What Farmers Know: Experiential Knowledge and Care in Vine Growing

Abstract

This article contributes to the critical debate on the choreographies of care in farming (Law) through an exploration of the inter‐dependence of care and situated expertise in the context of vine work. It argues that care as the totality of those activities which enable the maintenance, continuation, and repair of the farming ‘world’, to paraphrase Fisher and Tronto's classic definition, depends on experiential knowledge. According to Dreyfus and Dreyfus attentiveness, responsiveness, and adaptation to the material environment are characteristic of high levels of expertise. Attentiveness, responsiveness, and adaptation are also what characterises good care (Tronto; Mol). Through an autoethnographic account of acquiring competence in vine work, the article illustrates how through practical engagement with the material and social environment of the farm key elements of the logic of care (Mol) are acquired. In conclusion, the article indicates some consequences of putting experiential knowledge at the heart of multi‐scalar and multi‐temporal cares farmers are increasingly asked to attend to.

Sustainability—Risk—Resilience: How Does the Case of the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions Measure up?

“…Because of the tendency to prompt a regulatory reaction, biosecurity problems are targeted by a separate area of action from GAEC, via actor networks [27][28][29]. Networks have the advantage of being able to moderate the impression of entrepreneurs that the issues are both urgent and immense [83].…”

“…Attention to "resilience" [20,21,79,81], and to "risk" (e.g., [26][27][28][29][30][31] has progressively taken the floor of the sociology debate with regard to both agriculture and rural farmland. Such a shift has seemingly displaced earlier sustainability approaches.…”

“…It can be deduced that a more visible focus is needed on resilience and risk. The utility of the results offered by [67] emphasises resilience and risk, whilst counterbalancing the prevailing notion of risk management at farm level as the task of livestock systems predominantly [27][28][29]. This is of note for GAEC, as the set standards comprise basic land management standards, rather than farm management of farm technique efficiency principles.…”

“…It had to be negotiated by farmers and relevant social stakeholders with respect to the serious issues of a bio-technological, bio-economic, or biosocial character, which were typically regulated for many decades through some of the highly specific provisions of farm practices, which are not easily translatable to the popular public. Increasingly, policy agendas aiming to translate the "risk society" limits (e.g., Giddens [24] and Beck [25]) have recently fought their way to the foreground, with particular emphasis on agricultural risks [26][27][28][29][30][31]. Notwithstanding this shift, the sustainability…”

Knowledge and Precaution. On Organic Farmers Assessment of New Technology

“…Ingram (2008) and Ingram et al (2010), for example, studied farmers' knowledge of soil management practices. Others have investigated how the knowledge applied in these everyday farming contexts is learned, acquired or shared (Curry and Kirwan 2014;Krzywoszynska 2015). Besides the experience-based knowledge that farmers can articulate, these studies include a tacit knowledge element.…”