Socioecological Complexity of Constructing and Maintaining Ecologically Integrated Smallholder Family Farms

Seeing Like a Farmer: Socioecological Complexity of Constructing and Maintaining Ecologically Integrated Smallholder Family Farms

Anil Bhattarai

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

Seeing Like a Farmer: Socioecological Complexity of Constructing and Maintaining Ecologically Integrated Smallholder Family Farms

Anil Bhattarai

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political-ecological conditions that led to the emergence and spread of ecological farming practices in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley. It takes a conjunctural approach to examine the spread of different ecological practices in different periods and the roles played by households, government institutions and others in this process of change. The dissertation draws upon data generated through an interdisciplinary qualitative research which utilized mixed-methods including a year-long ethnographic field research in Nepal, primary and secondary literature review, personal experiences, observation, and formal and informal interviews.

This dissertation shows that the adoption of ecological farming practices resulted from different conjunctural changes within the farming households and beyond. The major factors within the households that pushed for the adoption of ecological practices were: the reduced availability of household labour as children spent increasing amount of time in schools and adults engaged in off-farm activities, the decline of formal and informal access to common pool resources such as grazing lands and forests, and the perceived and/or real biophysical shifts such as intractable pest damage of crops, beneficial effects of multi-cropping, and degradation of soil by the use of chemical fertilizers. These changes were also possible because of changes beyond the households: specific policies and programs adopted by national government agencies, international development agencies, and, after 1990s, non-governmental organizations. These policies included direct support such as through cash subsidies (for biogas) and free distribution of saplings, educational and training programs on ecological management of farms, and formal and informal exchanges of ideas and experiences of ecological practices among farmers. This dissertation also shows that Increased commodification of other aspects of households, such as the education of children, construction of modern homes, and health care, has created challenges for ecological farming. Differentiated capacity for diversification of resource generation such as through migration and off-farm income shapes the possibility for the maintenance of the ecological farms.

This dissertation has developed the rubric of ‘seeing like a farmer’ as a conceptual tool to critically assess and examine this phenomenon. This framework integrates 'society' and 'nature,' and expands the focus beyond 'agricultural sector'.

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Acknowledgments (if any)

This dissertation took a while – and had a few hiccups. But it is finally here. This work would not have been possible without the help and guidance of my fantastic advisors at the Department of Geography and Planning: Prof. Katharine Rankin and Dr. Mark Hunter. Thank you so much. I will cherish forever the patience with which you dealt with me as I stumbled through iterations after iterations of this work, at times on the verge of giving up.

I would like to thank my external examiner Prof. Haroon Akram-Lodhi for all the valuable comments and suggestions he made before and during the exams. I would like to thank Prof. Sue

Ruddick for the detailed comments on my dissertation as an internal-external member of the examination committee. I am also indebted to her for introducing me to the Deleuzian ideas that has helped me to make sense of this bewilderingly complex and perennially changing material world I have tried to represent in this work. My graduate committee members Prof. W. Scott

Prudham and Dr. Kundan Kumar provided valuable comments and suggestions in the early drafts of the dissertation and doctoral research proposals. Many thanks indeed.

I have tried to incorporate my interdisciplinary scholarly trainings in this work. My training in political economy of health at the Center of Social Medicine and Community Health of

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi has been an indispensable part of the approach I have developed over time to make sense of the world around us. I would like to acknowledge my teachers there, Prof. Mohan Rao, Prof. Imrana Qadeer, Prof. Rama Varu and Prof. Ritu Priya for inculcating in me this desire to always link together the seemingly disparate world. My

iv anthropological training at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has been an important asset as I engaged in my doctoral work as an ethnographer and as I tried to make sense of the seemingly chaotic ‘data’ I gathered and constantly changing world I encountered. Thank you:

Prof. Michel Rivkin-Fish, my graduate advisor there, Prof. Arturo Escobar and Prof. Lauren

Leve.

Prof. Andrea Nightingale – thank you tons for being a good friend and inspiring co-researcher.

Some of the work we have done together has also seeped into this dissertation. Most importantly, it will be indispensable part of what I hope to do in the coming days ahead.

Sabin, Siru, Parag, Janmanjay, Angshul, Prabhat – thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making me a part of your circle in Toronto.

Prof. Angela Miles, thank you for all the encouragements and hospitality.

Kamala Gurung, Gaurab Rana, and Rayhan – you guys were amazing. When things looked totally bleak, you were there for me. Thank you for letting me into your home and making me a part of your family. Forever indebted.

Thank you Man Poudel, Radha jee, Prabha and Pranika – for hosting me in your house in the early days of my life in Toronto. You were home away from home and you always are. To Man

P., thank you for almost 3 decades of friendship.

I am indebted forever by the kindness, generosity, and creativity of farmers in Fulbari, Chitwan.

Chandra dai, Sita bhauju, Rajkumar, Sheela – you all were amazing as a host to this familiar researcher. Your farm stands testimony to the fact that world’s agriculture could be organized far

v more ecologically, aesthetically and humanly. Thank you Bishnu madam, Bhatta ji, and all others who were kind enough to respond to my queries and participate in conversations with me. I have tried to be as accurate as possible in representing the amazingly inspiring works you have done in your farms.

Thank you Basanta Ranabhat (Basanta jee) for first introducing me to Chandra dai. Then things took their own course. Your dedication in promoting ecological agriculture is absolute inspiration to me for decades and I have tried to be represent the work you and many others have been doing for decades in Nepal as sincerely as I could. I would like to also thank Govinda

Sharma and his family of Hasera Farm in Kavre for hosting me for a few days.

Thank you Judith Constant Chase of Everything Organic Nursery. You and Jim Danisch (late) were some of the early people who kindled in me this desire to learn about ecologically sane way of doing farming. You have been absolute inspiration to so many, including, of course, me.

Thank you Yam Mall jee for answering my questions about the history of permaculture and sustainable agriculture in Nepal.

My grandparents (from the sides of both of my parents) would have been thrilled to know I finished PhD. They were the early inspirations in my thinking deeply about this seemingly simple, but really complex – and capricious – world of farming. The orchard my grandparents from my father’s side had created in Tandi still exists as a testimony to the fact that inspiringly beautiful, highly productive and constantly improving agroecosystems can be created. Thank you.

My parents have been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in my life. My sister,

Binita’s ‘just-finish-and-come-here’ did some magic. Finish part is done, coming there will happen very soon. My brothers, sister-in-laws, nieces and nephews provided good vibes, and strong support and encouragements. Thank you Keshav dai, Punam bhauju, Yadav dai, Sirjana bhauju, Sunil, Usha, Dipesh, Shraddha, Amulya, Kaavya, Paarav, Divyata, and Syaani.

Aja, Ajee, and Swastika –huge thank you. The pomegranate tree still exists, right?

Pramod mama, big thank you for constant encouragement in writing, and, back in 1991, for letting me in the farm to do ‘permaculture.’ Aunty, Dr. Elizabeth Enslin – your inspirations are everywhere throughout this work. Also, thank you for editorial help in early draft.

Now, my son Apoorva and wife Sujata, I am absolutely thrilled to report that this looooooog journey is finally at an end – well, for a new beginning. Thank you so much for being there with me. Apoorva, you grew up with my seemingly never-ending PhD work. I finally did finish.

Fabulous Sujata, now you have got a much needed break from the task of constantly reminding me that I had been sitting under unfinished work! A new beginning awaits! Thank you and big hugs.

I would like to make it absolutely clear that all shortcomings are mine and mine only.

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Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ...... II

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (IF ANY) ...... IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... VIII

LIST OF TABLES ...... XI

LIST OF FIGURES ...... XII

GLOSSARY OF TERMS ...... XIII

LIST OF APPENDICES ...... XVIII

LIST OF ACRONYMS ...... XIX

CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION ...... 1

ORIGIN OF THE RESEARCH IDEA ...... 2

RESEARCH PROBLEM ...... 5

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES ...... 7

RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...... 7

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ...... 9

DISSERTATION OUTLINE ...... 21

CHAPTER 2 : SMALLHOLDERS: SAVIORS, VICTIMS, DESTROYERS ...... 24

INHERENTLY PRUDENT PEASANTS/IDEALIZED SMALLHOLDERS ...... 26

METABOLIC RIFT: VICTIM OF CAPITALIST ORGANIZATION OF FARMING ...... 33

POLITICAL ECOLOGY: SMALLHOLDERS AS VICTIMS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY ...... 37

HUMAN INTERVENTIONS VS IDEAL NATURE (WILDERNESS IDEAL): AGRICULTURE AS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE ENTERPRISE ...... 40

ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION: INEFFICACY OF SMALLHOLDERS AND LACK OF KNOWLEDGE ...... 46

CONCLUSION: NEED FOR A GROUNDED POLITICAL ECOLOGY ...... 48

CHAPTER 3 : SEEING LIKE A FARMER: TOWARDS A GROUNDED POLITICAL ECOLOGY ...... 50

ASSEMBLAGES: NATURE OF ENTITIES AND CAUSALITY ...... 53

ENTITIES AS ASSEMBLAGES ...... 54

NON-LINEAR CAUSALITY ...... 56

ECOLOGICAL SMALLHOLDER FARMING: THREE ASSEMBLAGES ...... 59

FARMS: DYNAMIC SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL ASSEMBLAGES ...... 59

PRACTICAL ASSEMBLAGES: PRODUCING SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE ...... 64

MAKING FARMS RUN: FAMILY LIVELIHOOD ASSEMBLAGES ...... 66 viii

CONCLUSION ...... 73

CHAPTER 4 : RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ...... 75

A MIXED METHOD QUALITATIVE APPROACH: EXPLORING DYNAMIC SOCIOECOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY ...... 76

TOOLS OF DATA COLLECTION ...... 80

DATA ANALYSIS ...... 89

CHAPTER 5 : THE MAKING OF CHITWAN VALLEY ...... 91

PRE-1950S: A MALARIAL VALLEY, HUNTING GROUND, AND SOURCES OF LAND REVENUE ...... 95

FROM 1950S TO 1980S: EXPANSION OF STATE, INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND AGRICULTURAL MODERNIZATION ...... 101

TAMING MALARIA AND DOING DEVELOPMENT ...... 106

FROM 1990S-2010S: SPREAD OF BIOGAS, TREES AND COVER CROPS IN FARMS, NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS, ORGANIC

FARMING, AND PERMACULTURE ...... 110

CONCLUSION ...... 124

CHAPTER 6 : EVERY FARM AN ECOSYSTEM ...... 126

ADHIKARI FARM REVISIT ...... 127

THE MAKING OF THE FARMS: CHANGING ASSEMBLAGES ...... 130

ECOLOGICAL INTEGRATION ...... 132

DIFFERENTIATED ECOLOGICAL INTEGRATION IN FARMS ...... 140

CONCLUSION ...... 152

CHAPTER 7 : ASSEMBLAGES OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS IN CONSTRUCTING AND MAINTAINING FARMS ...... 155

BIOGAS: FULBARI AND BEYOND ...... 156

TREES IN FARMS (AGROFORESTRY) ...... 167

GREEN-MANURES/COVER CROPS ...... 176

CONCLUSION ...... 185

CHAPTER 8 : CHALLENGES OF ECOLOGICAL FARMING: THE CHANGING LIVELIHOOD ASSEMBLAGES ...... 187

FAMILY LIVELIHOODS: EXPANDING THE IDEA OF ECONOMY ...... 188

FARMING: INPUT/OUTPUT ...... 190

BEYOND FARMS: COST OF LIVING ...... 204

WHO WILL TAKE OVER? ...... 213

CONCLUSION ...... 218

CHAPTER 9 : CONCLUSION ...... 221

SUMMARY ...... 223

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL INSIGHTS ...... 226

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH AREAS/ISSUES EMANATING FROM CURRENT RESEARCH ...... 228

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 235

APPENDICES ...... 274

List of Tables

Tables Page Table 1.1 Practical Significance of Ecological Farms 10 Table 2.1: Ecological problems and solutions: different approaches 25 Table 5.1: Malarial valley, strategic barrier, hunting ground and sources of land 100-101 revenue: pre-1950s Table 5.2: Hill migrations, institutional expansion, ecological experiments: 1950-1980s 104 Table 5.3 Landholding in Chitwan, 2011/12 (under 2 hectares) 112 Table 5.4 Landholding Structure in Chitwan, 2011/12 113 Table 5.5 Number of holdings of different sizes in Nepal, 1981/82- 2011/12 113 Table 5.6 Land Tenure Arrangements in Nepal (1991-2011) 114 Table 5.7: Expansion of biogas, agroforestry and cover crops: 1990s-2010s 115 Table 7.1 Number of biogas units installed across Nepal (1992-2016) 164 Table 7.2: Biogas: Timelines and Forces/Triggers/Factors 166 Table 7.3: Agroforests: Timelines and Forces/Triggers/Factors 173-174 Table 7.4: Cover Cropping: Timelines and Forces/Triggers/Actors 178 Table 8.1 Adhikari Farm’s Income-Expenditure Table for Carrot Production in 2010 191 Table 8.2 What Does Adhikari Family Farm Contain? 193 Table 8.3 The List of Biodiversity in Fulbari Farm 194-195 Table 8.4 Diverse Markets for Different Products 197 Table 6.1 Materials Used for Constructing 947 housing units in Fulbari Village, 2011 211 Table 6.2 Changes in the materials used in housebuilding in Nepal, 1996-2011 212

List of Figures

Figures Page Figure 5.1 Google Earth Image of Chitwan, 2011 89 Figure 5.2 Chitwan’s Administrative units with Nepal’s map inset 91 Figure 5.3 An outdoor market place 109 Figure 6.1 Chitwan District’s Lower-level administrative units 120 Figure 7.1 A household-level biogas design used in Nepal 153

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Glossary of Terms

Agrarian Household: The smallest social unit involved in farming, and the basic unit used in official agricultural censuses and other surveys carried out in Nepal. Officially, people cohabiting in a given home and sharing a kitchen make up this unit. In Nepal, this unit increasingly consists of a married couple and their children, as the extended family household diminishes in prevalence.

Agrarian Political Economy: An approach to analyze the relations among different classes involved in agricultural production. It also focusses on the distribution of the means of production and the products among these classes.

Agrarianism: A philosophy that emphasizes the inherent value of agrarian rural life.

Agricultural Knowledge: Practical and conceptual understanding of different aspects of farming, ranging from the embodied understanding of farmers and workers to specialized understanding produced in various academic/scientific institutions.

Agricultural Modernization: An approach to transform ‘traditional’ agriculture that focusses on the promotion of modern inputs such as chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, hybrid seeds, and large scale mechanization. This approach was the main foundation of agricultural development interventions carried out by various international agencies, state agencies, and non- governmental and inter-governmental organizations during the twentieth century in the countries of the global south.

Agroecology: A body of knowledge that emphasizes ecological understanding of agriculture in which the interrelationships among living and non-living elements of farms is explored as a way of building productive farm ecosystems.

Agroecosystem: The totality of farms that is made up of animals, plants, built-structures, and other elements in a particular climate, topography and social context. An agro-ecosystem, as the name suggests, is an ecosystem reorganized for agricultural purposes. It is a domesticated

xiii ecosystem, which entails a restructuring of the trophic processes in nature, that is, the processes of food and energy flow in the economy of living organisms.

Assemblage: Used both as a process of formation, and a relatively stable state, of an entity; as a process, assemblage is the interaction among various entities that results in the formation of other higher-level entities. As a relatively stable state, assemblage is an entity that comes into existence when other entities combine with each other, but its stable identity is temporary, never permanently fixed. We can consider its state to be ‘meta stable.’

Biogas: Methane generated in semi-underground anaerobic chamber through the interactions of methanogenic microbes and organic matter, and that is used to primarily cook food in Nepal. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas and its release into atmosphere is a severe threat to global warming and climate disruption. The methane captured in biogas digester and used through cooking, lighting, and generating electricity keeps the methane from being released to the atmosphere.

Carbon Sinks: The term carbon sink refers to any process that removes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases. Both the terrestrial biosphere and oceans can act as carbon sinks.

Carbon Sequestration: Carbon sequestration is the process of removing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), either through biological processes (e.g. plants and trees), or geological processes through storage of CO2 in underground reservoirs.

Carbon emissions due to Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF): Land usages and land-use changes can act either as sinks or as emission sources. It is estimated that approximately one-fifth of global emissions result from LULUCF activities. The Kyoto Protocol allows Parties to receive emissions credit for certain LULUCF activities that reduce net emissions. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, on the other hand, does not currently allow the trading of credits generated by LULUCF activities.

Climate Change: Change in a relatively stable weather pattern in any place. It manifests in changes in broadly established patterns of rainfall, wind, temperature, snowfall, and other weather phenomena. Climate change also manifests in changes in phenological phenomena such as the flowering patterns of plants, and migratory patterns of birds and animals. xiv

Complexity: A condition that emerges from the dynamic interactions among a large number of living and non-living entities.

Cover Crops: Plants raised as soil cover and nutrient sources for the soil. They also provide nutrients to different microorganisms that are involved in recycling nutrients through complex food webs in the soil, and thereby converting the minerals into forms available to plants.

District: A key governing unit of Nepal created in 1962. Until 2016, this was the main unit for administering various developmental interventions by the Nepali state, including those in agricultural sector. After a new constitution was adopted in 2016, Municipalities and Village Councils have been designated as the main units for local-level governance, with provincial parliaments as middle-level political bodies with relative autonomy from the central state administration.

Division of Labour: Assignment of different roles and tasks among different people. The division of labour can be based on gender relations, specific skills and expertise, and ownership of the means of production. In smallholder settings, often the same individuals carry out multiple tasks.

Earth System: A complex multi-level system that emerges through the interactions of biophysical entities and phenomena at multiple spatio-temporal scales including at the level of the biosphere.

Ecosystem: An ecosystem is a subset of the global economy of nature—a local or regional system of plants and animals working together to create the means of survival.

External Inputs: Materials derived from outside the farms as inputs for agricultural production. These often include chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, hybrid seeds, tools, and specialized expertise.

Farm: In a general sense, the land dedicated to produce different crops and to raise animals, and that also works as a place for human habitat. More specifically, a farm comprises of various components (such as soil, homes, sheds, biogas, compost pit, vermicompost shed, ponds, orchards, crops, trees, and animals) to produce goods and services for human consumption. Farms vary across the world in terms of size, topography, composition of elements, arrangements

xv of elements, purpose of production, tenure arrangement, relationships with markets, and relationships with governing institutions.

Farm Integration: The placement of different entities in farm to derive maximum synergistic value from their mutual interactions over time. Examples include planting trees and vines together so that trees provide climbing space for vines; raising animals so that they provide multiple products such as manure, meat, milk, and cattle dung for biogas.

Green Revolution: The agricultural modernization project of 1960s in India that promoted the use of soil chemistry, synthetic chemicals, machinery and hybrid seeds to increase agricultural productivity and to convert ‘traditional’ farming into ‘modern farming.’

Household economy: The making of household livelihoods through a combination of production, consumption, and distribution activities that include subsistence, market interactions, and public institutional supports.

Metabolic Rift: A Marxian concept that deals with the ecological problems in agriculture as the disruption of nutrient cycle resulting primarily from the transfer of farm products to distant places and the supposed breaking of the nutrient cycle.

Municipality: The lowest level of governing structure in Nepal.

Organic Farming: In a formal sense, a method of farming formally certified by relevant agencies to have confirmed to designated standards of organic farming in a given place. Informally, organic farming has highly localized meanings ranging from farming that eschews pesticides and chemical fertilizers, to that based on intricate management of different living and non-living components of farm.

Permaculture: An ecological design system based on three principles: care of the earth, care of the people and share of the surplus. This concept was developed jointly by two Australians, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the 1970s.

Political Ecology: An analytical approach that combines agrarian political economy in examining the ecological transformations of agrarian world. Political ecology emphasizes the

xvi need to understand ecological changes as outcomes of relations among different social and non- human actors situated differently in relations of power.

Seed Banks: Local-level seed storage facilities created by farmers, non-governmental organizations, and various levels of government agencies across Nepal.

Socio-Ecological Complexity: A state of complexity arising out of the interactions among a large number of human and non-human entities.

Soil Ecology: A complex bio-physical system in soils that include both living and mineral entities and their interactions among themselves and with the climate and geology in a particular place and over time.

Sustainable Agriculture: A condition of ecological sustainability in farms.

Transition to Ecological Farming: A gradual move away from high-external inputs-based agriculture to one based primarily on the integration and recycling of resources in farms.

Village Development Committee: The lowest level of governing public institution in Nepal until 2016. This was the lowest unit of self-government during my field work but was replaced by Village Council with the adoption of a new constitution in 2016.

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List of Appendices

Appendix 1: Checklists for Key Informant Interviews and Participant Observations

Appendix 2: Permaculture Design Course Curriculum

Appendix 3: Adhikari Farm’s Carrot Production Cost and Benefit Account (2010)

Appendix 4: Adhikari Farm’s Biodiversity Board (2010)

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List of Acronyms

AEPC: Alternative Energy Promotion Center

AIC: Agriculture Input Corporation

BHC: Benzene Hexachloride

BSP: Biogas Support Program

CBS: Central Bureau of Statistics

CDM: Clean Development Mechanism

CEPRED: Center for Environmental and Agricultural Policy Research, Extension and Development

DADO: District Agriculture Development Office

DDCC: District Development Committee of Chitwan

DDT: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

ECOSCENTRE: Ecological Services Center

ERDG: Energy Research and Development Group:

FM: Frequency Modulated

GGC: Gobar Gas Company

GON: Government of Nepal

HMG-N: His Majesty’s Government of Nepal

IAAS: Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science

IAASTD: International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development

INSAN: Institute of Sustainable Agriculture Nepal xix

IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

IRRI: International Rice Research Institute

JTA: Junior Technical Assistant

LIBIRD:

LULUCF: Land Luse, Land Use Change, and Forestry

MEA: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

MOLE: Ministry of Labor and Employment

NGO: Non-governmental Organization

NPG: Nepal Permaculture Group

PDC: Permaculture Design Course

PGS: Participatory Guarantee Scheme

SECARD: Society for Environment Conservation, Agricultural Research and Development

UNFAO: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

UNOCHA: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

USA: United States of America

USD: United States Dollar

VDC: Village Development Committee

xx 1

Chapter 1 : Introduction

“..peasants’ struggles are not restricted to the streets, to occupying central squares in the capitals or setting fire to a McDonald’s – they are also, equally, struggling when trying to improve a field or to construct a communal irrigation system.” Jan Dowe van der Ploeg, Peasants and the Art of Farming (2013, p.10)

In the early 1990s, a few farmers in Fulbari village (now under the greater Bharatpur

Metropolitan City) of Nepal’s Chitwan Valley adopted ecological farming practices – practices that minimize or eliminate the use of harmful synthetic agrochemicals, generates and recycles nutrients, produces energy for households use, enhances biological diversity, and stores atmospheric carbon in soil. By mid-2011, almost two hundred out of a little over 800 farms – almost 25% – had been certified as ‘organic farms,’ with several others who were not certified but who had stopped using synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides and who had adopted several ecological farming practices such as cover cropping, agroforestry, and biogas. This was a major shift given that, since 1960s, Fulbari village and most of the Chitwan Valley had been promoted as Nepal’s main center of the green revolution industrial agriculture.

