Subtle Agroecologies

Open Access free to download: https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429440939

Some 25 years ago I met Bhaskar Save (pronounced ‘sa-vey’). He was a farmer, as he described himself. The focus of his heart and mind was his 14-acre farm in the state of Gujarat, in western India. There he read what nature placed before him, and practised it in raw soil, with water, air and seeds. Save was an inspiration for generations of farmers. By using traditional methods, he demonstrated on his farm yields superior to any farm using chemicals in terms of overall quantity, nutritional quality, taste, biological diversity, ecological sustainability, water conservation, energy efficiency and economic profitability.

Masanobu Fukuoka, the legendary Japanese organic farmer (synonymous with ‘One Straw Revolution’) visited Save at his farm. Thereafter Fukuoka described Save’s farm as ‘the best in the world, even better than my own!’ Over a spell of a few years, I met other extraordinary farmers, like Subhash Palekar and G Nammalwar. They emphasised self-reliance at the farm and in the village. They practised what the world came to call natural farming without considering their efforts - or indeed their special communication with natures energies - as being remarkable in any way.

At times, they and others like them were cajoled into giving their advice to the agriculture and food policymakers of India. They usually did, not with any enthusiasm, and their message was that food should not be imported, the poisonous chemicals popularised by the ‘Green Revolution’ must be abandoned, and that the sort of self-reliance they represented was the antidote to the social, economic and ecological plague that India had brought upon itself in the area of food cultivation and consumption.

They were for the most part considered by the technocrats of fast-modernising India as eccentrics peddling nostrums. Farmers they were, yet much more too, sages of a thinking which encompassed the growing of food by way of exercising rare super-sensibilities in relation to nature and its forces. It is through a few conversations with each, more than a generation ago, that I glimpsed their vision.

What these farmer-sages had sensed more than seen, and felt through bare feet on ground, through the slow pulse of all that they grew, were nature’s finer forces, which in the late 19th century were described as such by the Theosophist and Sanskrit scholar Rama Prasad in his book of the same name. It was against this background that I approached the reading of Subtle Agroecologies: Farming with the Hidden Half of Nature.

In her introduction to the book, editor Julia Wright observes that ‘farmers and others working close to the land are also the interlocutors with another source of knowledge: the hidden half of nature. Nature as a primary knowledge source has yet to be included in Agricultural and Ecological Knowledge Systems frameworks.’ This volume, with chapters from 28 contributors distributed across four thematic sections, does well to initiate an exploration into and about that hidden half.

In his chapter on western sciences and other sciences, Bertus Haverkort comments: ‘Many development activities and conventional systems of education and technology development neglect or reject the importance of cosmovision, culture and indigenous knowledge and suggest the superiority of dominant Western science.’ Likewise, ‘Human mastery over nature’s secrets became the new aim of knowledge,’ Joseph Milne observes in his chapter on recollecting the primordial harmony. ‘Later, as a more mechanistic view of nature took hold, any notion of ’purpose’ or ‘final causality’ was entirely eliminated from scientific theory.’

‘The intersection of wave-based science and agriculture’ is a demanding section of the book to read for those who aren’t scientists or technically-minded, but nonetheless valuable for the chapter writers’ descriptions of nature’s finer forces both made visible and harnessed (or rather, co-opted) to bring about healthier crops.

Notable in this section I found are the chapters which describe the discipline of genodics (de Broglie waves, protein melodies and amino acids), astronomical rhythms in agriculture (an almost lost art, here Steiner and the principles of biodynamic agriculture are well referenced), and the emission of light by growing or living organisms (dealing in some detail with mitogenetic radiation, biophotons and fluorescence excitation spectroscopy).

These, together with the other contributions selected by editors Wright and Nicholas Parrott, bring into the foreground the sciences to detect subtlety (themselves the hidden half of science). Having such footing, one’s absorption of the chapters on embodied methodologies - on food rituals, intuitive farming, the Goethean approach to farming, yogic agriculture, etheric realms and radionics (Hugh Lovel), the subtle life of the bee (Sabrina Menestrina), dynamic water in agriculture (Simon Charter) is eased. These compellingly round off the latter two sections of the collection.

Subtle Agroecologies does admirably well to serve as Goethe had sought (in ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften’), from all true enterprise engaged in the study of what in his era was called natural science. ‘To rid the human mind of a hypothesis that has unduly restricted it, forcing it to observe erroneously and to combine falsely, to muse instead of seeing, to sophisticate instead of judging, is already to render it an inestimable service.’