Agroecological Polycultures: Field, Farm and Food System Transformations
Ryan HayhurstNEO Regenerative Agroecological Systems Consulting
Est. 2004
What is Agroecology?
• “ecology of sustainable food systems" (Gliessman)
• “it has already begun to change the way agriculture is perceived and practiced from scales ranging from the soil food web, to polycultural cropping regimes and the political economy of local food systems”(Toensmeier).
• “at minimum, agroecological production attempts to bypass the damage done by corporate-led agro-industrial food regimes that control the majority of the agro-food infrastructure” (Altieri)
Food Sovereigntyhttp://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/17/2787921/african-countries-join-anti-monsanto-protests/
What is a Polyculture? An integrative crop system designed to take advantage of multiple plant-plant and plant-animal synergies to create a resilient, sustainable and abundant socio-ecological system
What theoretical frameworks can we use to help us name and understand how agroecology is dispersing in into the agricultural mainstream?
What tools and leverage points are available to us to operationalize agroecology in complex multi-stakeholder systems?
Strategies and Leverage Points?
Personal Practice• Esbjörn-Hargens & Zimmerman: Perspective & Depth• Bland & Bell: Holonic "Flickering”Complex System Process Facilitation• Participatory epistemology, interdisciplinary research
and transdisciplinary practiceContext specific design, scaled application• Gliessman: 4 Levels of Conversion to agroecologyAn Evolving Critically (Kincheloe, 2008)• How has agroecology manifest in Ontario within and
aside from industrial agriculture? In what ways has it been co-opted? How should it be contested? Or celebrated?
http://welovebold.com/stories/entry/social-innovation-camp
Can we use process facilitation and innovation labs to redesign agroecological systems?
1. Efficiency improvements 2. Substitute Alternatives3. Redesign Agroecosystem 4. Redesign Socio-Economics
4 Levels of Conversion, Gliessman, 2007
An Evolving Criticality: Future Research on Agroecology in Ontario
Is it happening?What is being done?
What? On what level(s) is the intervention
How? Theory of change
Impacts/outcomes, shortcomings & synergies
Behavior: Education & Training Initiatives
Systems: Production & Consumption Networks
Culture:Research, Policy and Politics
Questions, comments… ([email protected])
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