability” reflects on the possible role that cooperatives can play in addressing the underlying instabilities of contemporary Indian agriculture. Finally, “Genetically modified and organic cotton in India as agents of agrarian transformation” summarizes briefly how GM and organic cotton have become major agents of agrarian transformation in rural India. PDF available here.
Press Coverage: Environmental Health Sciences
The composition of the human microbiome varies considerably in diversity and density across communities as a function of the foods we eat and the places we live. While all foods contain microbes, humans directly shape this microbial ecology through fermentation. Fermented foods are produced from microbial reactions that depend on local environmental conditions, fermentation practices, and the manner in which foods are prepared and consumed. These interactions are of special interest to ethnobiologists because they link investigations of how people shape and know the world around them to local knowledge, food traditions, local flora, and microbial taxa. In this manuscript, we report on data collected at a fermentation revivalist workshop in Tennessee. To ask how fermentation traditions are learned and influence macro and micro ecologies, we conducted interviews with eleven people and participated in a four-day craft fermentation workshop. We also collected 46 fermented food products and 46 stool samples from workshop participants eating those fermented foods. We identified ten major themes comprised of 29 sub-themes drawn from 326 marked codes in the transcripts. In combination, this analysis allowed us to summarize key experiences with fermentation, particularly those related to a sense of authenticity, place, health, and the discovery of tactile work. From the 605 amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) shared between food and fecal samples, we identified 25 candidate ASVs that are suspected to have been transmitted from fermented food samples to the gut microbiomes of the workshop participants. Our results indicate that many of the foods prepared and consumed during the workshop were rich sources of probiotic microbes. By combining these qualitative social and quantitative microbiological data, we suggest that variation in culturally informed fermentation practices introduces variation in bacterial flora even among very similar foods, and that these food products can influence gut microbial ecology. PDF available here.
Press coverage: Foodie Pharmacology Podcast, The Conversation
Much agricultural production in the United States and Europe since the 1930s, and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since the 1970s, can be called “industrial” to describe how aspects of farm production resemble processes in industrial manufacturing. This shift in agricultural logic moved millions of people out of rural com-munities and into cities, increasing total agricultural production while creating new markets for agricultural technologies and consolidating agricultural work through vertically integrated agribusiness. Meanwhile, food insecurity and rural distress have remained stubbornly persistent. In this paper, I explore the disjuncture of increased production and increased precarity through the theoretical framework of political ecology. I present data from ethnographic fieldwork in on genetically modified (GM) cotton farms in India to argue that solutions to precarity in the contemporary globalized agricultural system will require political and social change, not merely the addition of new technologies and new choices. In fact, increases in new branded products may exacerbate underlying risk and insecurity for farmer producers. PDF available here.
Organic regulation makes products legible to consumers around the world, adding value to commodities and seeking to counter socioecological injustice through neoliberal logics of consumer choice and market diversification. Despite the regulatory and consumer need for universal signification, organic agriculture varies considerably between regional contexts and even within the same country. Within India, home to more organic producers than any other nation, certified organic cotton agriculture in Telangana and certified organic coffee production in Andhra Pradesh highlight how organic agriculture provides distinct, but parallel, ways for farmers and intermediaries to capture value in these supply chains. These questions are especially pressing in South India, which has struggled to spread the economic development of Hyderabad and coastal Andhra Pradesh to poorer rural areas plagued by suicide and agrarian distress. In this article, we explore how organic farmers and intermediaries in South India navigate the demands of foreign capital and governance while negotiating the benefits of global ethical supply chains alongside their own aspirations. PDF available here.
Press Coverage: Phys.org; The Long Room
In many epidemiologic models, a disease is assumed to spread along a contact network. We aim to infer this network, in addition to the epidemiologic model parameters, from the binary status of individuals observed throughout time. We perform an exact evaluation of the probability for each edge to be part of the network by using the matrix-tree theorem on the set of vertices made of the individual status at all times. This leads to a computational complexity of order {\mathcal {O}}(mn^2), where n is the number of individuals and m the length of the time series. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, and it is applied on data concerning seed choices by farmers in India and on data on a measles outbreak. PDF available here.
