Abstract
This article explores how 'Zero Budget Natural Farming', an Indian natural farming movement centered on its founder and guru Subhash Palekar, enacts alternative agrarian worlds through the dual practices of critique and recuperation. Based on fieldwork among practitioners in the South Indian state of Kerala and on participation in teaching events held by Palekar, I describe the movement's critique of the agronomic mainstream (state extension services, agricultural universities, and scientists) and their recuperative practices of restoring small-scale cultivation based on Indian agroecological principles and biologies. Their critique combines familiar political-ecological arguments against productionism, and the injustices of the global food regime, with Hindu nationalist tropes highlighting Western conspiracies and corrupt science. For their recuperative work, these natural farmers draw, on one hand, on travelling agroecological technologies (fermentation, spacing, mulching, cow based farming) and current 'probiotic', microbiological, and symbiotic understandings of soil and agriculture. On the other hand, they use Hindu nativist tropes, insisting on the exceptional properties of agrarian species native to, and belonging to India. I use the idea of ontological politics to describe the movement's performances as enacting an alternative rural world, in which humans, other-than-human animals, plants, mycorrhizae, and microbes are doing agriculture together.Keywords: agricultural anthropology; alternative agricultures; naturecultures; critique; ontological politics; small-scale cultivators; India; Kerala; Subhash Palekar
Highlights
When I reached Mr Appachan's2 farm in the Christian settler region of Wayanad on the day he wanted to show me how to make jīvāmṛta, the fermented brew of the urine and dung of native cows that is central to Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), another visitor arrived on a motorcycle, who was keen on learning about natural farming's "miracle preparation." To my surprise Mr Kumar introduced himself as the Agricultural Officer of the local Krishi Bhavan, one of the main institutions for agricultural extension in Kerala
As Appachan stirred the mixture that would ferment in a few days to become the "nectar of life" in a 200 liter barrel, he kept politely silent about the harsh critique leveled by himself and other self-declared natural farmers against agronomical sciences and state extension workers
It indexes an ontological politics that involves the performances of humans and microbes in a project of recuperating small-scale agriculture that necessitates both the critique of science and a curiosity about emerging scientific facts
Summary
When I reached Mr Appachan's2 farm in the Christian settler region of Wayanad on the day he wanted to show me how to make jīvāmṛta, the fermented brew of the urine and dung of native cows that is central to Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), another visitor arrived on a motorcycle, who was keen on learning about natural farming's "miracle preparation." To my surprise Mr Kumar introduced himself as the Agricultural Officer of the local Krishi Bhavan, one of the main institutions for agricultural extension in Kerala. This article deals with the epistemological, political, and practical consequences of the critiques of rural realities expressed by 'natural' farmers Their intellectual rejection of soil science, agricultural engineering, development ideologies, and the workings of the global agro-food system is rooted in their own past experiences with growing crops in a crisis conjuncture. Aiming for the economic and ecological self-sufficiency of their farms, Palekar and his disciples are outspoken critics of mainstream agricultural sciences, government-run agronomical extension, and everything that is associated with modern industrial agriculture and the global food regime They counter these with utopian visions of rural autonomy, prosperity, and abundance that are actualized through heterodox practices based on fermentation, multispecies mutualism, and the centrality of native cows. I focus on the discursive performances of this alternative agriculture movement – its critiques of science, the state, and the West: how does this natural farming movement articulate questions of authenticity, belonging, and attachment to place in a historical conjuncture where various enactments of knowledge, science, and practice compete for allegiance? How does the movement position its agronomical innovations in relation to the sciences and engineering involved in contemporary agriculture? What specific epistemic space do they carve out for their movement in confronting the encroachments of colonialism, global capitalism, Indian nationalism, and the biopolitics of development in their livelihoods? What are the positive uses of science for the onto-epistemological project of cultivating a new ecological agriculture of the future in a postcolonial landscape?
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