This dissertation investigates the political ecological conditions that made possible these shifts.

More specifically it addresses the following two questions: What were the conditions within the family households and in broader political ecology which led to these shifts? What were the challenges of expanding these practices? To answer these questions, this dissertation explores multiple historical conjunctures—periods when multiple factors within the households and beyond pushed farmers to adopt different ecological practices.

The dissertation uses data generated through interdisciplinary research which included a year- long ethnographic participant observation primarily in Chitwan Valley but also in other parts of

Nepal, review of primary and secondary documents, personal experiences, observations, and formal and inform interviews with farmers, agricultural experts, policy makers, and traders.

Origin of the Research Idea

The idea for this inquiry was first kindled when I visited a farm on December 29, 2008. That day, I had gone to visit Basanta Ranabhat of Ecological Services Center (ECOSCENTRE) at his office in Narayangarh city of Chitwan. We had been friends for many years and had gotten our training in advanced permaculture1 design in 1994. During our conversation, he mentioned about the spread of organic farming in Fulbari village. I got interested and asked if we could go there.

He called Chandra Adhikari and asked if we could visit his farm and if he were free to show us around. Chandra dai agreed. I refer to Mr. Chandra Adhikari as Dai, which is a Nepali way of referring to him as my brother by age, but not necessarily by blood. Referring to each other as

1 ‘Permaculture’ is a term coined by two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1974 to refer to the system of ecological design of human habitats based on the principles of earth care, people care, and share of the surplus. (Holmgren, 2018) https://holmgren.com.au/about-permaculture/

3 dai (elder brother), bhai (younger brother), didi (elder sister) bahini (younger sister) is part of everyday relations in Nepal and other part of South Asia.

When we reached the farm in the late afternoon, he was waiting for us at his front porch. “Yahan suddha maha paincha” (Nepali) (pure honey is available here), read a sign nailed on a neem tree at the gate of the farm. The front yard of the single-story cement and brick house consisted of an open area and two small patches of land flanked by a straight pathway. One patch had flowering plants on the ground, several bee-hives on metal stools, several pineapple plants, and an avocado tree at the edge. On another patch were a few areca (betel) nut and coconut trees, a few chili pepper plants, and some perennial flowers. After shaking hands and the exchange of a few introductory words, Chandra dai took us on a tour of his farm.

The road-side front edge of the homestead land was lined with trees, bananas, yam vines, and a grain mill housed in a corrugated-roof shed. A few meters to the left of the house were a cattle- shed, a multi-level pen that housed rabbits and guinea pigs, a raised platform for pigeon coops, a biogas plant, a toilet attached to the biogas dome, and a composting pit. He showed us a vermiculture shed that was surrounded by a narrow moat in which they had raised tilapia fish.

There were two other fish ponds behind the house. They were empty at the time of our visit.

Chandra dai told us that during the last monsoon they had raised catfish and grass carp in them.

The backyard had a mini-orchard of mango, lychee, guava, and papaya, with pineapples growing at its edge. The rest of this a little over three-quarter of a hectare farm was divided into several plots and sub-plots that were under different crops, winter seasonal vegetables, and winter corn.

An irrigation canal owned and operated by the government agency, the Chitwan District

Irrigation Office, passed through the farm. The three-member Adhikari family, which included

Chandra dai, his wife Maya, and their son, Raj, had planted several varieties of bamboo (grass),

4 and fodder and fruit trees on their portion of the canal dikes. Their three plots of land behind the canal were planted with buckwheat and mustard crops. In the theoretical parlance that I was deeply immersed into at that time, it seemed to me, Chandra dai has had his own version of the agroecological collage and a unique set of elements in his own version of the assemblage.

ECOSCENTRE that Basanta jee had co-founded and was heading when I met him in 2008 is a non-governmental organization (NGO) set up in early 1990s by a few graduates of the Chitwan- based Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS) to promote organic farming in Nepal.

One of its main founders had gotten a year-long training on organic farming in England. Prior to reaching the farm, Basanta jee had informed me that his organization had been involved in training some farmers in Fulbari on techniques of organic farming and permaculture design.

Moreover, he also said that this farm and others in Fulbari were regularly used as field-based learning sites during the training programs that ECOSCENTRE had been organizing for both farmers and non-farmers.

During one and a half hours of our visit, Chandra dai told us how he began his journey into permaculture and organic farming in the early 1990s. He narrated his story of doing commercial vegetable farming in the past. He vividly told us the turning point in his life when pest devasted his batch of winter vegetable stands in 1991. It was also clear from our conversation that the ecological organization of the farm emerged through interventions that predated the arrival and spread of ecological farming in Fulbari.

Let me offer a glimpse of the history of how it all evolved in the Chitwan Valley, usually known as one of the bread baskets of Nepal. This and many other farms first emerged in mid-1950s through the conversion of Chitwan’s wild grasslands, forests, and swamps. The organization of

5 these farms emerged over the last five decades through the interventions such as the clearing of trees and wild-grasses, routine agricultural activities, construction and maintenance of homes and other built structures, the use of green-manuring in the late 1970s, gradual addition of trees in different parts of the farm in 1970s and 1980s, the addition of fish and Azolla (a nitrogen- producing marine plant wildly available in swamps, river banks and other bodies across the world including in Chitwan valley) in farms in 1990s, and the modification of cattle sheds in early 2000s. In other words, while Chandra dai’s family and many others, according to him, started to give up synthetic chemical inputs from early 1990s, the overall ecological organization of farms changed over a longer period of time. I went back to Fulbari in September 2010 for a year-long doctoral research to explore how ecological farms like this and others had emerged over time and what prospects, if any, existed for practices adopted by these farms to be expanded to other farms in Chitwan valley and beyond. This dissertation presents the findings of this inquiry and distils some practical and theoretical insights regarding the adoption of ecological practices in smallholder farms.

Research Problem

This inquiry documents the spread of ecological agriculture in the smallholder-dominated context of Nepal’s Chitwan Valley, a place initially selected by Nepali government and international development agencies for the promotion of industrial agriculture in the 1950s

(Skerry et al, 1991). It examines the conjunctural moments and different factors involved in those conjunctures that have led to the spread of ecological farming. Although smallholder agriculture occupies smaller land area than the large-scale industrial agriculture globally, it is the dominant form of agriculture in the countries of much of the global south. These smallholder

6 farms produce over 70% of food consumed globally and provide livelihoods for almost 2 billion people (Lowder, Skoet, and Singh, 2014).

As if to outcompete the smallholder agrarian economy, industrial agriculture was introduced as a global agenda after the Second World War. This newer brand of agriculture is based on the use fossil-fuel and synthetic chemical inputs, management of large-scale irrigation, monocultural cultivation, and industrial-scale processing. This new model, usually called the green revolution, remained an important goal of agricultural planning throughout the world during much of the twentieth century (Glasser [ed.], 2011; Conkin, 2008; Fitzgerald, 2003). Industrial agriculture first emerged in the United States out of a constellation of forces such as the expansion of institutionalized agricultural sciences, large-scale deployment of experts to promote industrial agricultural practices, large-scale infrastructural investment, expansion of the industrial production of chemical inputs, and massive availability of fossil fuel during the first half of the twentieth century (Fitzgerald, 2003). This form of agriculture provided an important leitmotif for international and national level agricultural development planning in much of the countries of the

Global South in the second half of the twentieth century (Cullather, 2010).

There is, however, a growing evidence and recognition that this form of agriculture is ecologically destructive. While this highly energy intensive agriculture led to short-term increase in productivity of some cereal crops (especially wheat, rice, corn, and soybean), it has also led to the degradation of ecological resources, jeopardizing the very basis of agricultural production

(IAASTD, 2009b). Widespread problems such as the degradation of soil fertility, increasing air and water pollution, and decline of agricultural biodiversity across much of the world have become too serious to be overlooked (IAASTD, 2009b; Pretty, 2006). Recently, scientific studies have also shown that industrial agriculture has been a significant contributor to the increasing

7 atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, leading to the disruption of the relatively stable climate system that had been the hallmark of the Holocene period, roughly the last ten thousand years. The 2014 Fifth Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC) considers “cropland management, grazing land management, and restoration of organic soils” as “the most cost-effective mitigation in agriculture” (IPCC, 2014, p.19).

In this context, a radical shift is needed to address these ecological problems and contribute to the mitigation of disruptive climate change. This dissertation explores ecological agriculture as important alternative to industrial agriculture. Exploring the ecological shifts in smallholder setting of Nepal can provide insights for understanding the realities and possibilities of a shift that is much-needed on a global scale.

Research Objectives

The dissertation has three main objectives:

• To document conjunctures of the spread of ecological farming in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley

• To analyze the factors that led to ecological farming

• To identify the challenges for expanding these practices across places and time

Research Questions

In order to achieve the research objectives, the dissertation addresses two broad questions: What were the conditions in the households and beyond that led to the spread of ecological practices, and what were the challenges faced by multiple actors including farmers? I address these broad questions by answering two sets of specific questions. The first set include the following questions: what practices and technologies have farmers adopted over time; when did the specific practices emerge? What different factors within the households and beyond led to the

8 origins and spread of these practices? Where did these knowledge and skills come from? Who produced them? How are they transformed over time? Did they emerge from within the farms or from outside? For example, how did the biogas system, that has become a part of almost a million farming households in Nepal (Rai, 2017), emerge and spread? What made farmers adopt these practices? This set of questions helps us see the variety of actors and causal processes involved in the making ecological farms.

The second set of questions are related to the challenges faced by multiple actors in the generation and spread of these practices. These questions specifically focused on the challenges faced by farming households in generating and sustaining their livelihoods. What kind of resources are mobilized for running the agricultural operations? How are inputs mobilized? How are products distributed?

Farming families also are integrated with the economy of the outside world, not only through their integration with the agricultural economy of inputs and outputs of the farm components, but also through the myriad of ways other components become part of making family livelihoods.

For instance, they have to build and maintain homes, buy clothes and other consumer items, celebrate festivals, travel from one place to another, watch movies, send their kids to school, avail of medical services, and deal with contingencies. How have these aspects of family farms changed over time?

These questions help us understand the relational process through which ecological farming originates and spreads. In broad terms, what happens in family farms is not the sole prerogative of the members of the farming families. The making of farms also embodies the works of many actors beyond the farms and over time: for example, many seeds are produced through a network

9 of actors that include farmers, neighbors, seed breeders, government agencies, transnational seed agencies, corporations, and local businesses, to name a few. Together, these two sets of questions help us understand the involvement of multiple actors (national and international governmental agencies, scientific institutions, householders) in the generation and spread of ecological practices, the changes in households which led to their adoption over time, and the challenges of generating family livelihoods these and the ways the householders have attempted to overcome these challenges.

I explore these changes in three conjunctural moments: the pre-1950s period of malarial landscapes; the 1950-1990 period of development and modernization which was characterized by expansion of smallholder farming, proliferation of governmental institutions (international development institutions, state agencies, and non-governmental organization), and the 1990- present characterized by increased adoption of ecological practices in farms. I answer the research questions by considering causal factors both within the family households and beyond.

As I elaborate in chapter 3, I adopt a multi-causal and multi-scalar causal framework to understand the onset and spread of ecological practices, and to examine the challenges of expanding ecological farming over time and across places.

Significance of the Study

The need for deepening our understanding of the construction and maintenance of ecological smallholder farms can hardly be overstated. We all eat food to live, and our food comes from different sources such as the oceans, forests, and agricultural farms. Among these sources, smallholder family farms produce most of the food (FAO, 2015). These farms also produce many other materials and services for human consumption. Moreover, people – both farmers and non-farmers – build homes and raise families in these landscapes. Besides the need for ensuring

10 the production of basic necessities such as food and other materials, ecological farms can also have implications for environmental, health, and economic quality of those who actively manage those farms, live in them, and live in the landscapes within which farms exist (Bjorklund et al.,

2012; Pretty, 2007).

For example, these farms can have beneficial impacts on the quality of surface and underground water, the depletion or the enrichment of the soils, emission or the sequestration of carbon, the quality of ambient and in-house air, the quality of food, and the quality of overall environmental health. They can also help mitigate greenhouse gases and sequester carbon in the soil. Besides these ecological benefits, ecological practices can also have economic and political effects. They can improve the economic standing of farming households and give greater self-control to farmers over their farms and households. The following table (Table 1.1) synthesizes the practical benefits of ecological farming.

Table 1.1: Practical benefits of ecological farms Ecological Health Economic Political

Soil fertility Prevent Input reduction/elimination Enhance (Pretty, 2007) Poisoning (Pretty, 2007) Distributed Water quality (Kumar, et al., Productivity (Pretty, 2007) asset base (Pretty, 2007) 2007) Minimize negative (Pretty, 2007, Air quality Enhance Economic consequences van der Ploeg, (Chang, et al., Nutritional arising out of bad health 2013) 2019; Lee(ed), quality of food caused by high use of Enhance 1976;(Pretty, (Pretty, 2007) chemical inputs (Kumar, et Greater control 2007) Address al. 2009) over production Climate Change Respiratory Maintain Employment of of basic adaptation and Illnesses (Pretty, rural population (Pretty, necessities mitigation 2007) 2007) (Akram-Lodhi, (Pretty, 2007) Address Water- 2014) Biodiversity borne Diseases conservation (Pretty, 2007) (Pretty, 2007)

There has been growing focus on ecological farming among a diverse range of people: agrarian scholars with different theoretical lenses, social activists campaigning for smallholder family farming and food sovereignty, planners occupied with interventions in agriculture with different goals such as environmental quality, food security, and employment generation, and policymakers concerned with both the ecology of farms and viability of family farming. I discuss below the significance of this study both for scholars of agrarian studies (broadly defined) and for practitioners such as politicians, planners, activists, and policy-makers.

Practical significance: The need for ecological farming has become a practically pressing issue given the fact that there is less chance of expanding agricultural land to increase production for growing population (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 2011). There is an emerging consensus among major protagonists involved in agricultural sector that agriculture needs to be firmly grounded in the principles of ecosystem resilience (FAO, 2011; McIntyre, et al., 2008; Pretty, 2000, 2005, 2011; United Nations Environmental Program, 2005; United

Nations General Assembly, 2010).

A number of interrelated factors have led to these policy shifts. First, mainstream agricultural institutions at various levels have begun to accept that, while agriculture based on the use of external inputs such as synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large scale machinery, hybrid and genetically modified seeds, monoculture plantations, and controlled irrigation led to higher productivity of some crops in the past, it also resulted in the degradation of land and other resources to such an extent that continuing onto this path of agricultural development is not ecologically feasible in the future (FAO 2011; IAASTD 2009a; Millennium Ecosystem

Assessment (MEA) 2005; Pretty 2011).

Second, over the last several decades, ecological practices, which are aimed at restoring, maintaining and enhancing ecological integrity and productivity of farms and their immediate surroundings (Altieri 2011; Berry 1978; Pretty 2005), have become widespread and publicly visible around the world (Altieri 2010; Brookfield and Parsons 2007; Horlings and Marsden

2011; Kumar et al. 2009; Lappe 2012; Pretty 2005; Pretty, Toulmin and Williams 2011; Wright

2009).

Third, these practices have resulted also from growing understanding of the complexity of ecological systems in agricultural knowledge institutions. These institutions have begun to integrate this understanding into teaching, research, and extension activities (Kumar et al., 2009;

Pretty, 2005; Pretty, Toulmin and Williams, 2011; Wright, 2009).

Fourth, changing climate and consequent uncertainties in weather patterns around the world is creating an imperative for farmers, researchers, and policy makers to explore locally-adapted ecological farming as both an adaptive response to uncertainties arising out of climate disruptions (Lal, 2012; Pretty et al., 2011) as well as a way of sequestering carbon to mitigate some greenhouse gas emissions (Wollenberg et al., 2012; Pretty et al., 2011). Finally, health concerns arising out of how food is produced, processed, and consumed have further pushed the issue of agricultural sustainability to the centre of public debates (Lang and Heasman, 2004;

Lappe, 2012; Pollan, 2006).

Besides this emerging consensus within the agricultural sector, there is also another body of scholarship that sees the transition to ecological farming as a central part of transition from fossil-fueled industrialism to ecologically sustainable future (Duncan, 2002, 1995; Lappe, 2011;

Montgomery, 2007). This view questions the viability of industrialization based on linear

13 throughput of fossil fuels and minerals. This view is premised on the fact that all life forms on earth depend on ecosystems for their basic survival as well as, in the context humans at least, for comfortable and socially meaningful life (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [MEA], 2005). It has become increasingly clear that the currently dominant form of fossil-fueled industrialism has been destructive of these life-sustaining ecosystems around the world. Millennium Ecosystem

Assessment, a report prepared after a four-year long review, involving over 400 researchers analyzing the trends of changes in ecosystems around the world during the last four decades, has shown that every ecosystem on earth is in various levels of significant and, in some instance, possibly irreversible degradation (MEA, 2005).

The currently dominant industrial production system degrades ecosystems at various points: at the point of extraction and transfer of raw materials from ecosystems to factory floors; at the point of conversion of those raw materials into commodities; at the point of distribution of commodities through the transportation networks; at the point of the consumption of these commodities; and at the point of disposal of consumer wastes. Life-cycle analysis of almost every industrial product currently produced and used across the world attests to this grim fact

(McDonaugh and Braungart, 2013). While ecosystem degradation remained localized for a long time, we are also witnessing their cumulative effects in the planetary disruptions of climate systems and other bio-geo-chemical systems (Rockström et al., 2009).

There are some attempts at transitioning from ecologically destructive industrial system to a non- destructive industrial production system based on ecological designs and green chemistry2

2 Green chemistry is a field of chemistry that focuses on the generation of useful chemical compounds that are non- toxic and that are biodegradable so that their use in industrial system does not generate harmful waste products.

(McDonough and Braungart, 2013). Those who propose this transition focus on transforming the way products are made, with remarkable success (McDonaugh and Braungart, 2013). The moot question is whether this transformation is possible sufficiently quickly, and across sufficiently wider scale enough to arrest the unfolding ecosystem degradation, before we enter into planetary tipping points (Lenton & Watson, 2011; Lenton, 2012; Rockstrom et. al., 2009).

Given the very high level of energy and material intensity, for most of the people, the industrial system, even when firmly embedded in ecosystem cycles, can never be the primary option as a source of livelihoods. It is in this context that Duncan (1996) argues that industrial production system can be compatible with ecologically sustainable future only if it is radically downsized and re-embedded within ecosystems through circular flows of materials and energy.

The ecological limits of currently-dominant industrial system have led Duncan (1996) to argue for the centrality of agriculture for human sustenance. Additionally, given the fact that agricultural land is, comparatively speaking, the most democratically distributed means of production on earth (Hall, 2013; Mishra, 2007), agriculture has the potential to generate livelihoods in the future world of radically contracted industrial production in a broadly distributed manner.

In this context, understanding what farmers do, what makes possible for them to continue doing farming, and how are ecological practices generated, refined and adopted, is crucial for good policy and programmatic interventions. What makes the adoption of the technologies and practices possible in farms, therefore, has practical significance for diverse actors ranging from agricultural planners in the government offices, policy makers at the international institutions, and social movements championing the need for transitioning to ecological practices.

Theoretical significance: This dissertation takes a grounded political ecological approach to understand the origin and spread of ecological farming in smallholder agrarian context. Rather than assuming a priori that smallholder farmers are ecologically prudent as is often done by some activists and scholars (Desmarais, 2008; van der Ploeg, 2013), the approach I take here explores multiple factors in farming households and beyond which led to the adoption of ecological farming. I elaborate this grounded political approach in Chapter 3, in which I elaborate how my work is animated by concerns of political ecology, while also committed to an analysis driven by experience and everyday material organization of farms on the ground.

Although environmental change has emerged as a prominent issue in agrarian scholarship recently, traces of it can be found in the works of agrarian political economists and other agrarian thinkers from early on (see, Duncan, 2000, for work on Adam Smith; Foster, 1999 on Marx,

Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin; van der Ploeg, 2010, 2013 on Chayanov; Shiva, 1991, on

Gandhi and Howard; and Berry 1986 [1978] on Liberty Bailey in the US). Many of these old concerns have been revived and reformulated in the context of the growing scholarly interest in ecological issues at present times.

These scholarly interests are expressed in diverse ways. For some, the adoption of ecological practices signify the resilience of family farms in the face of a myriad of agrarian crises including ecological crisis brought about industrial agriculture (Altieri, 2013; Desmarais, 2007; van der Ploeg, 2008, 2013; Weis, 2007). According to Desmarais, we have,

“on the one hand, a globalized, neo-liberal, corporate-driven model in which agriculture is seen exclusively concentrated into the hands of agro-industry; and, on the other, a very different, more humane, rural model based on a "rediscovered ethic of development" stemming from the "productive culture" and "productive vocation" of farming families” (p.33).

Desmarais’ focus is not on ecology alone, but she presents the small-scale farmers as the champions of ecological agriculture, as against the large-scale corporate farming. In the early twentieth century, Chayanov carried out empirical and theoretical works on various forms of farming ranging from the then dominant peasant family farms to commodity-centered capitalist farms and the nascent state-proposed collectivized farms (Chayanov, 1966 [1925]). His purpose was to present alternative to drastic collectivization being proposed by one section of the

Bolshevik party that was in total control of state power in Russia after 1917 (Shanin, 2009). With meticulous use of widely available rich data from local provincial records and his own observation, he showed that peasant farming could work as the foundation for building more prosperous agrarian sector and generate surplus for industrialization. It was this work that has been taken up expanded recently by van der Ploeg (2008, 2013) to make an argument that peasant farming is based on constructing several balances, one of which is the ecological balance aimed at perpetuating the farm as productive resource (van der Ploeg, 2013). Similarly, through comparative studies of smallholder family farms in different parts of the world, Netting has argued that Chayanov’s approach needed to be modified in context of populous regions with relative scarcity of land. He shows with case studies from diverse places ranging from Swiss

Alps, Chinese peasant farming, and African householders that peasant farms are less energy intensive, more ecologically resilient and highly productive polyculture systems (Netting, 1993).

The concern for building ecological farms has also emerged as important part of thinking among agricultural modernization theorists. Agricultural modernization is rooted in the belief that scientific rationality is the main means for human progress, and that agricultural sciences and modern technologies are means for transforming the supposedly backward peasant/traditional farmers into modern agriculturists (Fitzgerald, 2003). This approach informed the

17 transformations of agriculture across the world throughout the twentieth century. Agricultural modernization involved setting up of institutional, material, and discursive infrastructures during the twentieth century (Cullather, 2010; Fitzgerald, 2003; Scott, 1998). Agricultural modernization as a program of interventions was carried out by the national states, transnational bilateral and multilateral institutions, research consortiums, mass media, non-governmental agencies, and many others (Escobar, 1995). These actors mobilized resources - money, materials, and mind - to set up schools and universities, to publish and disseminate textbooks and audio- visuals, to train experts and researchers, to build storage facilities and market stalls, to exchange germplasms and experts, and to set up input factories and distribution networks (Cullather,

2010). The growing concern for environment is expressed under the rubric of ecological modernization of agriculture although this concept represents a diverse set of ideas and interventions that are often not logically consistent, ranging from introduction of crop-specific projects to address changing climate, to agroecology, agroforestry, payment for ecosystem services, promotion of eco-labeling of agricultural products, no-till and cover-cropping, and integrating ecology in agricultural research and teaching (Haaren, 1994; Horlings and Marsden,

2008).