Fermentation preserves and transforms foods through autochthonous or introduced microorganisms. Fermentation is of special interest to ethnobiologists because it relies on place- and practice-based knowledge, local flora and microbial taxa, is sensitive to cultural and ecological conditions, and illuminates the interactions through which communities shape and are shaped by the world around them. In this short topical review, we discuss recent anthropological and ethnobiological research into fermentation, arguing that this topic deserves further attention during the current moment of microbial interest across social and natural sciences. We present a typology of scholarship on human-microbial relationships that delineates three intellectual camps in this literature: neo-cultural ecology, microbiopolitics, and the environmental humanities. In light of biomedical and scientific attention to microbes—not only as threats but also as complex and beneficial actors in our lives—it is crucial to understand how socioecological practices including growing, preparing, and consuming fermented foods sustain microbial communities, heritage foodways, and human wellbeing. PDF available here.
On cotton farms in Telangana, India, performance draws attention to farmers’ work not merely as an economic activity but as directed toward different kinds of audiences and in conversation with different roles, stages, and scripts. Importantly, this performance is contextualized by a neoliberal seed market where a seasonal deluge of accelerated and consumerist seed marketing diminishes the value of experiential knowledge in favor of the expansion of private genetically modified (GM) seed sales. This article draws on mixed methods and qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016 on cotton farms in Telangana to explore the use of “scripts” in rural life: the learned and socially mediated mental maps that reflect sets of rules, values, patterns, or expectations in smallholder commercial agriculture. The script of manci digubadi (good yield) helps order and justify GM cottonseed decision making in rural Telangana, where seed knowledge is uncertain, environmental feedback is ambiguous, and social emulation dominates farmer choices. While being cautious not to present performance in such a way that questions authenticity or presupposes either fatalism or economic rationalism, I argue that scripts help farmers navigate cotton agriculture amid uncertain GM cottonseed markets and the anxieties and aspirations of neoliberal rural India. PDF available here.
Press Coverage: EurekAlert; ScienceDaily; Newsclick; Deccan Herald; Times of India; Business Standard; Phys.org; The Week
Flachs, Andrew. 2019 “The Factish in the Field: An Anthropological Inquiry of Genetically Modified Seeds and Yields as Beings.” Science and Technology Studies, 32(3):26-43.
Research in GM crops is of pressing importance to biotechnologists, development economists, government officials, and concerned citizens. Each of these stakeholders carries preconceived notions of success and failure that not only influence how data regarding GM crops is shared but also reify the objective reality of GM seeds as a technology that might exist outside the idiosyncracies of a farmer’s field. In this essay, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among GM cotton planting farmers in Telangana, India to deconstruct the process by which scientific facts are created, leveraged, and then divorced from their subjective contexts in agricultural research. In paying closer attention to the ways that the science of agricultural development has limited possibilities of farmer experience and transformed GM seeds into autonomous beings, this paper attempts to take up Latour’s call for a compositionist investigation of a common world slowly assembled by its constituent actors. PDF available here.
Crop seeds are a factor of production that can be produced on farm or bought, commodified in varying ways and degrees, and that can change slowly or rapidly—all of which directly impact the crucial process of farmer “skilling.” Seed choices also offer a unique empirical window through which farmer knowledge may be studied. Although other studies have examined the differences between cash and food crops, this research provides new insights into varyingly commodified crops within the same agrarian system. When planting rice, genetically modified hybrid cotton seeds, and garden vegetables, farmers in Telangana, India, face different constraints and opportunities to learn about their seeds and practice that knowledge in the field. These differences arise from agronomic properties of the seeds themselves as well as from the sociocultural meaning that structures the context in which farmers buy, grow, and save them. This measurable discrepancy in farmer knowledge and experience presents an opportunity to examine the variable impact of seed commodification as it is experienced by the same group of farmers across several different crops. Building on theories of commodification and agricultural knowledge, we propose that the different ways in which farmer knowledge operates in these crops reflect a spectrum on which knowledge and commodification are inversely related. PDF available here.
