Agricultural Innovation for the People

Democratic food in action -- Trent Experimental Farm

Food Tank, a new and amazingly active research and activist organization, has just announced a new project examining democratic innovation in food production.  The aim is to understand how new agricultural methods can spread within and between communities, in both rich and poor countries.  It's about developing new ways of farming, and then replicating them, scaling them up, and distributing them around the world.  It's the kind of project that's central to the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Program that we're building here at Trent.  In a world with soon 9 billion people, it's urgent and essential work.

It's also the kind of project that would be worth placing in historical context.  Historians like Chris Henke and others have outlined the history of agricultural research and development and its ties to power.  They've demonstrated, among other things, the importance of various key episodes:

-       the formation of links between research and government, going back to the origins of the American land grant universities

-       the emergence of close ties between universities and the private sector, resulting in research on innovations that are particularly suited to corporate agriculture -- like fruit that can be picked by machines and shipped long distances

-       the more recent dominance of corporations themselves in funding agricultural research, producing innovations that can be patented, owned, and sold (like GMO crops and associated pesticides).

This historical context shows the significance of new approaches, like democratic innovation, that promise an alternative to the corporate model of agricultural research � one that is more relevant to the immediate needs of small-scale producers.  It's a great example of the ties between agricultural science and power that deserve more attention from historians.