Yet another approach is to see ‘capitalist’ agriculture as the main cause of the breakdown of agroecosystem balance (Foster, 1999, 2000). This approach is often labelled as theory of metabolic rift. This ‘theory’ is the reformulation of Marx’s exploration of soil degradation. As a non-disciplinary scholar, Marx incorporated knowledge emerging in social and natural sciences in his works. His primary focus has been on the political economy; however, he was also fascinated by emerging knowledge in natural sciences and its implications for political economy

(Foster, 1999). One such knowledge was that of soil chemistry. According to this knowledge,

18 agricultural land is a repository of nutrients, and when plants grow, they take up some of these nutrients and combine with sunlight, water, and atmospheric carbon to grow and produce seeds.

Therefore, when farmers harvest plants, they are taking out nutrients from the soil. As long as farmers use those plants close at home and recycle the human and animal waste back to the land, the nutrient cycle is complete, and land is replenished. However, when plants and plant parts are transferred further away from farms, according to this view, that leads to the breakdown of this nutrient cycle. This breakdown is called the 'metabolic rift.' Liebig has elaborated this idea in his

Letters on Modern Agriculture (Liebig, 1859). Marx used this understanding to explain the soil degradation under the condition of growing separation of the place of the agricultural production and the place of consumption. It is this part of Marx's analysis that Marxist scholars have revived recently to elaborate the concept of metabolic rift (Foster, 1999; Clausen, Clark, and Longo,

2015). Following this resurrection, the idea of metabolic rift has been picked up by scholars to explore different aspects of ecological crisis such as the depletion of ocean fisheries (Clark and

Clausen, 2005), eco-housing (Viteto, 2013), and municipal waste (Clement, 2009). At the core of this idea is the claim that capitalist system, based on the need for accumulation and profit- making, is inherently ecologically destructive (Clausen, Clark, and Longo, 2015; Foster, 1999).

These diverse positions have made the ecological farming a battlefield of ideas and practices

(Heasman and Lang, 2004). What conceptual approach do I adopt in this context? I argue that a grounded political ecological approach can provide robust framework for understanding the phenomenon of ecological agriculture in the context of smallholder family farming in Chitwan valley.

While I am sympathetic to family farming, and especially in the smallholder-dominated places such as Nepal, I emphasize the need for exploring the grounded and dynamic political ecological

19 conditions involved in the construction, maintenance, and transformation of the ecological farms.

We can think of farms such as the one of Adhikari family that I visited in 2008 and which I feature in the dissertation as an example of ecological farm. Ecological prudence is not an

‘essential’ feature of smallholder farming but needs to be produced and maintained at present and in future.

While Marx’s method of paying close attention to emerging knowledge about biophysical world was brilliant, the knowledge itself was inadequate and even erroneous. In other words, we need to retain Marx’s method of combining both the human relations and biophysical, while throwing out some of the erroneous conclusions based on the idea of soil-as-repository-of-inert-nutrients

(McMichael and Schneider, 2010). New ecological knowledge has shown that soil is not a mere repository of inert substances, but rather a complex biological entity formed by ceaseless interactions among diverse microorganisms and the mineral world (Nardi, 2007). The understanding of soil as bio-physically complex entity has begun to show that the destruction was the result not of the transfer of nutrients out of the farm, but of the bad practices that degraded the capacity of the soil to function as a complex and productive biological entity in the first place (Montgomery, 2018; Montgomery and Bikle, 2015; Schneider and McMichael, 2009).

Similarly, a more grounded approach is needed to agricultural modernization to understand how it plays out locally, especially given the material complexity of agroecosystems combined with multi-institutional and multi-scalar context of agrarian relations (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009,

2010). Historically, agricultural modernization involved promotion of particular forms of agriculture based on the use of synthetic and harmful inputs. However, this program also involved setting up institutions of knowledge that are now involved in generating, refining, validating, and promoting ecological farming methods and techniques (Pretty, 2007). In other

20 words, even if some of the institutions originally promoted high external-inputs-based agriculture in the past, their portfolio of actions currently includes active promotion of ecological agriculture.

In all these theoretical approaches, there is exclusive focus on farming, instead of farms. That is not necessarily a problem, except that the ecological farm is not limited only to how farming is done, but also how farms themselves are constructed and maintained. For example, constructing built-structures have tremendous influence on ecosystems beyond the farms as that involves use of materials and energy produced in different places. At the same time, built structures are important components of creating livable human habitats.

Moreover, households also are linked to the outside world through their involvement in sectors that are not directly related to farming. For example, they avail themselves of health care, utilize educational institutions, move across places in a variety of transportation systems. In the context of smallholder agriculture, the nature of these sectors bears on the capacity of farming households to reproduce.

Therefore, a more synthetic approach is needed that builds on insights from these approaches to better understand the complex and contingent ways a variety of actors interact with each other in producing components used in the construction and maintenance of ecological farms. This synthetic approach based on grounded political ecology also needs to incorporate sectors other than farming as a way of exploring conditions that allow smallholders to adopt ecological farming at present and in future –or limit them from doing so.

Dissertation Outline

The rest of the dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 surveys literature on ecological agriculture. More specifically, it discusses different approaches taken by scholars to examine ecological issues in agriculture. The objective of exercise is to identify the insights these approaches provide as well as their limitations. This survey will provide a foundation for creating the conceptual framework in the next chapter. The chapter ends with an argument for grounded political-ecological approach, which will be fleshed out in the following chapter.

Chapter 3 builds a theoretical framework. This exercise will address the need for interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral approach for a robust understanding of the spread of ecological farming in predominantly smallholder agrarian contexts such as Nepal’s Chitwan

Valley. This theoretical exercise will incorporate the forces and processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales that led to the adoption of ecological practices and conditions that enabled family farmers to adopt those practices in constructing their farms as productive and living ecosystems.

Chapter 4 describes the methods used in data collection, storage and analysis. It elaborates the way methodological choices are connected with conceptual framework adopted. This chapter also describes the reflexive approach taken in the research process.

Chapter 5 explores the dynamically changing socio-ecology of Chitwan valley. For this, I use data from primary and secondary sources, the micro vignettes from my experiences, and ethnographic notes. The objective of this chapter is to provide a broader biophysical and political economic context within which to situate the ecological changes taking place in farms in the valley. This chapter specifically examines the political ecological changes during three major conjunctures: malarial landscapes (pre-1950s), modernization and reclamation (1950s-1990s),

22 ecological transitions (1990s-2010s). Three phases were characterized by predominantly malarial and sparsely populated landscape in the valley, the active involvement of international and national governmental agencies in the settlement of hill migrants in the valley, and the intensification of changes in households including the spread of ecological practices in farms, respectively. This broad background material will then work as a dynamic political ecological backdrop for examining the changes in Fulbari farms in the subsequent three chapters.

Chapter 6 explores the changes in agroecosystems. The specific focus will be on timelines of the transformations of ecosystems, and the onset and expansion of ecological practices that have led to these transformations. Here, I will focus on the ecosystems as made up of both built structures such as houses, sheds and other entities, and the plants and animals, that are constantly transformed by practices over time.

Chapter 7 analyzes the involvement of diverse actors in producing, spreading and transforming some of these ecological practices. The approach I take is conjunctural. I utilize the concept of assemblage to explore how, in different conjunctural moments, the economic and demographic shifts in the households, perceived and real biophysical changes such as intractable pest attacks , soil fertility decline, usefulness of multicropping; the policies and practices related to alternative energy and climate change, and the setting up of various institutions for the generation and promotion of ecological practices, led to the spread of biogas, agroforestry, and cover cropping as important practices of ecological farming. I use assemblage because this allows me to explore the active nature of both the human and non-human actors in this process of change. I elaborate the usefulness of the idea of assemblage in Chapter 3.

Chapter 8 explores the challenges of constructing and maintaining ecological farms. More specifically, it explores the kinds of inputs (goods and services) farms have been mobilizing, and the kinds of things they have been producing. It also analyzes the way they have been using these things (for self-consumption, barter, gift, and market exchange). This chapter then documents the livelihood challenges that families have been facing. The overall objective of this chapter is to situate the ecological practices within the broader political ecological challenges faced by householders in Fulbari.

The chapter 9 will conclude with a summary of the dissertation and some theoretical and practical lessons of the findings for the promotion of ecological farming. It will also provide answers to the research questions and identify some areas that require further research. It will also draw out some points for policy and programmatic interventions for the expansion of ecological farming.

Chapter 2 : Smallholders: Saviors, Victims, Destroyers

Like in Fulbari village of Chitwan Valley, farmers in many other parts of the world are adopting different ecological practices in large-scale commodity farms of thousands of acres and small- sized backyards and rooftops (Bhehler and Junge, 2016; Kumar et al., 2009; Lengnik, 2015;

Ohlson, 2014; Pretty, 2006; Tow, et al., 2011, White, 2016). These practices have also spread in diverse climates: from cold temperate regions, to humid tropical lands, and in all altitudes below the permanent snow range where humans have inhabited (Kumar, et al., 2009; Pretty, 2007;

Tow, et al., 2011). Often represented through different labels such as organic farming, permaculture, regenerative farming, ecological farming, and biodynamic farming, in reality these practices manifest in bewilderingly diverse and constantly changing forms. How can we understand these agroecological changes conceptually?

The objective of this chapter is two-fold. First, it critically reviews five different approaches that scholars have taken to understand the spread of ecological smallholder family farming. I am taking these five approaches not as completely distinct from each other, but rather as heuristics that help us understand seemingly disparate ideas. These five approaches are then lumped into three categories that represent smallholders as saviors, victims, destroyers. The key question that

I address is: how have these approaches defined the problem of ecological smallholder agriculture? More specifically, I explore the following three questions: how do they

25 conceptualize smallholder farm ecosystem, how do they address knowledge and skills in ecological practices, and, finally, how do they explore the condition of possibility of ecological farming in smallholder setting? The chapter will conclude by outlining an explanatory framework that builds on these approaches in conceptually addressing the problems of ecological smallholder farming, while also addressing their limitations. The premise for building that alternative framework is the emerging consensus across the board that industrial agriculture has engendered multiple ecological problems, and that the solutions lie in drawing insights from non- human natural systems to build place-specific ecological practices (Pretty, 2007, 1995). This alternative explanatory framework will be fleshed out in the next chapter. The Table 2.1 summarizes different categories, approach(es) within them, the way they define problems and the solutions they propose.

Table 2.1: Ecological Problems and Solutions: Different Approaches

Categories Approaches Problems Solutions Saviors Peasant • Disruption of peasant • Strengthen peasant traditions Prudence traditional practices • Promote small-scale farming • Enlargement of farms Victims Metabolic Rift • Capitalist organization • Socialist organization of of agriculture farming and completion of nutrient cycle Political • Political economy of • Changes in political economy Ecology inequality forcing and public policies farmers towards destructive practices Destroyers Wilderness • Farming as inherently • Return to the wild and at best Ideal destructive of nature limit agriculture • Change Christian ideals of human control over the wild nature Ecological • Inefficiency of small- • Intensive scale thereby leaving Modernization scale farming more land for wild nature • Lack of knowledge • Generate technology and and expertise knowhow in the area of precision farming, genetic modification of farms

Inherently Prudent Peasants/Idealized Smallholders

One way to examine the ecological problem in agriculture is to see it as the outcome of the demise and marginalization of smallholder family farming, the implicit assumption being that smallholders are ecologically prudent. Historically, the definition smallholder farming includes a number of features: first, agricultural production was geared towards household subsistence based primarily on family labour; second, the scope and scale was small, predominantly for subsistence and for meeting the food and other basic needs of the immediate family (Chayanov,

1925; Shanin, 1990). In other words, the modes of use of means of production; the form of labour; the modes of disposal of the production; and the scale of farming together is used to define what is often called the smallholder agriculture (Netting, 1993). Recently, van der Ploeg

(2008, 2013) has argued that smallholder peasant agriculture is characterized by increased autonomy of farming families in making decisions in farming irrespective of the scale of farming. This autonomy from the demands of the market or from agricultural inputs from outside, according to van der Ploeg (2008, 2013), results from their ability to minimize, or even eliminate, their dependence on financial institutions for external resources. This ability, he argues, is reflected in their capacity to mobilize natural capital within the farm, and broader socio-political networks outside (van der Ploeg, 2008, 2013).

The debates about the suitability of peasant agriculture began in the late nineteenth century, and this debate reflects a variety of responses to agricultural societies undergoing rapid transformations (Fitzgerald, 2003; Rossiter, 1975). These debates initially occurred in two places: The United States and Russia. In the United States, this debate focused on the impact of emerging industrial agriculture on family farms that were considered to be an idealized symbol

27 of freedom and democracy in America (Fitzgerald, 2003). The increasing use of machines, promotion of scientific farming, increasing integration with distant markets, and greater involvement of governments in agriculture spawned a range of responses ranging from fear of loss of farmer autonomy to depopulation of the countryside (Fitzgerald, 2003). In Russia, the debate was focused on three broad themes: the role of peasants in the social revolution; the future of peasant form in the socialist society; and adequacy of peasant form to generate enough surplus for industrialization (van der Ploeg, 2013). Critiques raised a number of issues related to agricultural modernisation. Some rejected modern agriculture in totality while others were focused on specific aspects. Agrarian philosophers and farmers in the US were particularly critical of modern agriculture that was overly confident about productivity and progress (Berry,

1978). In the context of Russia (both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution), Chayanov raised a number of issues when the then nascent Soviet Union was moving towards large-scale collective farms, using machineries (Shanin, 2009).

The idea of smallholders as ecologically prudent agricultural producers, however, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2006 [1997). This was a period of both agricultural modernization and ecological awareness. The agricultural modernization process had been implemented with an assumption (sometimes explicitly stated and often implicitly taken) that peasant production was inefficient. Moreover, this was also a period of debate between large-scale farming vs. small-scale farming. The assumption that large-scale farming based on mechanization was more efficient than small-scale farming was taken as self- evident truth (ibid.).

The decline in soil fertility and biodiversity, the energy intensity of agricultural operations, and the negative effects of agricultural chemicals and soil erosion on water and air emerged as

28 important ecological problems in the second half of the twentieth century (Pretty, 2007). In this context, some scholars made claims that peasant agriculture was more benign compared to industrial farming with its problems of soil degradation, chemical overloading of water resources, and air pollution (Netting, 1993).

There were several bases for this claim. One, in the early twentieth century, American agronomist, F. H. King, travelled to China and Japan and documented the agricultural practices based on his conversations with farmers, agricultural technicians and his own observations. His writings were published posthumously in 1926 in a book form, Farmers of Forty Century. In that book, he claimed that farmers of China and Japan had been meticulous in managing their small farms by recycling almost all nutrients in farm and that was why they have been working on the same lands for over four millennia. He contrasted the fast depletion of soils in different parts of the US and claimed that the root of the problem lies in growing use of external inputs in farms.

Although King’s book provided information about farming practices in non-western societies more widely, similar observations had been made by earlier writers. Justus von Liebig’s book on modern agriculture has extensive discussions about the nutrient recycling practices in China

(Liebig, 1859). In 1940s, Sir Alfred Howard produced his book, The Agricultural Testament in which he made similar observations about peasant farmers’ practices to regenerate soil fertility in

India.

In the second half of the twentieth century, works of Robert Netting and David Pimentel, among others, provided more robust case studies. Netting’s book Householders and Smallholders is perhaps the most detailed treatise on peasant ecological prudence. He draws upon the case studies from Swiss Alps, China, and Africa to show the meticulous management of farms by peasants. David Pimentel’s work on energy efficiency provided another ground for showing the

29 prudence of peasant farmers (1973). His research on energy intensity of corn production in the

US that juxtaposed the highly energy-efficient corn production in polyculture farms in Mexico, provided the basis for some of the scholars to make cases for peasant agriculture and the ecologically harmful effects of the promotion of green-revolution technologies among smallholder farmers (Altieri and Toledo, 2011, Martinez-Alier, 1995).

Since mid-1990s, we have also seen the growth of movements of farmers, some of which have been coordinated and facilitated by the global network, La Via Campesina. This global network has called for radical overhaul of agricultural systems as a whole, through its call for food sovereignty. Food sovereignty involves the creation of socially just and ecologically sustainable food systems that are plural and embedded in local cultures and ecologies (Desmarais, 2006;

Wittman, 2009). The problem of agriculture, according to this movement, is industrial model of farming. Coupled with neoliberal policies, the promotion of industrial farming, it argues, has led to widespread marginalization of smallholders throughout the world (Patel, 2008). The answer to this marginalization is to strengthen peasant agriculture.

In 1996, La Via Campesina elaborated the idea of food sovereignty as a part of its intervention during the second World Food Conference in Rome. According to it, food sovereignty is:

"the ability of countries and communities to control their own food supplies; to have a say in what is produced and under what conditions, and to have a say in what is imported and exported. At the local level, food sovereignty entails the rights of rural communities to remain on the land and to continue producing food for themselves and for domestic markets if they so desire." (McAfee, 2006, p.13).

Thus, the idea of food sovereignty is not limited to an ecological issue alone, but it is an important element of it. Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright (2009) argue that the peasant-led movement's call for food sovereignty is an important contribution to understanding of and practical intervention in maintaining and enhancing the ecological health of landscapes. They argue that talking of 'agriculture' as the problem of ecological degradation, as is done by a wide range of conservationists, often obscure the real problem: the type of agriculture, rather than agriculture in general (ibid.). They argue that good agriculture, the kind that La Via Campesina has been promoting, has to be central in conserving the broader terrestrial landscapes of which agricultural lands are integral components. The quality of mosaic landscapes formed by fragmented agricultural lands are key in determining the existence of different species. These landscapes provide multiple niches for species to exist and if any species of bird, for example, is extinct in a small patch of ecosystems, then it can survive in another (ibid.).

As a programmatic intervention, La Via Campesina has provided a corrective to both agricultural modernization and revolutionary projects, by highlighting the resilience, prudence, and possible positive roles for peasant agriculture (Desmarais, 2002; van der Ploeg, 2013; Wittmann, 2010;

McMichael, 2010). At the same time, as Bernstein (2015) reminds us, there is a danger in essentializing peasant farming. If peasants have been involved in ecological farming, they are not doing it on their own, he argues. There are a host of other actors involved in this process of change. In other words, ecological farming is not an essential feature of peasant agriculture, but an outcome of specific set of practices that are often generated and promoted by diverse sets of actors. Indeed, as this study also demonstrates in the case of Chitwan Valley of Nepal, some of them have emerged through trial and error in farms over time in history. Most of biodiversity in peasant farms, for example, is the product of millennia of selective breeding by peasants. At the

31 same time, we also need to account for the generation of many other practices that are becoming important components of ecological farming in contemporary times (Pretty and Bharucha, 2015).

Conceptually, therefore, we need to eschew such definition a priori.

We can take the case of India's state of Andhra Pradesh to illuminate these changes (Kumar,

2009; Lappe, 2012). In 2004, a program called non-pesticide management (NPM) within a broader project called Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) (Kumar, et al.,

2009). The program started with few hundred family farmers who stopped using pesticides and chemical fertilizers in Punukula village of Khammam District. By early 2010, the number of farmers practicing the non-pesticide management had grown to over 318,000, and the acreage under this practice had increased to 2 million acres, almost 8 percent of the net cropped area in the state. Between 2008 and 2009 alone, an additional 600,000 acres were added to chemical- free agriculture (Kumar et al., 2009). As Kumar, et al. (2009) and Lappe (2013) show, this change resulted from the involvement of multiple actors: farmers (as participants and also as leaders), farmers’ groups, government institutions, non-governmental organizations, agricultural scientists, international organizations. It is also important to note that these changes were intricately involved the mobilization of active nature: the local ecology, hydrology, seeds, climate system, among others.

We can also look at another example from Sub-Saharan Africa (Reij, 2016; Sendzimir et al.,

2011). Until the early 1980s, the Niger region of Sub-Saharan Africa was beset with recurring droughts and famines. The decline of food production, destruction of woodlands, and outmigration were becoming common. In the nineties, international and local actors discovered what is known as 'the underground forest—the deep root system that allowed shrubs to regrow into trees when pruned properly" (ibid.). Many of these trees were nitrogen fixing and drought-

32 resistant species. They were also an excellent source of animal fodder and firewood (Reij and

Smalling, 2008). An NGO experimented with farmer-managed natural regeneration of these trees in farmer's private fields. These experiments were limited to only about a dozen farmers. But

Niger was faced with major drought in 1985. During the drought the NGO, which had experimented with natural regeneration of trees with a limited number of maverick farmers, used food-for-work program to expand the regenerative works among many others (ibid.). After normal rainfall resumed, there had already been sizeable numbers of farmers who had adopted this practice of growing trees inside their fields (ibid.).

Until the droughts weakened the state forest institutions in the late 1970s, trees, whether in government forests or private lands, were legally considered state assets. Therefore, farmers were hesitant to plant trees in their private fields. But the severe economic decline because of draught and resultant decline in agricultural productivity, led to the weakening of state forest bureaucracy. The prolonged political vacuum in the nineties provided autonomous space for local practices to flourish (Reij and Garrity, 2016).

In this context, the practice spread mostly through vernacular communication and observations.

By the early 2000s, the region had regenerated over 200 million trees in 5 million hectares of land. The regeneration of trees in farms had had cascading effects. These trees provided nitrogen through roots to crops grown in rows (Reij and Smalling, 2008). The protein-rich fodder led to the regeneration of livestock farming, this time through intensive operation as the trees had to be saved. The intensive livestock operation allowed more efficient utilization of manure. The growth of trees in farms also generated firewood for cooking (Reij and Smalling, 2008). The collection time for firewood declined from 3 hours per day to 30 minutes. The productivity of

33 crops increases both because of nitrogen fixing trees as well as the shedding of leaves by trees in the farms.

These are two cases among the burgeoning experiments mushrooming around the world (e.g.,

Pretty, 2007; Rockstrom et al., 2016). These transformations are not limited to these countries and places. In fact, amidst the growing awareness about the widespread degradation of ecosystems, we are witnessing creative experimentation aimed at addressing the ecological challenges all over the world. Pretty (2007) and Pretty and Toulmin (2011) have documented the spread of ecological farming practices across the world.

This approach supports an imperative to document ecologically prudent practices, but risks making the assumption that ecological prudence is an inherent feature of smallholder farming.

Rather, if ecological farming has emerged across different parts of the world, it has been the result of interventions at various levels involving a multiplicity of actors that mobilize active non-human elements. Our approach, therefore, needs to account for the political ecological conditions populated by these diverse actors behind the generation, spread and adoption of these practices.