Performance is a useful lens through which to analyze agrarian life, as performance illuminates the ways that farmers manage the complex socioecological demands of farm work while participating in social life and in the larger political economy. The dialectic of planning and improvisation in the farm field has produced scholarship at multiple scales of political ecology, including the global ramifications of new technologies or policies, as well as the hyper-local engagements between farmers and fields in the context of modernity and development. Political ecologists are also beginning to understand how affects, such as aspirations and frustrations, influence agriculture by structuring how farmers and other stakeholders make decisions about farms, households, capital, and environments. To understand farm work as a performance is to situate it within particular stages, roles, scripts, and audiences at different scales. The articles in this Special Section ask how farmers have improvised, planned, and performed in response to agroecological challenges, bridging scholarship in political ecology, development studies, and the study of agrarian landscapes through new empirical case studies and theoretical contributions. Agriculture both signals social values and fosters improvisations within farming communities' collective vulnerability to weather and the political economy. We argue that the lens of performance situates the political ecology of agriculture within the constraints of the political economy, the aspirations and frustrations of daily life, and the dialectic between improvised responses to change and planning in the field. PDF available here.
Paul Richards invokes the metaphor of performance in agriculture to highlight the ways in which farmers improvise and draw on repertory knowledge to address new and unexpected problems in the field. This skillset helps farmers respond to shifting weather patterns or changing pest cycles, but it also helps farmers take advantage of new markets, technologies, and development interventions – a question of planning and context as much as improvisation in the moment. This article discusses two intervention failures and one success in Telangana cotton agriculture, arguing that such agricultural interventions succeed when farmers can align development performances with their own visions of development and agricultural success. In doing so, it offers a political ecology of farmer performance on two levels. First, it brings attention to the ecological and socioeconomic factors that inspire performances and structure farmer improvisations. Second, it argues that development initiatives must recognize their efforts as embedded within local agricultural planning and contingent on local calculations of social capital. In two ultimately unsuccessful interventions, farmers withdrew from programs that required investments of time and agricultural methods but did not underwrite important social and agricultural vulnerabilities identified by participants. In one successful intervention, farmers found that an NGO's willingness to respond to their agricultural needs and provide a stage for the cultivation of a local celebrity more than compensated for the new demands of non-certified organic agriculture. In a rural Indian context, where farming is a moral as well as agricultural process, the performance of a development identity is an integral part of performances and plans that guide farmer decision-making. Because these performances create a knowledge that cannot be separated from actors, roles, and stages present, these contingent performances ultimately have lasting impacts on the agrarian landscape. PDF available here.
Flachs, Andrew and Matthew Abel. 2018. “An Emerging Geography of the Agrarian Question: Spatial Analysis as a tool for Identifying the New American Agrarianism.” Rural Sociology, 84(2):191-225.
Karl Kautsky’s Agrarian Question remains a useful lens for analyzing the relationship between small and large agricultural producers under the conditions of industrial capitalism. The U.S. agricultural census provides an opportunity to identify socioeconomic, demographic, and agricultural factors associated with new and alternative farming at the county level, and then analyze these for spatial patterns within a geographic information system. By associating these county‐level indicators with a crowd‐sourced USDA directory of farmers’ markets as a proxy for local demand, we identified four hot spots of new American agriculture: The West Coast, central Texas and Oklahoma, central Florida, and the Great Lakes region. Furthermore, we show that these areas have been growing since 1997. An additional farmer hot spot in central Appalachia diminished after 1997 and finally disappeared in 2012. We argue that spatial analysis is a tool for defining new agrarian landscapes, observing geographic and social shifts in small, alternative farming, and conducting more focused ethnographic research. PDF available here.
Press coverage: Farm Food Facts, Podcast of the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance; Futurity; EurekAlert; World Economic Forum
Free listing exercises are common and informative ways to explore shared bodies of knowledge and practice, and they can probe widely experienced phenomena in daily life. However, even with a representative sample, this method can suffer under common conditions in anthropological fieldwork: Respondents forget to list items, they fail to provide exhaustive lists, they become fatigued during the interview process, and their responses may not provide representative information. In this article, I suggest an iterative process that combines targeted free listing with key informants, walking probes, and a survey checklist. During an investigation of agricultural biodiversity in Telangana, India, this approach generated more comprehensive lists than free listing exercises alone. This process generates checklist surveys appropriate for larger research populations and can be used to assess widespread knowledge and practices quickly, accurately, and with minimal respondent fatigue. PDF available here.
