I’ve been thinking about study, particularly as I approach the halfway-through-term reading week next week.
Where my global systems thinking module on Mondays takes the form of a lecture with occasional group discussions, my Friday food systems module is a seminar. The approach is different for the two.
At the Monday lecture, I take a stack of notes. When I’m back from the lecture, I transfer the handwritten notes into Notion, fleshing them out and adding any observations and links to relevant content. There is usually some reading to do after each lecture for the following week, or perhaps a video or podcast. It’s a reasonably straightforward linear process of capturing and processing information, and the note-making helps it sink in. I’ve been building that thinking out further with some blog posts here.
Preparation for the Food Systems seminar is different. A third of the grade for the module is awarded for a series of ten response papers, brief summaries of a selected course text with observations. The suggested length of a response paper is 250 words. A 250-word response paper that accurately summarizes what may be quite a dense book chapter or essay, pulls out salient points and offers a succinct critique of the text is a skill I’m still working on.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
The response paper is submitted before the seminar, and reading additional course texts, and taking notes on that reading, is necessary to take part in the seminar discussion. So, more pre-work is needed to be able to contribute on the day. I’m still working out how best to capture what comes out of these seminars, when the discussion, which is based around a series of questions, can be free-ranging with contributions from across the group.
I was back on campus yesterday for a talk; Dr Sarah Duddigan from the University of Reading spoke about Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) in Andhra Pradesh. ZBNF is a grassroots agrarian movement that promotes the use of homemade seed treatments and inoculants, and the use of cover cropping or mulching. The focus is on stimulating soil biological activity and moisture conservation. It seems to have a particular appeal to tenant farmers, as it doesn’t result in a yield penalty in the first year, even after transitioning from conventional growing methods. Sarah made the interesting point that one difference with ZBNF from organic growing was that even organic growing still involves engaging with agribusinesses, for example for organic inputs. She described the social element of women getting together to prepare seed treatments (bijamrita) using dung, urine and other locally sourced components.
One of the loveliest aspects of the talk was the research team’s work to look at the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for taking part in the project, as described by participating farmers in their own words and using photographs they took themselves with a loaned camera. On one hand, they reported those benefits described to them by others like increased yields, but on the other hand, they reported things like connection with nature and the health benefits of being outside. A second phase of ZBNF brings the set of practices even closer to what you’d define as agroecology, including assessment of ZBNF against the TAPE framework.
Sarah described the way that a lot of the research team’s thinking about their approach to the project, and the development of their interdisciplinary approach crossing soil and environmental science with social science, came together talking on long car journeys where project sites were often hours apart. This reminded me of all the fascinating conversations I had with Nicholas when I spent six months working with him in Ghana in 2011. It’s all about the liminal spaces.
Discussion after the presentation and over lunch afterwards moved on to that interdisciplinarity, and how siloing affects our ability to look at food systems holistically – when for example geographers, anthropologists and nutritionists don’t necessarily even speak the same language in data or approach. This reminded me of the issue that I’ve raised in several recent food systems-related webinars, that food policy in England is the responsibility of 16 different government departments.
Food systems are complex and interwoven, but our approach to them isn’t. As the House of Lords Committee on Food, Diet and Obesity today released a report demanding that the Government publishes a comprehensive and integrated National Food Strategy, we see the signs of a continuing fragmentation of approach. In 2020, the BMJ noted that the Agriculture Bill was “entirely divorced from policies proposed by a government commissioned panel developing a national food strategy”. And today, the House of Lords committee report, focussed as it is on health and obesity, says that our food system is broken, demands a national food strategy, but makes scant reference to agriculture (their remit didn’t extend to it). Oversight of the food system in the UK is still fragmented, as the BMJ said in 2020.
I’ve been emailing a few organisations that I follow or that I’m a member of recently asking them, nicely, if they’d consider engaging on Bluesky. More of them do seem to be engaging, but some are still sat with placeholder accounts. More people should ask the organisations they support to start posting there if they aren’t.
Soy No More is a lovely new short film from the Landworkers’ Alliance about exploring agroecological alternatives to soy for pig and poultry feed.