Metabolic rift: Victim of Capitalist Organization of Farming

Another important set of theoretical interventions on ecological problems of agriculture has come from Marxist scholars, especially around the notion of “metabolic rift.” These interventions have primarily utilized the idea of metabolism to propose theoretical and methodological approach to understanding ecological issues in agriculture (Foster, 1999). Within these interventions, two related concepts are the primary tools of analysis: ‘metabolic rift’ and

‘metabolic reparation.’ While 'metabolic rift' is used to explain the ecological degradation,

'metabolic reparation' is used for explaining the ecological recuperation (Foster, 1999, 2000,

2016; Clausen, Clark, and Longo, 2015; Wittman, 2009). Scholars in these camps see 'capitalist agriculture' (Foster, 2000) or 'capitalist industrial agriculture' (Weis, 2007) as the cause of ecological degradation and propose different 'non-capitalist' agriculture as a path towards reparations. The non-capitalist agriculture ranges from peasants farming aimed at food sovereignty (Wittman, 2009) to Cuban government-led promotion of ecological agriculture

(Clausen, Clark, and Longo, 2015; Holt-Gimenez, 2010; McCune et al., 2011; Rosset and

Martinez-Torres, 2013).

Originally, the idea of metabolic rift was based on the emerging scientific field of soil chemistry that was gradually formalized into a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century (Kleppel,

2014; Rossiter, 1975). More specifically, it was based on the idea of German chemist, Justus von

Liebig who presented his ideas both through scientific experiments and popular mediums

(Liebig, 1859). During the nineteenth century, Liebieg carried out numerous experiments to understand the metabolic exchange of nutrients between living entities and soil. He also actively involved in public deliberations regarding agricultural policies and use of scientific methods in agriculture.

Liebig has elaborated his idea in his book Letters on Modern Agriculture (Liebig, 1859). In short, his ideas go like this. Agricultural land is a repository of more or less fixed amount of different nutrients that plants need. The animals get their nutrients through plants. When plants grow, they take up some of these nutrients and combine with sunlight, water, and atmospheric carbon. Therefore, when farmers harvest plants, in this thinking, they are effectively taking out nutrients from the soil. As long as farmers use those plants close at home and recycle the human and animal waste back to the land, the nutrient cycle is complete, and land is perpetually

35 replenished. However, when plants and plant parts are transferred further away from farms, that leads to the breakdown of this nutrient cycle. This breakdown is called the 'metabolic rift.' This idea was picked up by Karl Marx to make a case for the destructive impacts of the growing separation between town and the country. It is this part of Marx's analysis that Marxist scholars have revived to produce the concept of metabolic rift (Foster, 1999; Clausen, Clark, and Longo,

2015).

However, the idea of metabolic rift is premised on erroneous and inadequate understanding of ecology (Engel de-Mauro, 2014; Schneider and McMichael, 2009). The primary problem lies with the basic understanding of soil and land ecosystems. Before Liebig’s scientific works, soil was commonly understood as mysterious substance imbued with mysterious properties. Liebig provided a chemical foundation of understanding soil. Liebig was, however, limited by both the scientific instruments of his time and the conceptual framework within which he worked

(Rossiter, 1975). Scientific developments over the twentieth century have shown that soil is not a mere repository of inert substances, but rather a complex entity involving ceaseless interactions among a multiplicity of biological organisms, and their exchanges with the mineral world (Nardi,

2007). The understanding of soil biology has shown that the destruction of soil was not so much due to the transfer of nutrients out of the farm as due to the bad practices that degraded the soil in the first place (Schneider and McMichael, 2009). The integration of ecological knowledge is crucial to either rework the concept of metabolic rift (Schneider and McMichael, 2009), or to produce a better one. In other words, we have to retain Marx's methods of integrating human/social and the biophysical but avoid the limitation that was the result of the state of understanding at that time (Schneider and McMichael, 2010). Marx’s conclusions might have

36 been erroneous, but as a non-disciplinary scholar Marx was trying to integrate knowledge arising from diverse fields including the sciences of his time.

This concept shows us the need to integrate knowledge from across different disciplines (Foster and Beckett, 2014). We also need to acknowledge, as Foster and others have suggested, that social theories need to take the material world more seriously. Here, Marx’s work, howsoever limited it had been, can provide methodological insights. Rather than the conclusion that Marx derived based on his understanding of Justus von Liebig's chemical understanding of soil, his contribution is important in highlighting that human world is not separate from the broader material world. In other words, we have to update our understanding of the material world because we have come to know a lot more now than what Marx knew, but we cannot think about ecological problems in agriculture without combining the sound grasp of ecology with deeper understanding about human relations. Marx tried to grasp as much as he could lay his hands on during his time.

The emphasis on the need to incorporate both the bio-physical and the human into a conceptual framework is crucial, although its current conceptualization of soil as a repository of mineral nutrients limits it from seeing the possibility of ecologically sound practices within a wide range of social relations. Moreover, while its emphasis on broader political economy is important issue to consider, a grounded understanding is needed how that political economy itself is constituted through practices at multiple scales involving multiple actors.

Political Ecology: Smallholders as Victims of Political Economy

While metabolic rift explained (erroneously) the degradation of soil in terms of the transfer of nutrients from the soil without recycling them and connected it to the capitalist organization of long-distance exchanges and trade in agricultural products, political ecology emerged as a way of looking at soil degradation in what is called the developing countries as a problem of the political economic arrangements at multiple scales: households, multi-layered state institutions, and class relations. It began with acknowledging the soil as a physical phenomenon but always situated within the broader political economy within which soil problems were defined and corresponding solutions proposed, or not proposed: the inequality in access to resources and misguided priorities of the state institutions as a result of the class inequalities (Blaikie, 1985).

In 1985, Piers Blaikie made a major intervention in thinking about environmental change through his book, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985). In

1987, Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield edited Land Degradation and Society that expanded the focus of Blaikie's earlier book through case studies from different parts of the world.

Together these two books led to the conceptualization of 'political ecology' (Jones, 2008;

Neumann, 2005). Blaikie and Brookfield brought ecological change and political economy together into a framework of understanding ecological problems in agriculture (Blaikie, 1985;

Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Neumann, 2005; Rocheleau, 2007).

For them, purely biophysical explanations of the degradation were inadequate. They illuminated the problems of soil erosion through what they called ‘a bottom up approach’ that acknowledged the biophysical nature of soil erosion but examined this biophysical event in relation to the behaviour of the primary land users and the broader relations of power in which they were

38 enmeshed. Through case studies from around the world, they claimed that the particular political economic conditions led to the soil erosion and set limits on what could be done to rectify the problem. In their framework, soil erosion needs to be understood as the outcome of historically specific relations between the primary land users and various other groups and institutions such as the experts, state agencies, transnational development project officials, and politically powerful agents at various levels of society. Their conclusion was that, in most places, given the relations of inequalities between those who make decisions in public institutions and the primary marginal landholders and farmers, it is nearly impossible to generate technologies that address the problem of soil degradation.

This approach to ecological change was put to use and refined by various scholars during the last three decades (e.g., Escobar, 1999; Jones, 2008; Neumann, 2005; Watts and Pitt, 2011). The range of topics that scholars have explored by using the lens of political ecology is vast. The range includes soil erosion, food economy, conflicts between conservation and local livelihoods, control over seeds and genetic resources, access to food, and differential impact of pollution across lands and populations (Jones, 2008). Interventions by feminists have also expanded the idea of political ecology to include the way gender relations structure both the meaning attached to particular resources and ecosystems and the differential impact of (negative) change in their access and change (Rocheleau, 2007). Environmental changes (negative ones) have also spawned a variety of organized responses and these responses formed some of the key areas of political ecological scholarship during the nineties (Duncan and Rajan, 2013; Escobar, 2008;

Kothari and Parajuli, 1993).

The vast bulk of political ecology scholarship is focused on using the lens of political economy to explain negative aspects of changes: either negative ecological change such as the destruction

39 of forests, water and air pollution, decline in biodiversity, promotion of monocultures, degradation of soil, among others; or negative effects of various interventions through ecological projects on marginalized groups, such as the displacement of people due to the establishment of national parks (Alier and Guha, 1995; Hvalkof, 2006).

Political ecology helps us to examine the constraints posed by existing institutional ways of understanding and using material resources (Blaikie, 1985), thereby emphasizing the need for asking questions beyond specific farms. This approach also calls for incorporating the biophysical and human elements within the analytical framework. At the same time, its particular lens leads to deterministic conclusions. Nepal’s discourse and practice on soil erosion is an interesting case in this regard. Blaikie (1985) and Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) developed their theory based on the study of soil erosion in Nepali mountains. They connected soil erosion of that time to the existing political economy that forced poor peasants to cut down trees and cultivate steeper and steeper mountain slopes. Blaikie and Brookfield rebut earlier claims about the deforestation and soil erosion, without disputing the linkage between poverty and soil erosion. As Ives and Messerli (1989) show with their detailed case studies from Nepali mountains, the issue of soil erosion across Nepali mountains was more complicated and could not lend itself to deterministic explanations. They show that, whereas scholars took poverty- deforestation-soil-erosion as a fact, in many places, farmers were gradually building terraced fields by utilizing the land slips. They were even engineering landslips so that it was easier to build soil-retaining and water-retaining terraces, thereby defying established conceptions of poor farmers as soil degraders. Ives and Messerli dispute the image of Nepali hill farmers either as ignorant individuals as the mainstream scholars presented them or as victims of political economy as Blaikie and Brookfield presented them.

A grounded political ecology can help us ask questions related to the involvement of multiple actors in the generation of ecological problems and solutions in particular time and place. It emphasizes the complexity and non-linear nature of causal forces.

Human interventions vs ideal nature (wilderness ideal): Agriculture as Inherently Destructive Enterprise

Another way to approach ecological problem in agriculture is to contrast farms to supposedly pristine and idealized wilderness and what agriculture has done to it. This approach has many variants ranging from seeing agriculture in general as degradation of wild nature and, at best, a necessary evil, to accepting the possibility of small-scale agriculture reconstituted in ecologically benign forms that can then co-exist with wild nature (Eckersley, 1992; White, 1967). At present this viewpoint is expressed under the rubric of ecocentric philosophy which postulates intrinsic values to the non-human nature (Eckersley, 1992). Within this approach, agriculture cannot by its nature be ecologically benign although some agricultural practices can be less destructive than others. Preoccupied with abstractions, this approach presents agriculture in a broad sweep to make broad claims. To give an example, historian Lynn White (1967) made a rather sweeping claim about the linkage between the Judaeo Christian thinking and ecological crisis, and traced the root of ecologically destructive behaviors to the defeat of paganism in the first millennia

(pp.1203-1207). This defeat of paganism, then led to technologies such as the moldboard plough, which further led to a condition where ‘man (sic) and nature are two things, and man is master’(p.1205).

In reality, however, the attitudes towards wild, supposedly untamed landscapes remained ambivalent throughout human history (Cronon, 1995). Often the wild was the place of fear and always in need of taming. There were existential reasons for that attitude. Humans had to protect

41 themselves from wild animals. At the same time wilderness was also the source of food and many other resources. In the nineteenth century, however, a distinct approach emerged that saw in wilderness an unsullied nature and began to present its active appropriation by humans as its necessary degradation (Cronon, 1995).

Historically, this way of idealizing the wild was a distinctly American phenomenon and emerged in a very specific context (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2006; Cronon, 1995). At present, its philosophical foundation was provided by nascent discipline of wilderness ecology (Cronon,

1995), but it took shape as a response of urban industrial elites to growing industrialization and urbanization. The landscapes in the cities and around factories were being polluted, and, therefore, at least for the middle class, the refuse of the wilderness provided a way out from the dust, filth, and noise (Cronon, 1995; Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2006 [1997]). This need was also expressed in terms of exploration of beauty of the unsullied nature. Those who championed the protection of wild nature promoted their activity in terms of the awe-inspiring character of wild landscapes.

Many industrialists donated money to set up wilderness protection areas that were put off-limits for human use other than to use them as sites of enjoying beauty and being in communion with nature (Cronon, 1995). The disciplines of ecology and environmental ethics provided scientific foundation and justification for nature preservation (ibid.). Over time the national state agencies were set up and resources mobilized for setting up and managing these preserved areas. During the twentieth century, preserved areas were also set up across different parts of the world.

Established in the 1960s, the Chitwan National Park (formerly the Royal Chitwan National Park) is one of the manifestations of such premises and promises of wilderness preservation.

At present, there are almost 600 million farm holdings covering one third of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the earth (Lowder, Skoet, and Singh, 2014). All of these farms were created over time out of non-farm terrestrial ecosystems: the forests, wetlands, slopping mountain lands, flood plains, and even deserts. These farms emerged over eleven millennia, beginning in what is now called the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006). For a long time, converting 'wild' nature into farms was considered to be a necessary human endeavour celebrated for creating humanly livable places (Cronon, 1995). These conversions were also the results of active interventions by national states. The expansion of agricultural land provided surplus food for non-agricultural populations and generated more taxes and revenues (Mazoyer and Roudart,

2006).

For a long time, availability of human labour set the limit to how much of the wild land could be converted into farmlands (Bernstein, 2009; Ellis et al., 2013). The extent of conversion of wilderness varied across places ranging from densely populated lands of Asia to sparsely populated areas of Americas and Africa (Netting, 1993). While the increase in population facilitated the conversion of wild terrestrial landscapes into farm landscapes, the production of more food also led to the growth of human population, thereby reinforcing the conversion process (Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006). Moreover, the production of farmlands was not a linear, one-way process. Farmlands also transformed into non-farm entities such as urban places, forests, deserts, and swamps (Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006).

Conflicts over the preservation and use of landscapes emerged as some of the most seemingly intractable conflicts in many parts of the world (Kothari, 1997; White, 2016). Often, and especially in the countries of the global south, setting up of protected areas went hand in hand with displacement of, and outright violence against, people who were formerly using the

43 landscapes for their livelihoods that were going to be protected (Guha and Gadgil, 1995; Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2006 [1997]; Kothari, 1997).

By idealizing these newly-established protected landscapes, some of the proponents of wilderness as the ideal saw human use of land itself as the degradation of 'nature.' For some of them, 'civilization' was the problem. Dave Foreman, one of major proponents of this view, wrote about agriculture thus:

"Before agriculture was midwifed in the Middle East, humans were in the wilderness. We had no concept of 'wildness' because everything was wilderness and we were a part of it. But with irrigation ditches, crop surpluses, and permanent villages, we became apart from the natural world... Between the wilderness that created us and the civilization created by us grew an ever-widening rift." (Foreman, quoted in Cronon, 1995, p.19).

This view, often represented under the rubric of 'deep ecology,' sometimes provides the justification for violent approaches to wildlife conservation. Within this philosophy, ecological agriculture is an oxymoron. Therefore, for many deep ecologists, abandonment of agriculture itself or its radical limitation is necessary for recovering ecological landscapes. This is an extreme version of wilderness purism, but it has informed much of the debates on wilderness preservations over the last two hundred years in North America and Europe (Cronon 1996; Guha and Martinez-Alier, 2006 [1997]; Kothari, 1997).

This approach, however, was based on a rather inadequate understanding about the relationship between the human use and ecological transformations. At philosophical level, there is no ground to create the morally dichotomous landscapes. Both kinds of landscapes can have positive meanings and they depend on the ecological health of these landscapes. Agriculture does not have to be thought of as declension of pristine nature (Duncan, 1995). At the basic level,

44 wilderness purism in its extreme form is untenable simply because the very existence of humans at the present moment requires agriculture. As Berry (1987) reminds us:

"People cannot live apart from nature; that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their place." (p.7)

If the wilderness purism is untenable or tenable only if it is reconciled with the necessity of human-constructed landscapes, then there is no other option than to reject the moral dichotomy that inheres in this approach. In fact, it is impossible for humans to survive in wild nature and it is far less desirable as a place for human long-term habitation. Wild nature can provide refuge for a short period of time, but humans as species, like every other species, have been creating their own niche (Ellis, 2015) as a precondition for their survival and meaningful life. Rather than dichotomy, Berry (1987) emphasizes the need for balance between the human direct use and leaving the relatively pristine places on their own.

Finally, while a lot of human actions have degraded the rest of material world, this degradation is not the only story. Human actions also can restore, regenerate and even improve nature, at least improve in a certain sense. Bringing back pristine forests in places where agriculture exists in land fragments might not be easy but addressing some of the ecological problems through good agricultural practices is possible. Deeper understanding of the wild nature, or the non-human world is also useful in these tasks. In fact, this understanding is becoming the basis of transitioning to ecological farming. The problem of wilderness purism is not so much the love of wilderness in itself, but rather the oppositional terms in which wild landscapes are pitted against

45 humanly-used ones such as farms (White, 2016). The problem is also marginalization of humans who live and depend upon those landscapes that are turned into wild-life refuge (Guha and

Martinez-Alier, 2006).

If we follow the claim of extreme forms of wilderness ideals, the implications are dire. Not only the highly energy and material intensive industries cannot exist, but even agriculture has no place other than a small niche. Cronon (1995) writes:

"If wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then sole solution to our unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity would seem to be suicide." (p.19)

The extreme form of wilderness purism is also gradually giving way to a more nuanced approach to agriculture. This change of attitude is seen in the emphasis on the need for remaking the current ecologically destructive practices into ecologically benign ones. For instance, Butler

(2014) acknowledges the non-pristine nature of the landscapes and the need for using land:

"In order to live, most human societies, at last since the Neolithic Revolution, have domesticated their surroundings. And so, we inhabit a world deeply affected by the activities of our own kind and sometimes we have domesticated with skill and beauty." (p.xv)

However, beyond the acceptance of the need of ecological farming, the wilderness thinkers have not provided systematic understanding about the conditions that make possible the onset and spread of ecological farming practices. Instead, they have called for sweeping transformations in

Judaeo-Christian thinking that, according to White, the western people still carry as a legacy of the defeat of the paganism a millennium ago (White, 1967). For discussions on the generation

46 and spread of ecological farming practices, and the challenges that family households face in generating their livelihoods, we need to understand grounded political ecological conditions in which ecological farming practices are already important parts of changes taking place in agrarian societies.

Ecological modernization: Inefficacy of Smallholders and Lack of Knowledge

Ecological modernization as currently conceived is the latest variant of agricultural modernization that began in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States and that was adopted by a host of state and international agencies for international development after the

Second World War. Some actors who were actively involved in the promotion of agricultural modernization have come to realize the ecological problems facing agriculture: both due to the modernization activities as well as others (Horlings and Marsden, 2011). Their response has been what can broadly be called ‘ecological modernization.’ The idea of ecological modernization has gained greater currency in the context of climate change. An important component of ecological modernization is the promotion of what is now called ‘climate smart agriculture’ (for example,

USAID-India, 2011; Beddington, J, et al., 2012) Agricultural modernization involved both the generation and use of materials for transforming supposedly ‘traditional agriculture’ to modern one, as well as building of institutions for this purpose. Ecological modernization is an attempt at repurposing the material and institutional infrastructures of agricultural modernization. It is anchored in some of the earlier assumptions of agricultural modernizations: particularly the assumptions about scale advantage of large-scale mechanized farming and the vanguard role of the modernization institutions in the transition to ecological agriculture. According to ecological modernization, large intensive farming is an indispensable part of addressing the ecological

47 problems associated with agriculture. It is particularly emphatic about the claim that large scale intensive farming generates efficient farming thereby sparing forest and other wild areas from being converted into agricultural land to produce food and other materials for the world's growing population (Bennett, 2017; Ecomodernist Manifesto, 2015).

Although ecological modernism is manifested in different forms in programs and philosophies of some of the large agencies, a more detailed set of conceptual ideas are outlined in Ecomodernist

Manifesto released in 2015 and authored by a wide spectrum of disciplinary experts. This manifesto does not focus solely on agriculture, but agriculture is one of its important components.

In terms of technologies, it advocates a plethora of interventions: ranging from genetic science to precision nutrition management. It is important to acknowledge here that ecological modernization also has different variants. While some scholars propose the necessity of large- scale farming, others argue for intensification of existing farms: be it small or big (Marsden and

Horling 2011; Pretty and Bharucha, 2014).

Here also, the earlier position of clearly defined land sparing and land sharing debate is giving way to the necessity of more context specific responses (Bennett, 2017). Ecological modernization is generally silent about the issue of inequalities and power. Moreover, some of its claims about technologies have not been borne out in reality. For example, the claim that genetic modification could lead to reduction in pesticide use has not become true. In fact, there are now threats of resistant pests and weeds, potentially leading to increase in the use of harmful chemicals (Bennett, 2017). Most importantly, it lacks a holistic understanding of the ecological

48 farming, thereby making false claims about the efficiency arising out of scale of production

(Bennett, 2017).

At the same time its pragmatic approach towards scientific knowledge is useful in understanding the transitions underway. For example, while scholars claim that peasant farmers are building ecological practices, closer examination shows that those changes are most often the results of the supports from many of the institutions that were set up to promote agricultural modernization based on green revolution technologies. The essentialist positions regarding 'science', peasant farming, or capitalist farming are not useful in actually understanding the changes taking place.

Knowledge about chemical agriculture emerged in the same institutions that are also now generating knowledge about ecological farming (Montgomery, 2017; Pretty, 2007).

Conclusion: Need for a grounded political ecology

Which approach have I adopted for this study from among these various lenses and theories I covered above? One way to look at these different approaches is to see them in exclusive terms.

For example, we can easily rule out the extreme positions taken by some wilderness idealists, because that does not fit with the peasant and farmers realities of Chitwan Valley. Similarly, the

Marxist claim to metabolic rift is also based on erroneous understanding of soil as a repository of chemical-nutrients. A nuanced biological understanding of soil does not allow for equating the degradation of soil with the transfer of nutrients. If we look at the actual ecological practices, there is no ground to claim that there is inherent ecological prudence in smallholder farming, either. The claim of ecological modernization that we need to spare more and more present agricultural land by focusing instead on large-scale, supposedly efficient farm is also inadequate in many ways: it does not tell us how the millions of farms can be amalgamated into large farms absent large scale displacement and violence. Moreover, some of the practices it is promoting

49 under various names such as ‘climate smart agriculture’ look similar to the green revolution technologies such as genetic modification or efficient delivery of chemical inputs.

We can, however, look for insights that these approaches can provide in building another more synthetic and grounded political ecological approach. This approach emphasizes the need to examine highly context-specific nature of change in the context of dynamic complexity.

Ecological farming, according to this approach, results from conjunctures in which different forces act together for different outcomes. This approach is useful in understanding the changes occurring in the context of very dynamic small-holder family farming where farming families are caught up in the world of push and pull of the markets, public institutions, and other changes.

I have thus designed this study to examine these crucial questions: what were the political ecological conjunctures that generated and spread a variety of ecological practices. Specifically, as I apply in this study, a grounded political ecological approach integrating three elements: first, the network of actors that produce and refine knowledge about ecological realities and possibilities in particular conjunctural moments; second, the households that decide to participate in their generation, adoption, and even refinement; and, third, the broader set of forces which constrain or enable households to make a living. This synthesis is the task I take up in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 : Seeing Like A Farmer: Towards A Grounded Political Ecology

In previous chapter, I critically examined the literature related to ecological smallholder farming.

To make better sense of this body of work, I divided it into three categories and five approaches.

I analyzed their history as well as the way they addressed the problem of ecology in agriculture.

