Bet-hedging strategies, agricultural change, and unpredictable environments: historical development of dryland agriculture in Kona, Hawaii

Abstract

It is argued that current models of agricultural change are overly focused on productive increases. Risk management strategies, practices that can be critical to the long-term survival of a given agronomic system, warrant a more prominent role. Neo-Darwinian theory, and the bet-hedging model in particular, offers a way to evaluate both kinds of agronomic change within a single theoretical paradigm, as well as a means of assessing the long-term outcomes of variant agronomic strategies. The bet-hedging model is used herein to assess agricultural change in an unpredictable Hawaiian environment, the Kona District of central West Hawaii. A fine-grained record of agronomic change from one of the region’s more productive areas is compared with patterns from the region at large. The analysis shows that variance minimizing (or risk management) strategies were initiated by 1450 AD, if not earlier, and occurred in even the most productive localities. Innovations in gardening architecture, novel cultivation practices and changes in the scale of agronomic integration, are argued to have been effective in reducing the impact of environmental variance. Later in time (after 1650 AD) there was a shift in emphasis to productive maximizing strategies, with implications for the region’s economic and socio-political stability.