A relational approach to pesticide use: Farmers, herbicides, nutsedge, and the weedy path to pesticide use reduction objectives

Abstract

Demands for drastically reducing pesticide use call for different perspectives and narratives that can open new understandings of pesticide use and enact new action plans. Complementing traditional approaches to pesticide use that investigate farmers' decision-making and the structural factors conditioning farmers' roles as pesticide users, we propose a relational approach that recognizes the different actors, processes, and agential roles embedded in pesticide use. Based on a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews and multiple field visits to vegetable farmers and agricultural technicians operating in El Maresme (Spain), we unravel the different relations that unfold as herbicide availability and effectiveness contracted in the last few decades. Results show that the banning of herbicides and the emergence of a new weed ecology enacted different relations that moved farmers to adopt non-chemical methods. In this process, farmers' rationales and practices unfold as unpredictable, sometimes contradictory, and spatially and temporally variable. The results of this relational perspective on pesticide use challenges the homogenization of farmers’ rationales and behaviors while acknowledging the multiple realities beyond structural and fixed constraints that farmers face when confronted with mandates of pesticide use reduction. In order to enact pesticide reduction on the ground, results in this article call for further empirical focus on how the actors and processes that compose pesticide use are assembled, held in place, and work in different ways to open up or close down possibilities of pesticide use reduction.