More specifically, I examined three questions: how do these approaches conceptualize farm ecology; how do they address the generation, refinement and spread of ecological farming practices; and how do they explore the political ecological conditions that make ecological farming possible? I identified their limitations as well as insights each of these approaches could provide for understanding the case study at hand: spread of ecological farms in Fulbari Village of

Nepal’s Chitwan Valley. I concluded the chapter with a proposal to build a grounded political ecological approach that situates the origin and spread of ecological farming within different conjunctural moments characterized by the coming together of diverse forces and actors that produce and spread ecological practices. These moments are characterized by demographic and economic changes in the households, , the gradual decline in the access to public grazing land and forests, the energy crisis in the 1970s and climate change financing arrangements through

Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s that led to international and national involvement in the promotion of alternative energy technologies such as biogas, and the emergence of institutional infrastructure of promotion of ecological farming practices in

1990s and after.

The present chapter fleshes out the conceptual framework in detail. The framework consists of two main parts. The first part defines the concept of ‘assemblage’ to explicate the nature of entities that populate the world of ecological agriculture, and the approach to causality that I adopt to build grounded political-ecological explanation of the origin and spread of ecological practices in Chitwan Valley. In this section, I will discuss how I have found and applied the idea of assemblage as a useful way of understanding the complex political ecology that have given rise to ecological farming. The second part uses the concept of assemblage to define three conceptual categories of the political ecology: ecological smallholder farm, practical assemblage, and family livelihood assemblage. This conceptual framework builds a step-by- step explanation of the origin and spread of ecological farming in particular conjunctural moments. It begins with the definition of entities that make up the ecological farming as assemblages. It, then, defines the productive capacities of biophysical entities as the first layer of explanation, followed by the practical assemblage as another layer. It explores the final layer of explanation for this phenomenon, the family livelihood assemblage, as a major condition of possibility of ecological farming.

At this point, it feels appropriate to address the question: Why do I name this framework, ‘seeing like a farmer?’ This conceptual work involves a systematic synthesis of both biophysical and social realities, and agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. This interdisciplinary and intersectoral synthesis is important to understand the multiple conditions at multiple scales that make possible the construction and maintenance of ecological farms. For long, the disciplinary separation of formal academic knowledge had led to the separation between these worlds: nature and society. Agriculture is presented, mostly in the 'natural sciences', through more and more specialized lens in terms of natural constituents of farms: soils, seeds, nutrients, plants, water,

52 wind, crops, insects, and equipment. The social sciences, on the other hand, present agriculture predominantly in terms of changing human relations and institutions. The institutional arrangements of land ownership and use; formal and informal mechanisms of access to resources; the way state institutions administer agricultural development projects; labour relations; involvement of transnational corporations in agricultural trade; formal and informal institutions of knowledge, among others, are often the focus of social science scholarship. Here also, the 'natural' elements are not completely absent, but the presentations are often 'society- heavy.' These ‘natural’ and ‘social’ explorations have definitely enriched our understanding about this evolving and complex socio-material world. However, separation of these worlds limits our understanding of socially-mediated biophysical phenomena such as the building of ecological farms.

Following the emerging interdisciplinary scholarly practices in agrarian studies as I have discussed in the previous chapter, I synthesize social and the bio-physical into my study design.

This synthesis also reflects the observations of how farmers operate in real world, and in daily life. A farmer's relationship with other humans and with non-human elements is too intricately connected to be analyzed separately within the existing 'society' and 'nature', and ‘agricultural’ and ‘non-agricultural’ dimensions. They deal with other humans and human-created relations and institutions while simultaneously and constantly interacting with active elements of non- human world. The agrarian world, like any other parts of the world, is formed through "technical, natural and social entanglements" (Mitchell 2011, p.239). I work with a realistic assumption that farmers see the reality in non-disciplinary and non-sectoral sense. It is this observation which is the inspiration behind the naming of this framework as ‘seeing like a farmer.’

Assemblages: Nature of Entities and Causality

The context of agriculture is characterized by the presence of multitudes of institutions that intervene in farming directly and indirectly, such as the government agencies, non-governmental organizations, traders and their associations, educational and research institutions, farmers’ groups, farm-workers’ organizations, consumer organizations, social movements, and farming and trading households, to name a few (Bernstein, 2010; IAASTD 2008; van der Ploeg, 2008,

2013; van der Ploeg and Ye, 2016). These institutions influence farming in many direct and indirect ways. They provide regulatory conditions allowing and disallowing certain activities such as use of certain chemicals, or the use of certain amount of water, for example. They provide finances in many forms such as loans, grants, and payment for services. They set the rules of hiring and firing workers; they define the nature of market demand and supply; they provide subsidies directly and indirectly; they provide financial and technical resources for research that has direct and indirect impact on farms and farming households. In many cases, these institutions also directly set up a variety of markets for farming inputs and outputs, both tangible and intangible ones. In addition, these institutions also intervene in non-agricultural contexts that have bearing on family farming households. For example, the interventions in the fields of health services, education, infrastructure, and many other aspects of human life have direct bearing on the farming households.

Non-human (some prefer to call it more than human) entities that make up farms—the soils, seeds, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, wind, water, geological forms, and sunlight—are continuously changing because of the millennia of human activities (Vandermeer, 2011).

Gardens and farms also carry with them footprints from eons of evolutionary processes that predate human existence and farming (Lenton and Watson, 2011). Whether it is a rose bush in

54 the garden or the potato and chili pepper in the farms/fields, many of the entities that make up farms emerged because of human selections and innovations over millennia (Vandermeer, 2011).

The fusion of these complex human and bio-physical elements has made farming in general and smallholder family farming in particular a complex and dynamic human endeavor.

Understanding this complex, evolving, and multi-scalar political ecology helps us understand analytically why certain households could opt for ecological farming practices in particular conjunctural moments. It also helps us understand the challenges of householder face in scaling up these practices across places and time.

Entities as assemblages

The concept of assemblage has been in use in ecology, archaeology, biology, physics, chemistry, and many other disciplines for a long time (Wise, 2005). The meaning of this concept in these disciplines is varied and overlapping. For example, in geology, assemblage refers to ‘a group of fossils that, appearing together, characterize a particular stratum” (“Assemblage”, n.d., quoted in

Wise, 2005, pp.78). In ecology, an assemblage is “a group of organisms sharing a common habitat by chance.” (ibid.). In other words, an assemblage in these disciplines is a collection of concrete entities relevant for the disciplines: the artefacts found in an excavation sites for archaeologists, and a collection of living entities within a given ecosystem for ecologists, for example.

There are attempts to define assemblage more precisely in some disciplines. For instance, in the field of ecology, Fauth, et al. (1996) define five core concepts as precisely as possible: the community, assemblage, ensemble, guild, and taxa. They use these concepts to classify the composition of organisms within the field of ecology. They define these five concepts based on

55 where they belong in the intersecting sets of geography, phylogeny and resources. In their definition, assemblage is a collection phylogenetically related organisms sharing the same geography (pp.282-286).

Recently, the use of this concept has gained wider currency in social sciences (Ruddick, 2008;

McFarlane, 2011; Allen, 2012). This use has been driven by a variety of objectives: such as for understanding the assemblage of actors involved in the generation of policies and practices of forestry (Li ,2007), health care system (Duff, 2011), microfinance (Rankin 2005), and formation of regions (Macfarlane and Allen, 2012), among others. Most of the recent social science usage of this concept has been inspired by the writings of French philosopher Giles Deleuze (Allen,

2012; McFarlane, 2011, Ruddick, 2008).

In a broad ontological sense, scholars use assemblage to define the nature of entities that populate reality, their interaction with each other, and the causal process through which these entities emerge, evolve, and get transformed (DeLanda, 2006; Wise, 2005).

Wise (2005) provides a definition of what assemblage is not that can help us gauge what it is:

“An assemblage is not a set of predetermined parts (such as the pieces of a plastic model

aeroplane) that are then put together in order or into an already-conceived structure (the

model aeroplane). Nor is an assemblage a random collection of things, since there is a

sense that an assemblage is a whole of some sort that expresses some identity and claim a

territory.” (p.77)

According to this usage, every entity is a historically emergent assemblage, a whole composed of many parts, without any transcendental essences. The relationship between the parts and the

56 whole is not that of a seamless totality, in which the parts are completely subsumed under totalities (DeLanda 2006, p.4). What give assemblages a dynamic quality are their interactions with their constitutive parts. For instance, a farm is a dynamic assemblage produced through a myriad of interactions among trees, animals, hedgerows, climate, sun, birds, soils, soil carbon, microbes, and other elements that interact with it. The given relationship between parts and wholes is not necessary but historically contingent.

The emphasis on interaction, however, does not exclude the possibility of relative autonomy for the parts. Assemblage, therefore, implies the possibility of multiple reconfigurations, and is a useful tool for examining the involvement of a multitude of actors, both humans and non- humans, in the making of farms and family livelihoods, as I will explore later in this chapter.

Non-linear Causality

The notion of assemblage also implies a non-linear causality. This means, it is hard to identify a single cause leading to a single effect or outcome. This is particularly relevant for examining socio-ecologically complex phenomena. Sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau uses the idea of contingent and conjunctural non-linear causality to examine the problems of understanding autism (Decoteau, 2018). At the same time, it is important to clarify that non-linear causality do not mean just about any cause is equally valorized.

It simply means that it is hard to identify, the same set of causes leading to the same set of outcomes all the time and in all the places. Rather, in a situation of political ecological complexity, phenomena are often the outcomes of multiple causes situated in time and space. As

I have hinted in the previous chapter, ecological farming cannot be explained through the lens of linear causality in which one event/actor/phenomena necessarily leads to another one. Moreover,

57 multiple causes also produce multiple and different outcomes (Delanda, 2005, 19). The idea of assemblage also implies that the outcomes are in fact co-produced through the interactions among the constituent parts and between these parts and the whole. For example, a farm is the outcome of the interaction of biophysical components, the built forms and the interaction with other biophysical and social and economic entities outside the farms. In producing farms, different components also co-produce each other. In other words, the causality in assemblage is about mutual making and unmaking among parts and between parts and wholes. As Wise (2005) writes:

“The concept of assemblage shows us how institutions, organization, bodies, practices,

and habits make and unmake each other intersecting and transforming; creating territories

and then unmaking them, deterritorializing, opening lines of flight as a possibility of any

assemblage, but also shutting them down.” (p.86).

Does that mean that all entities and phenomena or processes are of equal importance? That is not the case. It simply means that, at any given conjuncture, different forces acquire different level of significance. For instance, in Chitwan Valley, as this study shows, until the 1990s, the international development agencies were the most important force for the generation of policies for biogas whereas the national government agencies were actively involved in building institutions. After 1990s because of liberalized political condition and neoliberal emphasis on non-governmental sector, the non-governmental organizations became lead actors whereas governmental and international agencies were involved in channeling funds and providing technical supports. Buchanan (2015) cautions us against using assemblage to describe any grouping where multiple actors are involved (pp.382-392). This term is more useful in examining the living material arrangements that gain some temporary semblance of stability but

58 are highly dynamic (ibid.) as is the case in Chitwan Valley. But we are also concerned with some enduring (in a dynamic sense) coalescing of different actors which lend itself to conjunctural analysis. As Decoteau (2018) writes:

Conjunctures describe the coming together of already existing structural (and cultural entities) at a particular moment in time, the outcome of which is unpredictable. Conjunctures, therefore, are more amenable to historical analysis. Assemblages, on the other hand, are less stable and the entities or forms that merge together to form the assemblage are not always structural in nature. (p.92)

In this context, a grounded political ecology built with the ideas of conjunctures and assemblages becomes a powerful tool for examining the spatio-temporally embedded changes in material worlds (Decoteau, 2018). Alone, the multiple forces may not be efficacious in generating a particular phenomenon (in our case, various ecological farming practices), but combined with different forces and actors, the efficacy is augmented. For instance, it is clear that in many places the role of state agencies is important in the generation and spread of ecological farming practices, as has been shown by case studies around the world (Kumar et al., 2009 for India’s

Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture; Pretty, 2007, for cases in several countries in

Africa). However, these ecological changes did not result solely from the interventions of government agencies. The family farming households, media, experts, and, in many places, even private traders and companies were crucial parts of the transitions (Pretty, 2007). Markets also

“push” and “pull” these practices. In Sahel, on the other hand, the ‘withdrawal’ of the government policies was a catalyst for the successful practices of regenerating the trees to spread across a wide area (Reij and Smaling, 2008; Sendzimir, Reij, and Magnuszewski, 2011). Thus, by utilizing the idea of conjunctures and assemblage, we can come up with grounded political ecological framework.

In the next section, I will use the concept of assemblage to define the ecological smallholder farming, practical assemblages, and family livelihoods.

Ecological Smallholder Farming: Three Assemblages

Now we will put to use the concept of assemblage to define three assemblages of ecological smallholder farming: farms, knowledge and skills, and family livelihoods. Together, these three elements form the complex and dynamic political ecology which we explore in the context of

Chitwan Valley in general and Fulbari Village in particular in Chapters 5-8.

Farms: Dynamic Socio-ecological Assemblages

At the material level, farms are composed of multitudes of living and non-living entities. We can think of them as socio-ecological assemblages. Analytically, we can specify them as composed of biophycial ecosystems that are constructed by humans for the purpose of satisfying material needs. These biophysical ecosystems have undergone continuous transformations ever since they first emerged with life on the earth. We can think of these transformations in terms of conjunctures when the living entities acquired the power to efficiently mine and recycle nutrients—from land, ocean, and atmosphere. For this purpose, photosynthesis was, and continues to be, the primary mechanism through which water is split with the use of sunlight to produce sugars as food, releasing oxygen as a by-product. The emergence of photosynthesis can be seen as the early conjunctural moment, about 2.5 billion years ago (Lenton and Watson, 2011)

This basic process continues to remain at the foundation of living ecosystems all over the planet.

This process operates within complex mechanisms through which the multitudes of organisms— the bacteria, plants, fungi, and animals—are involved in the ceaseless dance of transforming minerals into bio-available forms and recycling the mineral and organic matters within the

60 ecosystems (Lenton and Watson 2011). In such ecosystemic dance, microorganisms are the oldest, and perhaps, the most important, participants. Their role in maintaining the immensely complex mechanisms of nutrient and energy mining from rocks, water, and air, and recycling of nutrients within the food webs, are crucial in all ecosystems around the world (Nardi 2007).

Soils around the earth are formed through interactions of earth's tectonic and glacier movements, water flows, wind erosions, and biological transformations. For all kinds of soils on earth, rocks are the primary materials, and these parent materials determine the basic mineral characteristics of soils (Nardi 2007). Rocks are ground into tiny particles by winds, water and glaciers. The sizes and shapes of these particles give soils their distinct textures, depending on proportion of sand, silt, and clay (Nardi 2007, p.1). This is how the top-soils are made and unmade.

These parent materials are then collectively worked on by microorganisms to produce soil conditions suitable for diverse species of beings. Nardi (2007) calls this complex process the marriage of the mineral world and the organic world (p.1). Without living entities, the soils remain a mere collection of mineral dusts. This marriage between minerals and organic world can be seen in the transformations of matter through complex soil food web consisting of microorganisms, plants, and animals (Nardi 2007).

One of the pioneers of the organic farming movement is Albert Howard (1873–1947). Along with his wife Gabrielle, he spent most of his career as British India’s official imperial economic botanist. A Cambridge-educated plant physiologist, Howard in India was breeding new varieties of wheat and tobacco, developing novel types of plows, and testing the results of providing oxen with a healthy diet. By the end of the First World War, Albert and Gabriella were convinced that soil was not simply a base for chemical additives. It was an intricate living system that required a

61 wildly complex mix of nutrients in plant and animal waste: harvest leftovers, manure. The

Howards summed up their ideas in what they called the Law of Return: “the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes.” We depend on plants, plants depend on soil, and soil depends on us. Howard’s 1943 Agricultural Testament became the founding document of the organic movement.

While Albert Howard lauded the living nature of the soil, he was referring to the community of soil organisms, the dynamic relations between plant roots and the earth around them, and the physical structure of humus, which stickily binds together soil particles into airy crumbs that hold water instead of letting it run through. All of this was very real, and all of it was unknown when Liebig shaped the basic ideas behind chemical agriculture, based on what is known as the

NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) mentality of the green revolution.

Ecologically speaking, farms need to be understood as human-dominated ecosystems. When it comes to farms, it is not possible to study them as ecosystems without seeing them primarily as human-dominated landscapes (Vandermeer, 2011). “Keystone” is an architectural concept that denotes the stone in an arch that is essential for keeping the arch intact. Once the keystone is removed, the arch falls apart, and becomes an entirely different structure, even if the materials are basically the same. In agroecosystems, humans can be thought of as keystone species

(Vandermeer, 2011). To say that human beings are the keystone species of agroecosystems is to acknowledge that, in their absence, agroecosystems would shift into entirely different states

(ibid.).

However, non-human ecosystems and agro-ecosystems are different in one crucial respect. It is true that the removal of humans will transform all agroecosystems into states where human needs

62 are not central in the organization of the productive processes. However, agroecosystems are characterized by the organization that are dependent upon not only non-material entities, but human objectives defined by social relations (Vandermeer, 2011).

To clarify this point, let’s carry out a thought experiment: imagine which farm animals, plants and built structures would exist if there were no humans in particular agroecosystems. Their continued presence requires the purposeful selection, preservation, and sowing of plants; the rearing and breeding of animals; and the construction, repair, and maintenance of the built structures. We know that, without humans, most of the grains we grow presently won’t exist, as they co-evolved with humans in farms in such a way that their very reproduction is dependent upon farming labour (Ronald and Adamchak, 2008). These grains do not reseed in their present forms without active human selection. Similarly, most animals cannot survive in the absence of humans, because they were selected for particular human purpose, and that their present form won’t allow them to survive in the wild (ibid.). All of the built structures would eventually decay and disappear as entropic processes constantly work on them. These structures have to be continuously repaired or replenished through a variety of human labour. In other words, agroecosystems are the sites in which human beings co-produce goods and services in constant cooperation with other elements. Many scholars acknowledg83e this co-productive nature of agroecosystems (van der Ploeg, 2013; Vandermeer, 2011, for instance).

The organization of agroecosystems are driven by social relations among humans within the households, and beyond, and between humans and non-human worlds in which human use is contingent upon the knowledge about the non-human world as Marx rightly pointed out in the first page of Capital (volume 1) (Marx, 1977, p.125). In other words, the making and transformation of agroecosystems is like a dance in which active human agency is always in

63 relationship with active non-human world, but the human agency is always contingent upon the knowledge (often limited) about the non-human world) (Duncan, 1995) .

The act of restoring, maintaining and enhancing any agroecosystems, thus, almost always means constant transformation of this human-centred ecosystem that includes not only agriculturally productive land and biota in it, but also built structures which are essential part of human existence, and broader social relations among humans. This human-centrality is manifest in myriad, nearly infinite, highly differentiated, and constantly changing forms in agroecosystems.

Moreover, family farms are not populated by homogeneous human beings. Inside families, there are always differences in priorities and choices along the lines of gender, age and even professional skills. Then, there are differences among families. The construction of ecological farms occurs in these highly variegated and constantly changing ecological and social contexts.

What we are concerned with is more than the general definition of farm as an ecosystem. Here, we are concerned with normatively oriented concept of ecological farms. In other words, we are concerned with goal-driven construction of ecological farms: the goals of reducing or eliminating the harmful chemical inputs, enhancing the perceived and real quality of goods and services, and construction of pleasant and livable human habitats, among others. These goals are achieved through a multiplicity of ways in which agroecosystems are constructed and maintained. For instance, a smallholder grain farm might achieve this entirely through no-till cover cropping, whereas another one might achieve these goals through integrated, multi-layered agroforestry system that includes varieties of trees, animals, grains, and biogas, among others.

Yet another farm might adopt rammed-earth and bamboo construction of homes and sheds together with all other elements of ecological farms. Which particular forms the agroecosystem

64 takes is determined by decisions that farming households take in relation to their own goals, always negotiating with the knowledge, and resource availability including the availability of labour.

Practical Assemblages: Producing Skills and Knowledge

Construction and maintenance of ecological farms require skills and knowledge about producing, refining, and/or placing various components in farms. These skills and knowledge can be geared towards understanding the properties and capacities of different elements that make up farms

(“discovery of … the manifold uses of things”, as Karl Marx writes in the opening chapter of

Capital (vol. 1) (1977, p.125) so that these elements can be placed in certain ways in farms. The goal of knowledge and skills can also be of creating certain elements (e.g., tools, seeds, seedlings, homes, sheds), their placement in farms (around house, or along the edges, or in the main fields), and/or their continual refinements over time.

For example, farms need built structures such as homes, sheds and pens. They need to be built, and once built, they need to be constantly maintained and eventually replenished. Farms also need seeds, seedlings, and animals. They need to use water. They also need to generate energy.

All of these actions require knowledge and skills. In other words, farms can be conceptualized as the deployment of knowledge and skills in their construction and maintenance. These practices, however, are not pre-given. How are they generated? How are they refined? How and why are they adopted by smallholder family farms?

I use the idea of practical assemblage to define the complex web of interactions among a multitude of actors involved in the production and distribution of knowledge and skills that produce various practices used in the construction and maintenance of farms

The practical assemblages manifest in different conjunctures. For a long time, much of the knowledge and skills required for farming were generated through active engagement with the different elements of farms. These knowledge and skills were transferred and refined through inter-generational interactions, and farmer-to-farmer sharing. Over millennia, identification and improvements of useful plants and animals were carried out near exclusively by farmers through in-farm observation and learning, and inter-farmer sharing. This form of generation and refinement of skills and knowledge is ongoing part of agricultural communities around the world.

From the nineteenth century, formal institutions began to be set up to generate agricultural knowledge and generate farming practices (Rossitter, 1975). Especially after the formalization of agricultural chemistry by Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) in Germany and its spread across different parts of Europe and the United States, formal scientific understanding, and agricultural practices became added element of the agrarian knowledge and skills. During the twentieth century, an elaborate network of institutions was established for the generation, refinements and promotion of formal agricultural knowledges and technologies (Fitzgerald, 2003). As part of international development interventions, various national governments and international institutions started setting up those institutions across much of the Global South (Cullather,

2010). The Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS), established in Rampur, Chitwan,

Nepal was one of such institutions.

These novel ways of generating and transferring agricultural knowledge and skills did not displace the old ways based on observations of patterns in farm by farmers (Pretty, 2007), even if, for much of the twentieth century, farmers’ knowledges embedded within their local material reality was disvalued as ‘traditional’ or ‘inefficient.’

The agrarian world now is populated with these institutions run by formally certified experts who regularly interact with farmers. This interaction always involves the transformation and interactions with active elements of non-human material worlds (Ploeg, 2013; Pretty, 2007) In this context, it is imperative for us to explore the origin and spread of ecological practice as the outcome also of these locally embedded interactions. As my study shows, there has been specific conjunctural moments when diverse institutions including the family farmers mobilized materials and knowledge to generate and refine specific set of ecological practices.

