littlegreenpills posted:
i absolutely agree with you here, but a general objection might go along the lines of "I find it real hard to imagine how we can have an agriculture based largely upon the particular, the local and the qualitative and still keep any sort of robust evidence-based assessment of whether a method is actually working, which we surely need to do" and I was wondering how you would respond to that sort of thing

well i think we have to start from Howard's premise that we don't actually need quantitative description or interventional experimentation to figure out whether a set of methods as a whole works or doesn't work. either the farmer is producing a surplus that meets their needs or goals or they aren't, either the people they're feeding are healthy and fecund or they aren't. beyond that, i'm not saying we abandon quantitative measurement to answer specific questions about that method ("if we did x would less soil erode from slope y") but just that you can't start from the notion that everything can be quantitated (and if you do you're almost certainly under the sway of an idiot economist's ideas about agriculture)

like ideally i think the role of the agricultural scientist would be to describe what people are doing in a community and how its working (quantitatively and qualitatively depending on what outcomes the community cares about), disseminate that knowledge outside the community, take in knowledge from outside and test/adapt/develop methods for a particular locality. if we start from sound premises and good values in terms of our goals i think we can avoid most of the pitfalls associated with the privileging of quantitative interventional experimental paradigms