Drinking the Kool-Aid while attempting to be an unbiased researcher

I realized today that I’ve spend the past week and a half drinking the Bioversity Kool-Aid; meaning that I’ve been surrounded by great ideas like “custodian farmers”; researchers who are really interested in “farmer first” technologies, networks, and access to resources; and in the past few days, getting a chance to talk to farmers who are involved in Bioversity’s projects here in India. Which is all great, especially considering that Bioversity’s mission aligns with my own ideological commitments. But this is something my academic committee has pushed me to think about: how will I deal with my own pro-farmer, pro-local biases when conducting my research?

One of the things I’m studying is the difference between/evolution of the scientific paradigms of “wide adaptation of crops/top-down technology transfer” and “location-specific adaptation/participatory research.” The first approach is dominant in the state-run agricultural organizations; the second (I’m hypothesizing) is more likely to crop up among NGOs and individual researchers. But, is one approach necessarily “better”? My own bias pushes me towards thinking the second approach is better, because it takes into account the local socio-economic as well as environmental conditions of farmers. But from an innovation systems perspective, we probably need some combination of both approaches. The first approach works well for large farmers on productive lands; the second works better for marginal farmers/areas. I think if I’m able to take a more even-handed (or “academically agnostic”) approach to my research, my scholarship will be better. One step I can take to reduce my bias is to be very careful in my interviews, and to carefully consider what my respondents say. In my historical research, I think the best strategy for now is just to document all relevant material, and then sort out my theoretical argument later.

Theoretically, I find the correlation of the “wide adaptation/top-down” approach with a socialized political system extremely interesting. This would require me digging into more political science than I currently have under my belt, but I think it would be really interesting to compare 20^th century agricultural development in the US, Soviet Russia, and India. For example, what was the political context; proportion of public vs. private research investment; scientific paradigms; and ultimately the success of agricultural technologies in each of these nation-states during critical periods of agricultural development? Maybe I can find someone already working on this stuff and collaborate…

In other news, baby goats are the cutest things ever and I want one!

Custodian farmers and global agro-biodiversity

This week I attended two conferences in Delhi (and have one left to go): one on "custodian farmers" and the other on global agro-biodiversity. My host organization did a large part of the work for the custodian farmers conference, which brought together 20-30 farmers from south and southeast Asia as well as experts in agro-biodiversity. It was interesting, definitely innovative, and somewhat logistically challenging to bring together farmers, some of whom had not travelled before, and who spoke at least 5-6 languages between the group. They each gave a short presentation that was translated by their country's research/NGO partner. Throughout the meeting I learned exactly what a custodian farmer is: someone who actively maintains, conserves, adapts, and shares agricultural biodiversity. Similar to what we might call "early adopters" or innovative farmers, although in some cases they said their communities did not recognize the importance of what they were doing. They have a lot of different motivations for doing this. Many of the farmers (which was a limited sample size, for sure, and only included one lady farmer) seemed to have some intrinsic motivation to conserve different species and varieties of crops. They were also motivated by financial benefit, and were very interested in how they could get more education, technology, and access to markets to make value-added products or to market their rare varieties. The two-day workshop was very interesting to hear about some of the research and policy related to custodian farmers, and we also had some interactive (participatory agricultural research, you could call it) activities with the farmers about what they valued and what suggestions they have to get more people to become custodian farmers.

The next conference was a global consultation on agro-biodiversity, more specifically, plant genetic resources (for a brief background, see my previous posts here and here). I know that at previous conferences on this topic, there's always a lot of strain between the "global north" and the "global south" because the global south contains most of the in-situ (in nature, or on-farm) biodiversity, but the global north has historically housed most of that diversity in seed/gene-banks while southern countries sometimes struggle to build their capacity at collecting and banking different plant (and animal, insect, and microbial!) species/varieties. But attendees at this conference were mostly Indian scientists (India has one of the largest biodiversity collections), country-representatives from the global south, and international research center representatives. So it was interesting to hear the perspectives from this group of people, and for me to talk to a bunch of scientists who I have studied so much about!

Quinoa: food fads and fallacies

In an alternate universe, perhaps I am an agricultural economist. Or, maybe my graduate training has prepared me to critically view articles like this recent one about quinoa and why vegans are awful people, as well as the response. For an actual economist's point of view, check out Mark Bellemare's blog.

There is no easy answer to this question. Like determining the greenhouse gas impact of "food miles," without a lot of data it's difficult to determine the net positive or negative effect that rising quinoa prices have on Bolivian farmers. My instinct is that in this case, rising prices might actually be helping farmers. If there are getting consistently high prices for quinoa that they sell, that means that they can actually sell less (or grow less acres) of this high-value export and still make a good profit. A good analog would be basmati rice that's grown in the Punjab region. But in both articles, the problem of quinoa prices for Bolivian farmers is conflated with the impact of globalization. It's true that globalization is changing the price of foods, their availability, and consumer preferences all over the world. Sometimes this can have negative impacts (think Coke, junk food, subsidized grains, and volatile markets), but there are also positive impacts. It's all more complicated than the first article would admit.

My DIY portable book scanner

While I'm in India next year, I plan on visiting several agricultural research libraries to find primary sources related to my research. And while there are several options for how I could record these documents, the fastest, easiest, and most useful seems to be using a digital camera to photograph pages from my documents. I am unsure whether these different libraries will let me use a camera and a tripod, but I am hoping they will.

I've been researching the best way to use a camera for scanning documents, and found an entire world of DIY book scanning. Unfortunately most of these scanners are not portable, and a bit above my ability level as a novice DIY-er. But after some research into camera tripods, I found this set up, pictured above, to be the most promising. I then came across this article and decided it was worth it to invest in the equipment (which all in all, cost me less than $100, not counting the camera). I also got a piece of plexiglass from the hardware store to flatten pages, but I think it will depend on what the libraries allow. Finally, hopefully I will be have good ambient light in the libraries, because I found that my camping lantern cast uneven shadows (but the overhead light caused glare in the plexiglass). If anyone has a suggestion for lighting, please let me know!

I am pretty happy with my results so far. The process goes pretty quickly, and I can do it sitting down. My files are large and as long as I get a good enough contrast between the page and the words, I can make readable files (not exactly OCR text readable, but readable to me). Processing the images is taking longer than taking them, and then I'm converting the files into pdfs (since so far I've been scanning from library books, it is pretty easy to keep them organized).

Here's a pretty good example of what I've collected. For this specific photo I used my lantern for lighting and the plexiglass sheet. I edited the photo in iPhoto to adjust the color/shadows, crop it, and make it black & white. As you can see, it is easily readable especially when zoomed in. The next scan I do, I will probably play around with the white balance and ISO settings on my camera.

Throughout my research in India I will be keeping all of my digital files on Dropbox and Google Drive so that if something happens to my computer, I won't lose my files.

Feel free to ask me any more detailed questions about my method, and I would of course appreciate any advice!