Making Farms Run: Family Livelihood Assemblages

Family livelihoods, in the context of smallholder family farming, can be defined as the way family members generate resources for sustaining their families including managing their farms both in immediate time scales as well as inter-generationally. Agriculture is often conceptualized in terms of activities related to producing agricultural goods, and using these goods either for household consumption or for market exchange. In the context of growing involvement in market-based farming, Bernstein (2010) defines agricultural sector as:

“farming together with all those economic interests and their specialized institutions and activities, “upstream” and “downstream” of farming, that affect the activities and reproduction of farmers. “Upstream” refers to the conditions of production necessary to undertake farming and how those conditions are secured. This includes the supply of instruments of labour, or “inputs” (tools, fertilizers, seeds), as well as markets for land, labour and credit – and crucially, of course, the mobilization of labour. “Downstream” refers to what happens to crops and animals when they leave the farm – their marketing, processing and distribution – and how those activities affect farmers’ incomes, which are necessary to reproducing themselves.” (p.65)

This formulation is perhaps as comprehensive as it could get in terms of defining what constitutes agricultural sector that is geared towards producing commodities for market exchange. Here, Bernstein focuses on ‘reproduction of farmers.’ A family farm’s agricultural costs and outputs forms the core of this sector. Although Bernstein’s definition captures the full

67 range of entanglements in market-based agrarian production-processing-distribution chains, farming households deal with much more than these ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ agricultural processes. Agrarian political economy has always situated the reproduction of farms within the reproduction of family livelihoods (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009, 2010; Bernstein, 2010;

Chayanov, 1966). We can expand Bernstein’s formulations to incorporate the non-capitalist portions of livelihoods as well as the non-agricultural ones.

Within the agricultural sector, we see much more varied situations than the commodity production geared towards market exchange indicated, with inputs procured through a variety of mechanisms including from a variety of markets, and with outputs geared towards a variety of uses ranging from household consumption, barter, gifts, and monetized exchanges in a variety of markets (Ploeg, 2013).

Moreover, family farmers have to deal with their health care, education of their children, construction of their homes, and cultural valuation during a certain period of time and, most importantly, self-perception of themselves. They also acquire ‘incomes’ from a variety of sources, including formal and informal non-agricultural employment, gifts, government subsidies and services, such as income from working for non-governmental organizations. These are important aspects of agrarian family livelihoods given that the procurement of these services entails investment of resources by households and/or public institutions, and that non-agricultural sources can also form part of the income stream of the family farmers (van der Ploeg, 2008,

2013). Whether the households are responsible for procuring these services or these services are provided through public provisioning has important implications for the livelihoods of family farming households. Similarly, judicious farming practices could break the control of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ processes. For example, in-farm management can reduce and even eliminate

68 inputs from outside the farms. Thus, family livelihoods involve not only the ‘agricultural,’ but also non-agricultural aspects of agrarian households.

In other words, and as this study also indicates, from the perspective of a farming family, many other domains of life such as health care, house building, education, entertainment, income from off-farm sources, to name a few, are also important. These other activities have always been important components of agrarian lives. These aspects of agrarian living directly impinge on the capacity of the farming households to remain in farming, or to exit and quit. For example, an illness of a member in the family can crush the household's sustenance if health services are highly privatized. Similarly, if living and working conditions in both farms and off-farm are detrimental to health, family farmers can face bouts of livelihood-crushing events because of catastrophic healthcare expenses and other consequences (Krieger, 2009). Correspondingly, if health care is publicly provided, then the burden of agrarian households is lessened. Same is true for other aspects of agrarian life such as children's education, transportation expenses, construction of homes, expenses for rituals such as weddings and other ceremonies.

More specifically, from the point of a farming households, economy is grounded in the quest for making a living that encompasses broader idea than formally understood as the totality of monetary exchanges (van der Ploeg, 2013; van der Ploeg and Ye, 2016). In Nepal, they call it

‘ghar vyabahar chalaune’ (running the household affairs). The word 'economy' itself has its origin in the Greek word, 'oikos' meaning 'management of the households.' Making of a living consists of three major elements: inputs to and outputs from land; access to services and goods from the world beyond the farms; and general sense of respectability for farming as a vocation.

Economy of ecological practices consists of three interrelated parts. The first part involves all the inputs that go into making of that economy. The mobilization of inputs is aimed at producing various outputs in farms. Therefore, the different outputs that emerge out of farms form second part. Finally, farmers also involve in economic relations with the rest of their communities and beyond for a number of goods and services that are not direct parts of agricultural inputs and outputs, but that are crucial part of existence. Together, these three components make up the emergent agricultural/agrarian economic assemblage. Before, I proceed to outline the details of these parts, I would like to clarify that I am taking the idea of economy in broad sense that encompasses monetary exchanges but is not limited to it. Moreover, economy, in this sense, emerges as set of materials, relations, and institutions, and not their abstractions.

Farm inputs: The major input in farming is the land itself. As I have shown in the discussions about farm ecology, agriculture occurs in hundreds of millions of farms, and a few billion plots of land. These fragmented pieces of land are emergent ecosystems involving distinct entities and human labour. Some of these entities are available in farm. Labour in farm is procured either from within the household, through waged and unwaged labour arrangements within a particular area, through migrant labour, and through mechanization. Even within an agricultural village or towns, the multiple labour arrangements exist. These labour arrangements also emerge through long historical process involving the changes in household demography and the division of labour in economic activities (van der Ploeg 2008; Chayanov, 1966). The types of labour performed in farms also vary—ranging from routine tasks, to detailed actions backed with keen observation. In the ecological management of farm, the latter is important component of labour process (Pretty et. al. 2011). The knowledge about how ecosystem functions becomes important in the way labour is performed. Besides humans, many other entities also contribute their 'labour'

70 in farms. The drama continues: the trees pump up nutrients from subsoils; birds and predator insects control pests; the winds blow spores of fungi, which help in converting nutrients into bioavailable forms (Nardi 2007).

Farms also use tools and machines for some tasks. Some of those machines are manufactured in different places. Besides machines, some farms use seeds from market or from neighbours; mineral fertilizers; and pest-control concoctions. All these materials are produced through diverse arrangements such as barter, gift, monetary exchange, and sharing from the common pools. Political economic forces are not abstract, external and disembodied entities imposing limits on farms from outside but are constituted through these myriad practices within millions of farms.

The move towards sustainable practices has led to the reconfiguration of the economy of agricultural inputs in diverse ways. An important part of sustainable agriculture practices is the generation of large number of inputs from within the farms. A lot of farmers who formerly used inputs such as chemical fertilizers or pesticides, for instance, are generating the nutrient flows in farm or utilizing farm designs to obviate or minimize the need of the use of pesticides (Pretty et al. 2011). Crop rotations are designed for, among other things, optimization of soil nutrients and the recycling of plant biomass, thereby obviating the need for sourcing some inputs from outside

(ibid.). For inputs used in farms, there are many institutional arrangements of their procurements such as individual ownership, renting for particular period of time from private owners, cooperative procurements and sharing based on mutually agreed upon rules and regulations.

Farm outputs: What comes out of farms are determined by the broad ecological context. By ecological context, I mean both in the sense of 'natural' context of weather patterns, topography

71 and soil quality, but also in the sense of constructed ecology such as microclimates created through farm layouts or artificial greenhouses. Within these ecological contexts, farms produce material outputs such as crops, vegetables, mushrooms, fruits, fodder, firewood, and seeds, among others. Each farm has its own profile of outputs. These outputs are disposed of in diverse ways: as objects of household sustenance; as items for gift and barter among relatives and neighbors; as items for exchange in particular markets. Beyond the tangible outputs, ecological farms can also produce ecosystem services such as moisture retention in soil, habitats for birds and predators, and pleasant aesthetic landscapes (Pretty, 2007).

In highly specialized farms, most of the goods are sold through highly specialized markets. In the context of primarily subsistence production, the disposal occurs through household level arrangements, and through informal networks of gifts and barter outside the households.

Between strictly household-focused systems of production to strictly-market oriented ones lie immensely plural arrangements involving diverse traders, network of transportation, processing facilities, governmental institutions, and cooperatives (van der Ploeg 2013). The legal arrangements, state institutions, and norms agreed upon in actual practices are all historically emergent realities within these assemblages (van der Ploeg 2008, 2013). Here it is also important to note that the distinction between 'input' and 'output' is strictly based on actual practice. For instance, seed could be input for a household, which saves it from previous crop or gets it from market or neighbors. For other farmers, who specialize in producing seeds for market, seeds are also outputs, and a source of revenue.

Non-agricultural economies: Farming households also are involved in economic relations that are not strictly related to procurement of farm inputs or disposal of farm outputs. They fall ill; children and adults go to schools and colleges; they use transportation networks to avail of these

72 services, or to avail of entertainment. They also consume goods and services not available in their own farms. Here also, their relations assume multiple forms. They may perform as a consumer of market products and services and engage in strictly monetary relations; they may also avail some of the services in barter arrangements such as with local shamans who would perform services in lieu of agricultural goods. They may perform their role as citizens of a state that delivers some of the goods and services through particular institutional mechanism.

Ultimately, the issue is whether and to what extent households bear the resource burden for the provisioning of various services. Income from outside the farm is becoming important component for the sustenance of agrarian households (Adhikari and Bohle, 2000; Brookfield and

Parson, 2008; van der Ploeg, 2010; van der Ploeg and Ye, 2016). At the same time, public provisioning of some services are part and parcel of household livelihoods. There is a clear difference between households that can avail of publicly provided services and those that rely on their own resources for procuring those services. To be more precise, it is different to be a householder in Cuba, Nordic countries, Canada, and many other countries where much of the healthcare and education are publicly provided from being a householder in other places where, for specific political economic reasons, these services are increasingly provided through markets.

We see a pattern here: public provisioning of some of the services goes a long way in strengthening the resilience of households. From a household's perspective what matters, therefore, is not only what policies are in place in agriculture, but what the overall policies and politics are that determine the availability and accessibility of public services such as health care, education, public transportation, and child care support. Public provisioning of services such as health care and education does not guarantee that households adopt ecological farming or that they can stay in farming, but it can strengthen the capacity of households to stay in farming.

Focusing on these aspects of households is important, therefore, to understand the capacity of households to stay and carry out farming including ecological farming.

Finally, we have to think about the dignity of farming as a vocation, too. Dignity of staying in farming is also related to overall capacity to make a living (van der Ploeg, 2016), but it is much more than that. The decline of interest among young people to stay in farming is widely documented (Agarwal, 2014; Jeffrey, 2010; van der Ploeg and Ye, 2016; White, 2012) and this decline is not only about lack of making a living in the farm. The issue of dignity is related to respectability in the households and in community for individuals, and respectability and perceived livability of the places in which agricultural production occurs (van der Ploeg and Ye,

2016).

Conclusion

This chapter builds a grounded political ecological framework to examine the generation and spread of ecological practices, often manifest in the ongoing construction and maintenance of farms. As the name itself suggests, this approach is informed by political ecological orientation that emphasizes multi-scalar and multi-factorial nature of change, while simultaneously recognizing the contingent, and spatio-temporally specific manifestation of those changes, in our case the generation and spread of ecological farming practices. In order to build this framework,

I have utilized the concepts of assemblage and conjectures.

A step-by-step approach is taken in this work. First, ecological smallholder farms are conceptualized as the outcomes of complex assemblages produced through the interactions among diverse actors both humans and non-humans. The biophysical entities that make up the farms have their own capacities and properties that are not totally amenable to human will.

Second, the knowledge about these capacities and properties is a crucial component of building ecological farms. This knowledge is manifest in the practices that are adopted in farms. In addition to acknowledging the capacities and properties of biophysical entities, it is also important to explore how this knowledge emerges, evolves and travels. The idea of practical assemblage addresses that need.

Then, third, as a human-centered ecosystem, farms require human presence for them to remain as farm ecosystems. In the context of family farms, the presence of family unit – of different sizes – is an important condition for the possibility of ecological farms. In ‘seeing like a farmer’, I have explored assemblages that enable as well as constrain families’ capacities to make a living. This approach calls for methodological design that emphasizes historical and multi-scalar aspects of change, grounded in understanding the contingent coalescing of multitude of factors in generating and spreading ecological farming practices. The next chapter spells out this methodological design.

Chapter 4 : Research Methodology

The previous chapter fleshed out the conceptual framework for the study. Called ‘Seeing like a farmer,’ this interdisciplinary and intersectoral framework of inquiry used the idea of assemblage and conjuncture to define three conceptual categories: Ecological farms, practical assemblages, and family livelihoods. The objective of that framework was to describe the nature of actors involved in the process of change, and to clarify the nature of causal relations that they establish among each other. The current chapter lays out the research design and methodology adopted during the inquiry.

To reiterate, this doctoral research addresses a core research problem: what makes possible the transition to ecological farming in the predominantly smallholder-based agrarian context of the global South? The countries of the global south, including Nepal, promoted green revolution agriculture after the second world war. Over the last six decades, Nepali state agencies, the international development organizations, and scientific research institutions put in place a variety of agricultural modernization programs based on the use of synthetic chemicals, mechanization, controlled irrigation, and hybrid seeds (Skerry et al. 1991). In Nepal, Chitwan Valley of south- central Nepal was one of the key sites of the promotion of these programs. This study examines the conditions that made possible the spread of ecological farming in this valley, amidst a systemic campaign for modern chemical agriculture.

Globally, including in Nepal, there is a growing realization among a wide cross section of people that green revolution agriculture is detrimental to ecological health of the land and economic viability of farms (IAASTD, 2009). This form of agriculture has also engendered a host of health

76 problems, including cancer, blood pressure, digestive issues, and heart diseases. This study is premised on the assumption that ecological agriculture can provide a much-needed alternative to green revolution agriculture. In this context, understanding what makes transition to ecological farming possible in the smallholder-dominated agrarian context can provide insights for transition needed throughout the world. Through this historically informed qualitative ethnographic research among ecological family farmers in Chitwan valley, I seek to generate insights for transition to ecological farming in Chitwan valley and beyond.

Understanding the political ecological complexity of the origin and spread of ecological farming practices requires generating different types of data through multiplicity of sources. While taking a long view, the research also call for capturing the reality at present. In this sense, I would characterize my study as historically informed ethnography of a place that has been undergoing rapid biophysical and social change

The rest of the chapter proceeds by discussing the qualitative research methodology adopted in this study. This exercise will be followed by discussions on research methods that includes discussion on tools of data collection and data analysis.

A Mixed Method Qualitative Approach: Exploring Dynamic Socioecological Complexity

This research adopts a mixed method qualitative approach to examine the conjunctural moments of the origins and spread of various ecological farming practices in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley. The mixed methods include ethnographic field work, key informant interviews, personal experiences, and collection and use of primary and secondary documents. Primarily qualitative in nature, this study locates the origin and spread of ecological practices in farms in the particular conjunctural

77 moments. These moments are characterized by the particular changes within the farming households and in the broader political ecology.

It defines a farm as the spatial and temporal organization of various components (such as soil, homes, sheds, biogas, compost pit, vermicompost shed, ponds, orchards, crops, trees, and animals) to produce goods and services for human consumption, and to create human households and habitats. An ecological farm is conceptualized as the construction and maintenance of farms such that they achieve positive outcomes such as in-farm production of energy, in-farm recycling of nutrients, maintenance and enhancement of soil fertility, minimization and elimination of wastes and pollutants, and comfortable and healthy human habitats. These ecological practices are not given but produced historically.

The key questions I addresses in this dissertation are: what were the political-ecological conditions that made possible the generation and spread of ecological farming practices in

Chitwan Valley; and what were the challenges of expanding these practices across space and time. I address these questions by drawing upon a case study of the origin and spread of ecological farming in Nepal’s Chitwan valley. My study addresses three key aspects of the construction and maintenance of smallholder ecological farms. First, I explore the construction and maintenance of these farms as the outcomes of the production, placement, and transformation of farm components (such as seeds, biogas, homes, soil, animals, trees, etc.) over time. I address this aspect through the examination of changing farm ecosystems. What kinds of practices were put in place? What were the timelines of the spread of those practices? Second, I examine the generation and transformation of the skills and knowledge required for the production, refinement, and placement of these components. For this, I “zoom out” on the historical process through which the actors involved in this generative process come together.

Third, I identify and analyze the livelihoods of smallholder family farms as the primary condition for the construction and maintenance these farms at present and in the future.

Analytically, I focus on the conjunctural moments when a variety of actors aligned together in producing specific practices, in promoting them, and in adopting them in farms. The phenomena to be examined three overlapping assemblages related to the generation and spread of ecological farming practices: the agroecological assemblages of farms, practical assemblages of producing and disseminating specific ecological practices, and livelihood assemblages. These phenomena call for understanding the multi-causal processes that operate at multiple levels –from the level of individual farmers and their farms, to broader biophysical and social landscapes characterized by the active presence of different actors (Decoteau, 2018).

Thus, this historically contextual work requires generating different types of data through multiplicity of sources. While taking a long view, these questions also call for capturing the reality at present. In this sense, I would characterize my study as historically informed ethnography of a place that has been undergoing rapid biophysical and social change.

Ethnographic observation alone cannot provide information about longer historical timelines. For that I have to rely on key informant interviews, primary and secondary documents, and my own experiences of growing up in farms in the valley.

The focus on these questions also reflects my abiding interest and involvement in agrarian ecological issues over several decades in Chitwan Valley and in South Asia. My own previous research in the valley also explores the changing livelihoods of fishing people living along the bank of Narayani and Rapti River, both of which have been undergoing rapid transformation through the building of dams, formation of nature conservation sites, resettlement and

79 displacements of populations, and changing agricultural and other spatial practices across its

500-kilometre of catchment in the northern Himalayan mountains (Bhattarai and Jana, 2005).

The fishing people recall that the massive decline in fish in the river coincided with the building of dams. They also speculated that the growing use of agrochemicals across farms along the roadsides could also have contributed to the decline of fish. Besides the formal research, I also grew up in farms in the valley. My grandparents were among the early migrants to the valley, and through them and many other relatives and acquaintances, I also heard about the land and farming in the valley.

When I had prepared my research proposal, I had proposed Fulbari as my ethnographic field site.

However, as I began the ethnographic research, I realized that the idea of a field as a bounded place was problematic. Scholars have identified the problems of conceptualizing the bounded place for a long time. If our focus is on people in a place, how do we study people who traverse across places? My informants were located in Fulbari and elsewhere. Even those who were located in Fulbari moved across places, and those travels were significant.

During my one year of research, I followed people and things as they travelled from one place to another. The flow of goods such as through the sale of organic products from Fulbari to outside markets; the input flows in the organic farms; the flow of people from outside into Fulbari as they come for study visits, research, trade, and volunteering works; the flow of farmers from

Fulbari to other places as they go to sell their goods, organize training activities, go for study tours, and go to avail of services such as health care, connected Fulbari as a place to the wider world. In this sense, my field site is broader than Fulbari although I focus primarily on cases of ecological farming in Fulbari.

The decision as to which connections to follow as people and things travel outside of Fulbari was based on my own perceived significance of the events. People moved all the time and I could not follow everyone who moved across. My primary focus was on movement related to the ecological farms: such as sale of organic products, trainings on related topics, meetings and conferences related to organic farming and permaculture, and some medical events such as accidents, among others.

Tools of Data Collection

In this inquiry, I use the data I generated through ethnographic participant observation, key informant interviews, and primary and secondary materials. I also draw upon my own experiences of living and working in our family farms, observing other farms, and being involved in activities related to the promotion of ecological practices in farms in Chitwan valley and other sites within Nepal where ecological agriculture has been pioneered and actively disseminated.

This study utilized mixed methods to address the research questions related to the spread of ecological family farming. I engaged mixed methods for several reasons. First, they helped me triangulate information generated from different sources. I have stated above that I have relied upon my own memory for some information, especially in describing the conditions in some markets, road networks, or the nature of house building. I have corroborated this information source with formal and informal conversations with key informants and farmers. This way, I have tried to ensure higher reliability of the data. As is also clear from the checklists I had prepared for the research, I have tried to generate similar information from different sources in the field, too.

Here, I will discuss the tools of data collection and analysis that I used for the study. The detailed list of research questions, interview checklists, ethnographic observation checklists, checklists for the key informants, and checklists for document collection is provided at the Appendix 1.

Due to my own intimate onto-epistemological positionality (familiarity arising out of long inhabitation, active involvement in the field) with the place and people of research, I have used the writing style which interlaces Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) throughout, as discussed by Nash and Bradley (2012). Scholarly personal narrative emphasizes questions while drawing from personal experiences of the author, as s/he describes the events and situations on the ground as they are. Using this format, I begin with the researcher (I) and “zoom-in” while “zooming- out” towards universalizable /generalizable themes that connect with the larger we” (Nash &

Bradley, 2012, p. 5).

Ethnography of the familiar: In this sense, what and how I am doing, could be called

“ethnography of the familiar.” Ethnographic observation was an important tool for collecting data for this dissertation. This tool is often associated with the techniques of generating thick descriptions of people’s behaviors (Geertz, 1971). Traditionally, ethnographic tools include mapping, writing diary, taking notes, and recording the conversations, among others. As Geertz emphasizes, the main objective in ethnography is to understand the dynamics of everyday complexity of the situation through thick description. Two caveats are in order here in relations to the ethnographic practice I used. First, while I make use of a few snapshots of people’s behaviors, my main focus is on the material organization of farms: the things that people put in their farms, the things that they have stopped putting in their farms, and the kinds of things people do in their farms. In other words, the focus of this work is on things and people both.

Second, I went to Chitwan valley as someone who was familiar with the place. My ow family migrated to the valley in 1970s. I went to schools and colleges there, in Tandi, a major market town in the eastern part of the Chitwan Valley. I grew up in farms and saw the things come and go, appear and disappear, in our own farms and those of others. My involvement in the field of sustainable agriculture and democratic politics – as an activist, an NGO-worker, and a public intellectual – had also connected me to an emerging network of actors in the field. These experiences were crucial while interviewing people, observing landscapes, and analyzing documents. I, therefore, significantly draw upon my personal experiences that are relevant to understanding the changes occurring on particular farms and to triangulate data generated through other methods. Many of the things, people, institutions, and places I observed during my research and experienced during my growing up in the valley were familiar to me for a long time. This research is a process of generating new data as well as converting these familiar matters into significant matters. As the saying goes in ethnographic lingo, for me as the familiar got stranger, the stranger elements got familiar.”

I had initially planned to carry out this ethnographic work in Fulbari village in the Chitwan

Valley. I had made a preliminary visit to this village in 2008 (described at the opening) Over a twelve-month period in Nepal between September 2010 and August 2011, I spent ninety-three days in total in Fulbari, staggering my stays such that I could cover the annual cropping cycle.

The ethnographic observations focused on the ecology of farms, economic practices, agricultural knowledge, and non-agricultural aspects of agrarian changes. Direct observation of farms in

Fulbari provided data of farm-level entities such as trees, animals, built structures and their placements, soil management, biodiversity, labour practices, economic exchanges, and

83 interaction with agricultural experts. These observations were recorded in notes, photographs, and audio recordings.

Observations were also the primary source of information about how and to what extent forms of exchanges were changing. Cooperative marketing, for example, was a distinctly new form of exchange tied to organic agricultural production. Not all changes were due to the adoption of sustainable practices, however. For instance, local retail outlets and direct-selling to consumers had existed for a long time in market centers such as Narayangarh, Tandi, Chanauli and Rampur.

By 2010, what farmers were selling now was different because of the changing ecological management of farms. The markets they interacted with have also changed over time. Selling to organic outlets in Kathmandu and Pokhara, two major cities in Nepal, was a new and relatively small and sporadic activity for farming households. I followed the merchandise to these cities to track the complex logistical arrangements required for the flow of goods. Descriptive mapping of this maze helped me understand the institutional and material complexity of making the

“organic” trade system work. It also helped me understand the possibilities and limitations of these emerging economic relationships. I met with farmers, businessmen, staff of non- governmental organizations and representatives of government offices to explore the possibility of expanding organic marketing through farmers’ local markets and dedicated outlets.