In this article, I describe a paradoxical but necessary creation of the development apparatus: the “show farmer” (Stone 2014). Various corporate, state, and NGO development projects call upon show farmers to demonstrate the viability of alternative agriculture for visiting funders, scientists, media, and growers. As village gatekeepers, show farmers cultivate local celebrity and publicize a model not just for their community but for the sustainability of agricultural development interventions in the global South generally. This transformation is, however, contingent— hen the incentives, ranging from farming infrastructure to social recognition, dry up, show farmers may abandon the stage and development interventions can fail. In addition to qualitative ethnography and interviews, this article draws on 12 months of seed choice and household demographic surveys conducted 2012–2014 among 104 organic cotton farmers in the Warangal and Asifabad districts of Telangana, India. To better understand how alternative agriculture interventions are affecting rural life and how farmers create new avenues for agricultural success through the development apparatus, anthropologists must pay more attention to this crucial but underexplored character. PDF available here.
This paper was selected for the 2015 Robert M. Netting Award by the American Anthropological Association.
Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow. Path dependency theory primarily explains the persistence of sub-optimal practices, but double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton. We use the case to explicate the role of treadmills in technology ‘lock-in’. We also examine how an adaptive locked-in path may be broken by external interests, drawing on recent analyses of ‘didactic’ learning by farmers. PDF available here.
Press coverage: Counterpunch
Flachs, Andrew, Glenn Davis Stone, and Christopher Shaffer. 2017. “Mapping Knowledge: GIS as a Tool for Spatial Modeling of Patterns of Warangal Cotton Seed Popularity and Farmer Decision-Making.” Human Ecology, 45(2):143-159.
In the Warangal district of Telangana, India, poor farmer knowledge, rapid seed turnover, and farmer conformist bias have resulted in faddish spikes in GM cotton seed popularity. We analyze space as a variable in 2715 seed choices by 136 farmers in two villages between 2004 and 2014, allowing us to model a decade of changes in farmers’ social learning across the village landscape. GIS analysis in combination with ethnographic research reveals shifting loci of seed certainty, in which different farmers were deemed worthy of emulation in different years. Over the study period, Warangal farmers were far more likely to emulate field neighbors’ cotton choices than they were to replant seeds, regardless of their crop yields. Rapid seed turnover and seed choice conformity was strongest among the comparatively poorer Scheduled Tribe farmers who live on the outskirts of the town proper. When the same farmers plant rice, their choices are more consistent through time and across space, suggesting that farmers learn about these two crops in very different ways. PDF available here.
Organic agriculture projects have advanced biodiversity as a key goal and outcome of their methods, in part by encouraging non-chemical inputs and non-genetically modified (GM) seeds. In India organic cotton agriculture has been marketed as a specific alternative to GM cotton, India’s only legal GM crop. However, previous work has shown that the same production pressures that drive GM agriculture to lack biodiversity do not necessarily apply to Indian cotton farms. On organic farms in the Adilabad district of Telangana, India, organic farmers are growing nearly 100 semi-managed foods, trees, and medicines belonging to 37 botanical families. However, organic groups target farmers that may be more inclined to cultivate agrobiodiversity anyway. This paper draws on household surveys, field interviews, and ethnographic research among ethnic Gond farmers participating in a corporate organic program to suggest that such alternative agriculture schemes find ways to reward farmers for biodiverse fields. Organic cotton farms contain significantly greater numbers of economic plants than GM cotton farms in Telangana, and organic organizations ensure that this economic botany becomes institutionalized. PDF available here.
The transnational spread of law and technology in Indian agricultural development has passed through three distinct phases since the mid-19th century. In each case, a narrative of agrarian crisis allowed for new state and corporate interventions, conceived by American and British agribusiness, within the existing logics of Indian smallholder agriculture. These began with colonial British industrial cotton projects in the 1840s, continuing with Green Revolution agriculture, and eventually with contemporary GM and organic cotton farms. In each case, farmers developed strategies through a frictive, contentious adoption of new technologies and built new avenues to success that worked for some farmers and failed for others. In this article I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and household surveys conducted in nine villages from 2012-2014 in Telangana, India. As with previous development initiatives, the US-born legal structures that defined high-tech GM and low-tech organic agriculture were adopted in India without major changes. I argue, however that their actual implementation by farmers has required a significant shift in the ways that people manage the agricultural economy. PDF available here.