I also travelled with some of the local-level agricultural experts as they went around various places conducting what are now called “plant clinics.” During the plant clinic sessions, I observed how the live material world of farming and expert ideas came together in producing a particular kind of relationship between farmers and experts. Some of the experts also ran research projects in the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS). I visited their labs and discussed their works.

The changes in the farms also historically connected Fulbari with a host of other places, individuals, and institutions within Chitwan Valley and beyond. For instance, its fodder tree saplings or seeds came from diverse sources – from neighbors, government horticultural farms, forest departments, and original mountain villages, requiring multi-sited approach. I sought to understand the way lives lived in different places is intermeshed. Farmers shared ideas, and travelled to see each other’s farms, thus connected Fulbari with places and peoples beyond.

The transformation of agrarian material worlds has involved sharing of living materials for millennia (Mann, 2011). As Massey (2004) has shown, places are never bounded space, but constructed through flows and relations involving human bodies, ideas, and other material entities. Fulbari in no way was an exception. Therefore, this research also demanded travelling to places beyond Fulbari. Fulbari farmers had also visited many farms and agricultural projects outside of their own villages, and adopted ideas, materials, and practices from them. Others from outside had also visited Fulbari farms and had transferred practices from there through a network of governmental and non-governmental institutions and individual initiatives.

These observations also had some limits. Farms are dynamic entities, alive and changing all the time. Therefore, capturing every single change is impossible. There are changes that cannot be captured without sophisticated scientific procedures and instruments – for instance, those that occur at microscopic levels in soils. My research encompasses observations about biophysical changes to the extent that my generalist ability allowed. Where I could not rely upon primary research, I also drew upon secondary literatures such as from ecology, plant and animal sciences, and soil biology to shed light on the biophysical complexity of ecosystems. The bacterial and fungal lives in soil that regulate and facilitate the nutrient cycles among plants are incredibly

85 complex and are beginning to be understood clearly only recently (Nardi 2007; Vandermeer

2011).

Besides direct observation of farms and daily activities in Fulbari, I also participated in many meetings, in Fulbari and outside. During my stay, Chitwan’s district government was in the process of formulating its long-term strategic plan, for which converting Chitwan into an organic farming hub was an important stated goal. The committee overseeing the preparation of this plan organized a series of informal and formal meetings to which I was invited to observe and share my ideas. Those meetings became an important opportunity to observe how various actors saw farming differently as they tried to chart out long-term development plans for the valley.

I also draw extensively upon my own experiences. I have worked on farms for as long as I can remember. I spent considerable time in our extended family in the mountain village of Sukaura

(in hilly district of Tanahun, south of Bandipur, a tourist town) before we migrated to Chitwan in

1976. As a child, I contributed to farm work when not in school. I cut grass for cattle and goats and weeded the corn fields. I transplanted rice seedlings and harvested rice, corn, and other crops. I prepared fields, hauled farmyard manure into them, and planted vegetables. Inevitably, these activities exposed me not only to the drudgery of farm work, but also to the grounded political ecological of agricultural production and household sustenance.

While experiences of farm life have been deeply etched in my memory, in the early 1990s, I was actively interested in ecological sustainability of farming. After I finished college in 1991, I started working in an international commercial bank. I quit the job after fifteen months and started living at my maternal uncle's farm 30 kilometers southwest from my hometown. I was involved in converting this two-acre farm into an agroforest system. We named it, the Ajamvari

Farm, to capture the ideal of eternal and perennial farming. In order to design this multipurpose farm, I gathered ideas from permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison's book, Permaculture Manual, to design the farm. When we began the work, it was an annually-cropped piece of land. By the late

1990s, it had evolved into a vibrant agroforest with different patches combining trees of different heights, bamboos, annual grains and vegetables, goats, chicken, buffaloes and cows.

I was also inspired by writings of Wendell Berry. I started reading Berry’s books in 1987 as a part of teaching myself the English language. His book, Home Economics, which emphasized the need for centrality of household sustenance in economic thinking, was a sure contrast to highly abstract economics I was learning in my college where I was pursuing a degree in commerce and accounting. Then, Berry's The Unsettling of America (1986 [1977]) opened up a whole new vista of understanding about the ecological and socio-cultural costs of agricultural development and modernization in the United States. Besides being a collection of inspiringly beautiful essays, this book also explored the changing cultural, political, economic, and physical landscapes of

American agriculture, which helped me make some sense of unfolding reality all around me in

Chitwan. As I was to discover later, and as I share throughout this dissertation, both processes were intimately connected, albeit in complicated ways. After all, the opening of Chitwan Valley for agriculture and the establishment of gridded agricultural landscapes on the flat surface was primarily carried out by the surveyors and agricultural extension experts from the United States of America (Sketry, et al., 1991) (Chapter 2 for details).

Key informant interviews: Besides numerous informal conversations during my ethnographic work, I also carried out interviews with fifty-nine key informants: ten of them were farmers; six owners of agrochemical shops; five officials of district agriculture office; five political leaders; four organic traders; ten representatives of non-governmental organizations; three teachers at the

Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences; eleven students of IAAS; and five pioneers of sustainable agriculture in Nepal. Backed up with ethnographic observations, review of secondary materials, physical observations of farm, and my own personal experiences of growing up in the

Chitwan Valley, these interviews provided complex accounts that included conjunctural moments and the involvement of diverse actors in the origin and spread of ecological practices in

Fulbari’s farms.

I used interviews to identify timelines about some major changes such as the spread of trees in farms, setting up of biogas plants, adoption of improved cattle-shed methods, use of green manures, use of Azolla and fish in paddy fields, changing labour practices, use of machines on farms, changing focus of agricultural science teaching and research, among others. These helped me understand better the spread of ecological practices. I conducted (and recorded) interviews in various places – in labs, shops, homes, training sessions, during travel, under banyan trees, and at roadside tea stalls. I recorded these interviews primarily in my iPod and transcribed them later. I also took interview notes during the time when I did not have my iPod with me or when I did not have my iPod charged. During my research Nepal had suffered prolonged power-outage, running up to 16-17 hours per day in some months. Charging iPod was often not an option, and I took written notes when my iPod was out of charge or when I had unscheduled interviews. The data generated through key informant interviews were triangulated with those coming from other sources including from my own personal experiences.

Primary and Secondary Documents: I utilized several primary and secondary documents. The main primary documents were the policy documents, cooperative records, and visitor records. I utilized secondary peer-reviewed writings and other materials that focused directly and indirectly on changing farm organizations in Fulbari, Chitwan Valley and beyond, and research abstracts

88 was an important source of data collection. Many policy documents were available online. I accessed others through the Ministry of Agriculture, located in the highly restricted government complex of Singh Durbar in Kathmandu. I also discovered during the research that Nepal’s state institutions had begun uploading more governmental documents online. Therefore, access to public documents has become much easier. Private research institutions had also begun scanning and putting them online so that researchers have better access to them without having to trek through securitized office complexes.

Reviewing recent policy documents helped me see how farming is perceived in multiple ways by state institutions such as the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Agriculture, and National Planning

Commission. Some of the practices were directly contingent upon governmental policies such as the biogas plants and improvement of cattle sheds for better management of nutrients.

The Fulbari Organic Producers’ Cooperative has also kept several documents and records. Their record books showed the details of organic farming volunteers who had visited Fulbari including their names and addresses; the frequency of the meetings of cooperative members and executives; and the agenda of the meetings, among other things. The visitors’ logbook was particularly informative about how Fulbari had become a hub for visitors interested in organic farming. During my stay in Fulbari, I also observed visitors write in the logbooks. These were people who came as wandering volunteers from different parts of the world, the trainees of short courses on various aspects of organic farming, and visitors with no organizational affiliations who had heard of organic farming in Fulbari and had visited for direct observation. These people also included agricultural experts from government and non-governmental organizations, and farmers from different parts of Nepal.

The review of materials about Nepal’s agricultural educational and research institutions provided the historical contexts of public interventions in agriculture, thereby helping me understand different conjunctural moments I have described in Chapter 5-8. Institute of Agriculture and

Animal Sciences (IAAS) is a few kilometers away from Fulbari. IASS has produced numerous research materials over the last four decades, and I reviewed more than fifty relevant abstracts from the IAAS journal.

Data analysis

The data I collected came in multiple forms: research notes, interviews, photographs, personal memories, and primary and secondary documents. After having a cursory sense of what kind of data I had gathered, I worked on the framework for their presentation. The broad outline of the dissertation provided the first structure to sort out the data. Following this, I prepared a detailed outline of each chapter, which helped me filter my data further.

Indeed, it is impossible and also quite unnecessary to look into every minute detail of the existing reality and transformations. I focused on some aspects that have a large bearing on farm integration, nutrient recycling, and overall productivity. This does not mean that other details were not important. Indeed, they are. For instance, it would be insightful to explore the transformation of microbial life in different parts of farms. However, I was limited by my own expertise in that regard.

I am aware that some of the data do not allow me to make definite statements. This is especially true of issues regarding the challenges that farmers are facing as they transition to sustainable agriculture. I have used anecdotal data to highlight the importance of some issues such as the rising cost of house building, private health expenditure, expenses related to children’s

90 schooling, and cultural attitudes towards farming. One major objective of exploring these issues is to highlight the importance of focusing on issues that are not strictly agricultural, but that are important if seen from the vantage point of farming households. This breadth of the dissertation provides preliminary grounds for exploring emerging issues in depth in future research projects.

Chapter 5 : The Making of Chitwan Valley

In the previous three chapters, I critically reviewed the literature pertaining to ecological agriculture, defined conceptual framework of the study, and described the research design and methodology adopted in the research. This chapter begins the presentation of research data.

The present chapter explores conjunctural changes in Chitwan Valley as a larger site within which changes in Fulbari Village are situated. By using the idea of conjuncture and assemblage, this chapter explores the historical process through which the valley emerged as a place for strategic barrier and royal hunting ground, as a place for agricultural modernization, and, recently, as a place for experimentation on ecological farming. To reiterate, conjunctures are moments when specific sets of structurally stable (in relative sense) forces shape particular outcomes, whereas assemblages are the shifting and dynamic coming together of a multitude of actors (Decoteau, 2018). In other words, while both conjunctures and assemblages are characterized by the interactions of multiple actors, they are also distinct in terms of their relative stability. These historical processes are important for explaining these recent changes in Fulbari village at micro-scale and at Chitwan Valley at macro-scale.

The latest manifestation of one of these assemblages was on display on a day in June 2011 during what is now called in Nepal the Rice Day (dhan diwas). In 2004, the Phillippines- headquartered International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) called for International Year of Rice celebrations. Nepali government responded to that call by declaring Asar 15 of Nepali Bikram

92 calendar3 as 'National Rice Day.' Since then, this day is officially celebrated each year across the country. The celebration often involves political leaders and agricultural officials participating in different activities in farms and outside. Fulbari Organic Producers' Cooperative organized a village level celebration of 8th 'Rice day' (Dhan Diwas) on June 29, 2011 (Asar 15, 2068 Bikram era calendar). This celebration consisted of two parts. The first part included mud-throwing among participants and planting the first batch of rice seedlings in a farmer's field. There were several journalists present with their cameras (both still and video) and audio recorder. Several of

Chitwan's FM radio stations aired the celebration live with interviews with participants and rice planting, and mud-splattering photo shots.

The second part consisted of a public meeting at the open ground of Shreepur Secondary School.

Chaired by Chandra Dai (Chandra Adhikari), the then chairperson of the Fulbari Organic

Producers’ Cooperative, various individuals spoke about many things including the need for development, health, soil fertility, and chemicals in farming. The speakers represented various organizations: government, NGOs, political parties, savings and credit groups, and a natural pesticide and fertilizer manufacturing companies and distributor outlets. Mr. Santosh Raj Paudel, the then Program Planning Officer at District Agriculture Development Office (DADO),

Chitwan, was invited as its chief guest (pramukh atithi). The first speaker was Min Bahadur

Bishwokarma, president of a local NGO, Dalit Sewa Samaj (Dalit Welfare Society). During his short speech, Mr. Bishwokarma highlighted the similarity between changes in caste system and changes in the use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture. "Things definitely change with time," he

3 Nepal's official calendar is Bikram and Asar is the third month. This month is also spelled 'Ashadh', but that is more sanskritized name. I have retained 'Asar' for its simplicity and this is close to common everyday usage. Asar 15 has been special occasion of 'entering into the mud'. It is also commonly remembered as 'dahi chiura khane din' (the day to eat curd and beaten rice).

93 said." In the past, we had untouchability. The laws were made to keep that (practice) in place.

But we have changed that law and now untouchability is illegal. Similarly, for many years we thought that farming was possible only with the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. That is also changing now. Today, we know chemicals destroy our health and diseases never seen before, such as cancer, obesity, heart attacks, and diabetes, have become common." The later speakers echoed him and recounted how they used to "travel long distances" to procure chemical fertilizers; how agriculture office nearly forced them to use chemical fertilizers in the initial years; and how the whole village had become 'chemicalised' (chemicalmaya). "We were told we needed to make agricultural revolution (krishi kranti)," Shambhu Dhital, an elderly farmer, recalled. "We were told that we needed to produce more food because the population was increasing; we were told that we needed to contribute to the development of the country (deshko bikash garna), and that we must use chemical fertilizers to achieve that. There was a time, when the whole village had become chemicalmaya (chemicalized, or full of chemicals); we had to use so many different 'powders' (pesticides); in those early days, they offered us chemical fertilizers almost for free. I once hauled in one cartload of 'chinimal'--it used to be called ammonium sulphate or synthesized nitrogen--for only twenty rupees." He paused for a few seconds. "The whole village was about to become desert; things could not grow. We realized that we had to do something or abandon farming as a way of eking out our livelihoods. Today, Fulbari has become an example (of organic farming).” Other speakers highlighted how agricultural experts (krishi bigyaharu) now were teaching farmers how to reduce and give up chemicals and adopt ‘organic’ way. There were a few personnel of a company that had started producing earthworm cast. They were distributing some sample packets to those present at this gathering.

This event symbolizes the variety of actors that are involved in the making of this emerging world of ecological agriculture in the Chitwan Valley. As I further elaborate below in this chapter, these actors are produced over time. During the twentieth century, there was a massive expansion of state agencies across Nepal including in the Chitwan Valley. In the 1950s, the era of international development began that was a major catalyst for the making of agrarian landscapes in the valley. In addition to the state agencies, international agencies also came into the picture. From 1990s onwards, we have also witnessed the spread of non-governmental institutions across the valley. The material transformations – in farms, in housing technologies, in infrastructure, and many other aspects of people’s lives – cannot be understood without accounting for this expansion and transformation of state agencies over the decades. For example, if we see a particular variety of rice in a farmer’s field now, then it is likely that its generation involved a complex set of new institutions including the plethora of state agencies, together with international ones and, recently, non-governmental ones.

The rest of the chapter explores the three conjunctural periods in the making of the agrarian world of the valley. The pre-1950s political ecology of the valley was characterized by sparse population and strong state ownership of land, regeneration of wilderness as security barrier against the possible invasion from the British India, and endemically malarial environment. I characterize the modernization period from 1950s to 1980s as a time of expansion of agricultural modernization projects and the governmental institutions, the clearing of the forests and the draining of the wetlands, the formation of freehold agrarian households, expansion of the cultivated areas, and expansion of physical and social infrastructures. I find the most recent period (1990s-2010s) as the period of experimentation and spread of different ecological farming practices, parceling out of farmlands into ever smaller holdings, continued expansion of state

95 institutions and the growth of off-farm income, the expansion of non-governmental organizations and markets, the privatization of health and education.

Pre-1950s: A Malarial Valley, Hunting Ground, and Sources of Land Revenue

If the day is clear (for instance, right after a good rain), one can see most of the Chitwan valley from the Uppardangadhi mountain fort located about 1040 metres above the sea level to the north of the valley. From the fort, the valley sprawls on the south as a mosaic of houses, farms, forests, factories, brick kilns, government offices, market centers, and roads. The churia mountain range surrounds the southern side of the valley. A 35-kilometre stretch of the East-

West Highway runs through the middle. Major market centres such as Bhandara, Parsa, Tandi, and Narayangarh are located along or near this highway. Narayangarh, situated on the bank of

Narayani river in the westernmost part of this 35-kilometre stretch of the highway, is the biggest city/market center in the valley.

Administrative headquarters and residential homes fill up Bharatpur town that sits a few kilometres to the east of Narayangarh. A four-kilometre wide forest patch that runs from the northern foothill down to the Rapti river in the south connects the forest and grasslands of

Chitwan National Park. This area hosts most of the lakes of the valley and has become a major tourist destination famous for its one-horned rhinoceros and jungle safari. Chitwan has over 400 settlements of differing sizes: the villages, towns, market centers and cities in Chitwan that are connected among themselves and with other places through expanding networks of roads and means of communication (DDCC, 2015). The Narayani river flows on the western border of the district. There are three distinct settlement areas in the part of the valley that are within Chitwan

96 district: Eastern, Western and Maadi. 4 The dark green areas are forests that form Chitwan

National Park, some state-controlled and managed forest patches and community-managed forests.

Figure 5.1 A google earth image of Chitwan, 2011

The areas of the valley currently under settlement were either very sparsely populated or comprised of grasslands, forest or swamp before 1950s. According to some official reports, this valley had seen cycles of population and depopulation in the past. A district profile prepared by

District Development Committee (DDC), the district-level administrative and governing institution, claims that this valley had a history of settlement dating back to pre-historic times

(District Development Committee of Chitwan (DDCC), 2013).

4 A district is the middle-rung administrative unit in Nepal until 2016, and there are 75 of them across Nepal. Nepal’s new constitution has created three tiered-governing structure: the federalized central governing institutions, provincial governments, and local level municipalities, village councils, and metropolitan cities. The status of the district governance is in limbo as the transition to provincial governance is to begin with provincial elections slated for December 2017. The 75 districts were created in 1962 and have remained one of the main units for public statistics.

The latest round of depopulation began in the early nineteenth century because of a strategic policy shift of the Nepali state. Nepali state (called, ‘Gurkha state’ then) lost a war to the British

East India Company in the 1814-1816 war, famously called the War of Sughauli (Regmi, 1995).

This war stopped the imperial expansion of the nascent Nepali kingdom and set a relatively fixed national boundary. The rulers decided to regenerate the malarial swamp and semi-tropical forest as a barrier against the rising British empire (Adhikari and Dhungana, 2009; Regmi, 1978). This is depicted well by a British writer, Harold A. Oldfield, in the late nineteenth century.

Oldfield was a surgeon stationed at the British Residency in Kathmandu in 1850. Because of the fear that the foreign residents might gather important information which might aid the possible

British invasion of the country, the Nepali rulers had strictly regulated their mobility across the country. Within this constraint, Oldfield kept notes and sketches of various aspects of Nepal during that time, among which was extensive details about the court life, hunting expeditions, and places that he had visited when he was allowed to accompany the rulers as they embarked upon hunting expeditions, including in the Chitwan Valley. He writes about Chitwan (Chitaun, in his word) thus:

"The dhuns (valleys) (italics in the original) of Chitaun is of considerable extent, and derives its name from the town of Chitaun, which is situated on the right bank of the Rapti (river), about twenty-five to thirty miles below Hetowara (Hetauda), at or near the point where it is joined by the Mantaura river, a tributory stream of considerable size, which flows through the lower hills to the north-east of Chitaun. "The district about Chitaun is open, and covered with long grass jungle rather than forest, and is very much infested with rhinocerous. It is the best shooting ground for the rhinocerous in the whole of the Nepalese dhuns (italics in the original). "Previous to the first Nipal (Nepal) war, the dhuns (italics in the original) of Chitaun and Makwanpur were extensively cultivated; but since the peace of 1816, the Gorkha Government, from the motives of policy, have caused the inhabitants to abandon the greater part of them, and they have been allowed to revert to their natural state of forest and grass jungle." (Oldfield, 1880, p.49).

The royal hunting activities continued till 1960s, but the policy of keeping the swampy forest as strategic barrier began to change in the early twentieth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, the rulers began to promote the reclamation of the forest and grasslands for cultivation and settlement. In the 1920s, the government had signed a treaty with British India that guaranteed full national sovereignty of Nepal, and this lessened the fear of possible British invasion of what was left as Nepal territory. As a part of the attempt on the part of the rulers to expand the agricultural tax base, they began to promote the reclamation of land for agriculture.

This reclamation was much more successful in the eastern plains than in the Chitwan valley, however (Adhikari and Dhungana, 2009; Ojha, 1983: 21-44).

Figure 5.2: Chitwan’s administrative divisions (Nepal’s map in the inset)

Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)

Chitwan remained sparsely populated until the 1950s because of the endemic malaria infestation, higher tax burden imposed by the ruling class in Kathmandu, and generally harsh living conditions compared to settlements in the hills where people had created terraced valleys through hundreds of years of labour (ibid.). Moreover, the war years of the first half of the twentieth century also led to the focus of the rulers in other areas. For example, they were occupied with the recruitment of Gurkha soldiers for the British army (Subedi, 2016) and the establishment of a few industrial factories in the eastern areas (Biratnagar and Janakpur in particular), which were closer to the Indian port city of Calcutta, to produce goods whose demand had risen during the war years.

Before the 1950s, much of the Chitwan Valley remained under swamps and forests, punctuated by settlements of the earlier settlers and inhabitants of this Valley – Tharus, Darais, Botes, and

Kumhals. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Nepali state attempted to transform densely forested areas of southern plains into agricultural land (Ojha 1983). It was a period of growing interest in the export of grains and timber to British India. Large-scale conversion of forests into farmlands, however, had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century.

Setting up of the agricultural schools, training of a few agricultural experts and building of an irrigation system in eastern plains were perhaps the main agricultural modernization projects during the first half of the twentieth century. They indicate Nepal's non-farming ruling elites' interest in farming, but until 1950 these interests were not enacted for a number of reasons. The reclamation of land did not go in fast speed due to a number of factors. Primary among those factors were: the higher tax burdens on cultivated parts of land and endemic malaria (Ojha 1983).

The various wars waged by the British empire during the period also led to the recruitment of a

100 large number of able-bodied Nepali hill men (glorified as Gurkhas) from Nepal's mountain villages (Subedi 2011).

Whatever area was under cultivation, the land was owned by the state, which appointed tax collectors (jamindars) in each settlement. The settlements housed the cultivators of particular area (Regmi, 1978). The tax collectors managed the cultivators who shared some portion of the produce as tax payments but did not have proper ownership over the land. Throughout the hills and the mountains, by late nineteenth century, farming households had started having ownership title over some of the land they cultivated. The land ownership system in Chitwan began to change after the end of hereditary rules of the Ranas, and establishment of liberal democracy in

1951. It was in this context that we need to explore the post-1950s conjunctural moments in this larger swath of Chitwan Valley.