This paper was selected for the 2015 Eric Wolf Prize by the Political Ecology Society.
Of the various genetically modified (GM) crops in use today, none is planted by more smallholder farmers than Bt cotton. Bt crops contain insecticide-producing Cry genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, expressing proteins deadly to many common cotton insect pests. Small-scale Indian cotton farmers in particular have struggled with pest management, and in 2013 over 90 per cent of Indian cotton farmers planted Bt cotton, more than in any other country. A pressing question in agriculture today is how sustainable the benefits of Bt cotton will be for these farmers. PDF available here.
Genetically modified (GM) crops may threaten agrobiodiversity because: (1) genetic material could escape into and subsequently alter non-GM species; and (2) GM crops encourage farmers along an agronomic feedback loop encouraging input-intensive monocultures. However, in the Warangal district of Telangana, India, GMcotton farms also contain nearly 100 semi-managed vegetables, trees, and wild plants belonging to 39 botanical families. While farmers continue to plant poorly understood, deceptively labeled Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis Berliner) cotton seeds in their fields, they also maintain an average of 17 other plants on the same farms for home economic needs. This paper draws on surveys, field interviews, and ethnography conducted among randomly sampled Bt cotton farmers to show the full range of economic plants cultivated on Warangal GM farms. In doing so, I argue that some farmers have been able to preserve agrobiodiversity despite the pressures of GM cotton cash cropping. That agrobiodiversity has potential benefits for Indigenous knowledge and drawbacks for environmental and health concerns. PDF available here.
This paper was selected for the 2014 Barbara Lawrence Award of the Society of Ethnobiology.
In this essay we present three biases that make it difficult to represent farmer voices in a meaningful way. These biases are information bias, individual bias, and short-term bias. We illustrate these biases through two case studies. One is the case of Golden Rice in the Philippines and the other is the case of Bt cotton in India. PDF available here.
Press coverage: Yale Environment Review
Scholars in many disciplines have approached the question of how humans combine environmental learning (or empirical assessments) and social learning (or emulation) in choosing technologies. As both a consumer item and the subject of local indigenous knowledge, commercial crop seeds provide a valuable window into these processes. Previous research on seed choices by cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, uncovered short-term seed fads, or herding, indicating agricultural deskilling in which environmental learning had broken down. Unknown was if the faddism (and the underlying deskilling) would continue or even be exacerbated by the spread of genetically modified seeds. Data covering 11 years of seed choices in the same sample villages are now available; we combine analysis of this unusual data set with ethnographic observation. We find that herding has continued and intensified. We also find an unexpected emergent pattern of cyclical fads; these resemble classic models of successive innovation adoption where periodicity is introduced from outside the system, but we argue that it periodicity is actually generated by an internal dynamic. PDF available here.
This paper shows the ways that ethnographers can develop a more effective qualitative understanding of community gardens by volunteering as gardeners. It explains how volunteering helps gain access to different facets of the garden community. Ultimately, it shows that volunteering can provide an anthropological perspective on the idea, prevalent in the literature, that many people join community gardens only for the economic benefits. PDF available here.
While the benefits of healthy eating and greenspace development have been well documented, the social impact of urban and community gardens remain less studied. This paper explores the social and cultural effects of urban gardening in the greater Cleveland area. Gardening is shown to have a multitude of motivating factors, including economic, environmental, political, social, and nutritional. While analyzing the impact that gardens have on community building, identity, and food security, some authors claim that the gardeners themselves are preoccupied with the economic impact of their actions. Perversely, this leads readers to the conclusion that poor people or people of color are only interested in gardening for its dollar value. Following this argument, more affluent gardeners have the security to ignore the economic impact and focus only on furthering an environmentalist agenda. Such authors presume that utilitarian function and environmentalist ideology are mutually exclusive, but my own fieldwork showed that many gardeners actively combine these ideas. This paper intends to convey the complexity of use, function, and intent in these communal spaces, filling an existing gap in our understanding of their social impact. PDF available here.