The pre-1950 agrarian assemblage is summarized in the table below (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1: A Malarial Valley, Strategic Barrier, Hunting Ground, and Source of Land Revenue: Pre-1950

Changes in Farm-making Assemblages of Forces/Actors/Triggers • Slow-paced making of farms • State policies the key force in the making and and reversals to ‘natural’ state unmaking of farms; • Rice planting based on spray- • The nature of farming determined by the terrain, the seeding variety of crops and the knowledge about the • Forests/Streams and swamps as terrain; important sources of food such • Seasonal malaria as key deterrent together with as fish, vegetables, spices state policies; • A few multi-story homes, but • The nature of natural vegetation and state/human almost all made out of adobe, capacity or lack thereof (e.g. lack of machinery reed, thatch, and straw; powerful enough to clear the forest and matted • Animals left untethered and reeds and to drain the swamps grazed in the open grasslands • Sugauli War and strategic goal of the Nepali State and inside the forests; mostly • Nepali state’s extractive tax policy deterred migrants used for meat and as drought (both from Indian villages and Nepali mountains) to animals; come and settle in the valley. Migrants in search of

101

• Farms belonged to a mauja and more land went elsewhere such as Darjeeling, the head of the mauja was the North-East India and Myanmar tax collector, who collected • Hence, until 1950s, this valley remained sporadically taxes annually and deposited settled; them to a government office up • Ruling elites also kept the forests as hunting sites for in the mountain themselves and their invited foreign guests; (Uppardangadhi); • State ownership of land with tax collectors • Individual/family ownership of appointed for each settlement, although by the land was non-existent in second half of the nineteenth century, individual Chitwan Valley freehold landownership was institutionalized in the hills (Regmi, 1978)

From 1950s to 1980s: Expansion of State, International Development, and Agricultural Modernization

The period between 1950s and 1980s is another key conjunctural moment in the valley’s history of Chitwan Valley. This period is characterized by the involvement of Nepali state institutions and international development agencies in transforming the biophysical and political economy of the valley. Two specific events had particularly salient place in this conjuncture. In January

1951, the then Rana regime signed the Point Four agreement with the United States Overseas

Mission (USOM) to initiate a series of modernization projects across Nepal.

The second is the end of the Rana regime in February of the same year. Inspired by the struggle for Indian independence, many Nepalis began various armed and unarmed movements against the autocratic rule of the Ranas (1846-1950 AD). These movements, many of which initially emerged in the late 1930s, culminated in the signing of an agreement between the then Rana rulers and the rebels in 1951, paving the way for the end of 104-year (1846-1950 AD) rule of the

Rana families. In the aftermath of political change in the early 1950s, the objectives of state institutions began to be redefined, and many new state institutions were established to carry out various development activities.

102

During the 1950s, legal and administrative arrangements of land ownership was significantly altered, notable among them being the abolition of different landownership arrangements within which the state ownership of land was instituted. The changes instituted the household ownership of land on a firm footing (Regmi, 2002). This meant that the migrants who came to the valley created farms as free-hold household property, unlike in the past when the cultivators did not have title over the land.

The Point Four Program was the main vehicle for the introduction of modernization projects in the country, including the ones for the modernization of agriculture. In the aftermath of the

Second World War, agricultural planners in the countries of the global south including in Nepal promoted what is now widely known as the 'green revolution' (Patel, 2013; Pearse, 1974). As a set of farming practices, green revolution encompassed the use of 'miracle seeds', synthetic chemicals, controlled surface irrigation, and agricultural machinery. Promotion and spread of these practices involved the setting up of supply chains for inputs, and establishment of a wide network of institutions for teaching, research, and extension (Cullather, 2010; Visser, 2010).

Chitwan Valley was one of the main sites of these experimental interventions in Nepal.

In early 1950s, Chitwan was selected for a variety of modern agricultural interventions (Sharma and Malla, 1958; Skerry et al., 2001). In ordinary conversation, this place was referred to as

‘bikas khuleko thau’ (the place where development was taking place, especially referring to opening of schools, building of roads, and establishment of hospitals). As a child, I remember walking with my grandparents as they trekked down a kilometer and a half of dirt road to a government-managed cooperative shop called Sajha (literally means 'common') in Tandi, a market town in eastern Chitwan. Sajha was the government offered and designated shop to buy

103 different fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and implements such as iron plough that was popularly called 'bikase halo' ('improved plough' is the closest translation).

The development potentials of Chitwan valley were not lost on Nepal's early planners. The first

Five Year Plan document states:

Rapti Valley, some 90 miles south-west of Kathmandu, is 600 square miles in area. It has approximately 25,000 inhabitants and 25,000 bighas (nearly 42,000 acres) of land under cultivation. The valley contains, in addition, about 50,000 additional bighas of fertile wasteland which can be brought under cultivation without damaging forest resources. The soil is suitable for growing cereals, pulses, sugarcane, oil-seeds, fruits and vegetables. Grassland is also available for cattle breeding. The surrounding forest, large and dense, abounds in high class timber resources for wood-working and derivative industries such as the manufacture of furniture, matches, paper, tanning materials and bamboo products. Ample raw materials also exist for other small or medium-size industries such as oil-milling, rice-milling cigarette production and lime and cement manufacture. (Government of Nepal, n.d., p.35)

The expansion of state institutions sped up after 1960 when the then King Mahendra took over state power from the elected government through a military coup. Between 1960, when the military coup occurred, and 1990, when a political movement for multiparty democracy succeeded in curtailing the power of the absolute monarchy, which prevailed for three decades

(1960-1990). During the royal Panchayati rule, Nepali state institutions had expanded in a variety of forms across the country. The absolute monarchical Nepali state carved up various administrative units, and introduced bureaucratic and political functionaries in a plethora of institutions set up to politically manage these units. (Please see Table 5.2 for the summary of conjunctures during 1950-1980s, subdivided in four decades)

104

Table 5.2: Hill Migrations, Institutional Expansion, Ecological Experimentation: 1950- 1980s

Changes in Farms Assemblages of Forces/Actors/Triggers • Individual/family • End of autocratic family-fule of the Ranas; homesteads created in • Arrival of various international agencies in agricultural new areas such as Fulbari sector: The Government of India, the United States and legally enshrined Overseas Mission, Food and Agricultural Organization of with titles; Farms also the United Nations, World Health Organization; got divided through • Land policy shift with the ushering in of private/family inheritance transfer and ownership of land in new constitutional set up; buying and selling • Malaria eradication program began with the mobilization • Home building practices of international and national resources), making available changed from mud bricks of quinine; drainage of swamps; and thatched roofs to • Agricultural training center in Rampur established, and fired-bricks, cement and expansion of agricultural extension, introduction of new corrugated sheet metal varieties of seeds for roofs • Nepal’s First agricultural cooperative set up to provide • Mixture of tethered and credits to the first settlers; untethered animal • Landslide in 1955 husbanding began • Availability of powerful machines and petroleum energy • New breeds of hen and for land clearing new tools in farms; • Experiments in Biogas technology, setting up of • Trees in farms, especially institutions for its promotion bakena for fodder and • Government set up a horticultural farm for fruit nursery diverse fruit trees and vegetable seedlings • Green manuring for rice • Cover-cropping experiments in Rampur agricultural fields school which would be named Institute of Agriculture • Biogas installed in some and Animal Sciences in the 1970s; farms • Brick and clay-tile firing kilns established; • Commercial vegetable • Highways built (East-West, Narayangarh-Mugling, Prithvi) production • The remaining forests also increasingly set aside and • A few ‘permaculture’ controlled as wild life conservation farms set up • Radio programs on agricultural modernization • Increase in wage • Expansion of Sajha across Chitwan and beyond; laboring, seasonal in- • Setting up of modern implement factory in Birgunj migrant labor during • Irrigation Canal network expands planting/harvesting • Introduction of import liberalization, and liberalization of education and health care in mid 1980s • Sustainable agriculture ideas through international

exchange such as the permaculture training at the IAAS • Squatting of grazing lands diminishes the availability of fooder for the animals;

105

As we witnessed in tables abov, making Nepal's agriculture modern was a key element of various interventions during these fateful four decades. The opening of this valley for settlement in the 1950s was an important component of the organized transition from 'traditional' to

'modern' agriculture, as well as from subsistence oriented traditional Nepal to modern Nepal

(Malla and Sharma, 1958; Skerry et al., 1991).

Nepali state's interest in farms is as old as the state itself. However, until 1950s, this interest was largely limited to extraction of surplus in the forms of unpaid and often forced labour and tax revenues on land (Regmi 1978; 1995). The state's interest in how farmers farmed remained marginal at best for a long time. Regmi (2002) has documented a few circulars the then rules produced regarding certain farming practices such as when to use irrigation or how to share local forest and water resources. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nepali rulers also began to promote a few new varieties of vegetables, fruits and ornamental plants. In mid-1850s, the then prime minister Jung Bahadur Rana brought seeds of several winter vegetables, fruits, and ornamental plants from England. This could be considered, borrowing from anthropologist Mark Liecty, their participation in "selective modernity" (2003).

State's institutional involvement in agriculture began with the setting up of first agriculture school and veterinary hospital in Kathmandu in 1924. First experimental farm was set up in central Tarai town of Parwanipur in 1947 (Kaini 2005, p.4). In early twentieth century, several students from Nepal studied at the College of Agriculture in Kanpur, India. (Kaini 2005, p.3).

Expansion of agricultural land remained the focus of new agricultural initiatives.

These national institutions operate in tandem with many transnational institutions, both public and private, and inter-governmental and non-governmental. United Nations have several allied

106 institutions that work on agriculture, UN Food and Agriculture Organization being the major one. There are several transnational agriculture research institutes located in different parts of the world and specialized in particular crops such as potato, rice, wheat, maize, and others. These research centres are coordinated by Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research

(CGIAR), and they are commonly referred to as CGIAR centres. These centres collaborate with national, and sub-national institutions--private, public and non-governmental. They procure seeds and other genetic resources. They mobilize funding for a variety of research projects.

These institutions are organized around three inter-related tasks: educating agricultural experts; carrying out agricultural research and delivering knowledge and technology through a variety of extension institutions and communication activities. In Nepal, these institutions emerged over the last six decades. These institutions have transformed agriculture in many ways and over time have established particular relations with Nepal's farming communities. These relations are also not fixed and are evolving over time. This comes in variety of projects and institutional forms.

The bilateral institutions, multilateral institutions, transnational conglomerates, international non- governmental organizations, international volunteer groups, among others, are part of the agrarian landscapes.

Taming Malaria and Doing Development

Initial involvement of the international agencies was for the mapping and converting the ‘wild’ lands into agricultural holdings. Mapping of the valley for settlement had begun in the 1940s, but remained rather slow until 1950s (Skerry, et al. 2001). The end of the Second World War, the independence of India from the British colonial rule, and the launching of Point Four Program by the United States Government provided a broader context for major changes in Nepal including in the Chitwan Valley. The newly elected president of the United States had also launched a

107 global program of development called the Point Four Program. The Point Four agreement was signed on 23 January 1951, between the then United States Overseas Mission (which later morphed into United States Agency for International Development|) and the last Rana ruler,

Mohan Shamsher (Skerry, et al., 2001). This agreement was later upheld by the new government formed after signing of the agreement a month later, that led to the end of the Rana rule and the beginning of liberal democracy.

The Point Four Program paved way for a wide range of international involvements in Nepal, and one of the major sites of those interventions was Chitwan valley (Fujikura, 1996; Malla and

Sharma, 1958). In the mid-1950s, widespread floods and landslides displaced tens of thousands of families across the hills, which further led to the active promotion of settling hill families in the Chitwan Valley (Dahal, 1997; Skerry et al, 2001). A major impediment for the reclamation of the land was the endemic malaria, however. Therefore, the malaria eradication program became a core element of the reclamation in the valley. This program initially sought to eradicate malaria, but later, after it was clear that eradication was not feasible, sought to control it.

Entomologists mapped the malaria habitat and provided inputs for designing malarial control programs. The US government supplied the DDT, sprayers, masks, and the first round of technicians. The Point Four Program also trained thousands of Nepalis in different schools in the

US and India. It also led to the setting up of different health facilities, schools, and agricultural research and training centers. One such institutions/centers was the Institute of Agriculture and

Animal Science (IAAS), in the heart of Chitwan Valley in Rampur, popularly known as the

Rampur Campus. It helped set up timber processing factories. It brought in plant seeds and animal breeds from the US to be promoted among Nepal farmers (Skerry et al, 2001). Over time

108 the Point Four Program become one among many other interventions by international organizations.

IAAS was one of the main institutions set up in the 1970s as a part of agricultural modernization in Nepal and its existence owes a lot to the arrival and expansion of international agencies. It was supposed to be the centre for generating knowledge, technology and human resources to spread modern farming practices around the country. By now, it has emerged as the central institution in producing almost all of Nepal's agricultural experts.

The next several decades saw the setting up of these institutions and their expansion across

Nepal. The initial phase of the institution building of formal agricultural knowledge system involved training a large number of cadres of community development workers through

Tribhuvan Village Development Programs. When the USOM began its agriculture extension work, there were only four trained agriculture experts in Nepal (Skerry et al. 1991, p.24). A few

Nepalis were also sent to the US land-grant agricultural universities for training in various agricultural sciences. These trainees came back to run some of the institutions that were being set up and were expanding in their scope and reach (Skerry et al. 1991, p.15).

The geography of the swampy Chitwan Valley and the hilly terrain of the rest of Nepal was daunting. With very limited road transportation, and most of the people living in tens of thousands of villages scattered across rugged hills and mountain landscapes, expanding nascent governmental institution was inevitably a slow affair. According to the 1961 census, most people lived in 24,500 villages of less than 500 residents (Skerry et al. 1991, p.24). Besides training

Nepalis in new agriculture--both inside Nepal through Village Development Program, and outside the country, the USOM advisors were also instrumental in introducing hundreds of new

109 varieties of crops in Nepal, first for testing and then distributing to farmers (Skerry et al. 1991, p.26). In addition to crops, they also brought improved livestock and started the livestock breeding programs. Cows and chickens were the main focus of this program (ibid.).

Similarly, several farm research stations were set up for different purpose such as seed multiplication, improvement of animal and poultry breeds, and demonstration. These farm stations were part of extension and research activities. The number, scope and geographic reach of these institutions only expanded during the next several decades.

Across Nepal, many private organic farms have emerged as important 'field visit' sites for other farmers and agricultural experts including in Fulbari. Many farmers are becoming part of what is called "farmers-breeder" program (LIBIRD, 2009) to improve upon and recover nearly extinct local varieties of seeds. There has been continued expansion of this sector after 1990. Before

1990, the only organizations that existed were the ones sanctioned by the then autocratic state or the ones that were ‘apolitical’ such as the small farmers groups. These later organizations were created by small farmers development project that Nepal had implemented in early 1980s

(Shrestha, 2017). Over the decades, it became the catalyst for the formation of thousands of cooperatives across Nepal.

Until the 1970s, the small towns near the main river ferrying points used to be important centers of exchange. The building of the highway and a bridge over the river in late 1970s led to the collapse of those towns. Moreover, during the late 1970s, a big chunk of the river was incorporated into the Chitwan National Park, thereby curtailing the mobility of people across the rivers. Similarly, until the East-West highway was built, Bhikha Thori, about 70 kilometers south from Narayangarh used to be the major town bordering India where people used to go to procure

110 household essentials such as clothes, kerosene and salt. That town is no longer important for the people living beyond the immediate villages.

From 1990s-2010s: Spread of Biogas, Trees and Cover Crops in Farms, Non-governmental Organizations, Organic Farming, and Permaculture

The period after 1990s marks another major conjuncture in Chitwan valley’s agrarian and larger social transformation. This conjuncture is marked by several things: the expansion of non- governmental organizations, spread of private sector in the field of agricultural inputs, the promotion and adoption of biogas technology, the continued spread of trees in farms, and cover- cropping, among many other things.

Besides governmental organizations and international development agencies, there are a number of non-governmental organizations that handle a number of agricultural projects across different parts of the country. These projects most often come under what is broadly termed as

'agricultural development' but also include generation and dissemination of agricultural knowledge and technologies, environmental protection, and micro-credits, among others. Of late, private companies have also begun to carry out some agricultural research work, especially in the field of agricultural biotechnology, although they are almost negligible compared to what governmental and non-governmental institutions do (Stad and Shrestha, 2006).

Throughout Nepal, formation of farmers' groups has also been going on for over three decades now. Initially begun as a part of small farmers' development projects, by now groups are formed by both governmental and non-governmental organizations for a variety of purposes. Lately, some of these groups have also become a medium of generating different agricultural practices

111 including organic pest management, composting, liquid manure, marketing of produce, among others.

The post-1990 period has seen the expansion of other associational groups such as the non- governmental organizations, social movements, political parties and their affiliate organizations representing farmers. Most of Nepal’s political parties have farmers’ organizations. There are tens of thousands of NGOs carrying out diverse interventions. Then, in some places, some social movements have emerged.

According to Social Welfare Council, there were over 1000 non-governmental organizations that worked in Chitwan. We do not know if all of them work in Chitwan or only in Chitwan. Place of registration does not mean they have to work in that place. What we know is there are many others non-registered groups such as local clubs. Savings and credit groups have sprouted across

Nepal including in the valley. This number itself also does not tell us if they are active, and how actively involved they are and in what fields. This number shows that in Chitwan, as in other districts of Nepal, these institutions are among many other actors. The emergence of these actors signaled multiple developments in Nepal: the beginning of liberal democratic space in 1990, the flow of fund through different channels to non-governmental organizations, and organized attempt by some citizens to intervene in public sphere.

Family farms dot these settlements across the valley. According to the latest census, there are tens of thousands small-sized farms by family households in Chitwan. Over 98% of these holdings are less than 2 hectares in size (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The Central Bureau of Statistics, which carries out the census operations in Nepal, defines an agricultural holding as

“an economic unit of agricultural production under single management comprising all livestock

112 and poultry kept, and all land used wholly or partly for agricultural production purposes.” (CBS,

2013, p.108). Not all landholdings are enumerated as agricultural holdings. According to the

CBS, one of the following four criteria is used to consider a holding as agricultural holding:

1. cropped area greater than or equal to 0.01272 hectares in the hill and mountain districts, and 0.01355 hectares in the plains;

2. having one or more head of cattle or buffaloes;

3. having five or more head of sheeps or goats;

4. having 20 or more poultry (CBS, 2013, p.108).

The census report clarifies that “the holding is generally the same as the household,” and

‘household’ is defined as “a group of persons who live in the same dwelling and make common arrangements for the provision of food and other essentials of daily living. A household may comprise one or more persons and may include unrelated persons. More than one household may live in a single house.” (p.109)

According to the district level data from the national census of 2011/12, there were 88,242 agricultural holdings covering an area of 40,631.6 hectares in Chitwan district (CBS, 2013, p.1), with less than 0.5 hectare on average per holding. Almost 99% of the holdings were two hectares or less (CBS, 2013, p.1).

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Table 5.3: Landholding in Chitwan, 2011/12 (Under 2 hectares) Holding Size (ha) No. Holding % Holding of total <0.01355 1505 1.71 0.01355- < 0.1 14578 16.52 0.1- <0.2 13245 15.01 0.2- <0.5 30618 34.70 0.5-<1 19953 22.61 1-<2 6880 7.80 Total 86779 98.34 Source: CBS, 2013. Table 5.4: Chitwan land-holding structure, 2011/12

Size No. Holdings Area (ha) No Land 1505 34.5 Under 0.1 ha 14578 809 0.1-0.2 ha 13245 2048.5 0.2-0.5 30618 10380 0.5-0.1 19953 14025.9 1.0-2.0 6880 9281.8 2.0-3.0 989 2294.6 3.0-4.0 387 1251.2 4.0-5.0 43 195.6 5.0-10.0 43 310.5 Total 88241 40631.6 Source: Central Bureau of Statistics, 2013. While this is the latest statistics in Chitwan valley, this has to be seen in the context of the gradual change in farm sizes across Nepal as is clear from the table 2.3.

Table 5.5: Number of Holdings of different sizes in Nepal, 1981/82-2011/12 1981/82 1991/92 2001/2002 2011/2012

Size (ha) Holdings Percent Holdings Percent Holdings Percent Holdings Percent <0.1 8224 0.37 173000 6.40 260500 7.81 471087 12.30 0.1 - 0.5 1099677 50.12 993100 36.73 1318400 39.50 1631460 42.58 0.5-1.0 355420 16.20 711700 26.32 915700 27.44 984022 25.69 1.0-2.0 379051 17.28 529500 19.58 588600 17.64 548974 14.33 2.0-3.0 156961 7.15 168400 6.23 157000 4.70 129364 3.38 3.0-4.0 77228 3.52 59600 2.20 51600 1.55 39507 1.03 4.0-5.0 42441 1.93 28600 1.06 20200 0.61 14881 0.39 5.0-10.0 60082 2.74 32000 1.18 21600 0.65 10744 0.28 10+ 14872 0.68 8200 0.30 3800 0.11 1054 0.03 Total 2193956 100.00 2704100 100.00 3337400 100.00 3831093 100.00 Sources: CBS, 1985, 1994, 2004, 2013

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There has been decline in the large land-holding size segments, to such an extent that most of the holdings now are less than 1 hectare in size. In fact, one abiding feature of Nepal's agriculture is the progressive decline in the size of farm holdings, with ever smaller plots being farmed over time (CBS 2002, 2013; Chapagain, 1983, p.7, cited in Ghimire, 1992, p.13; see also Table 1.1).

This is not surprising given the rise in the number of families, the provision of inheritable rights over family property including land, and general increase in population. Moreover, the reclamation of new land seems to have stopped. There has actually been a decline in the amount of land under agricultural holdings between 2001 and 2011 (CBS, 2013). I grew up seeing our own farms and those of our neighbors divided into smaller and even smaller holdings through inheritance and buying and selling. Statistics show that, out of over 4 million farm holdings in

Nepal, farms of ten hectares or more in size number only in a few hundreds.

At present, most of the farms in the valley are owner-managed. According to the latest agricultural census, over 77% of the total agricultural area is under owner-management, and the rest is under different tenure arrangements ranging from fixed-cash rent to performance of service as rent (CBS, 2013, p.2-3). The rented portion of the total agricultural land (in area) is higher for sizes higher than 1 hectare. Most land is managed either as fully owned operation or mixture of owned and rented operation. The proportion of rented land in the valley is slightly higher than the national average. Nationally, the trend shows the continuation of the owner- managed farms, with over 88% of total land area managed by the owner-operators in 2011.

While this is a slight decline from the 90% of 1991, it is still an indication that most of the land in Nepal is managed by the owner-users.

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Table 5.6: Land tenure arrangement, 1991-2011 (land hectares)

Census Year Owned Rented Other arrangement Total 1991 2362.1 221.2 14.2 2597.5 (90%) 2001 2417.3 230.8 6.8 2654.9 (91%) 2011 2229 287.6 9.3 2525.9 (88%) Sources: National Sample Censuses of Agriculture, CBS, 1994, 2004, 2013] CH 5

Size is not the only one aspect of changes taking place in farms. The population of people living in agricultural households has continued to grow, and the proportion of people who consider agriculture to be their main occupation is a small portion of this population. A large proportion of agricultural population is made up of school, college, and university students. School enrollment ratio is high for the lower age groups.

Table 5.7 Expansion of Biogas, Agroforestry, Cover Crops: 1990s-2010s

Changes Assemblages of Forces/Actors/Triggers • Modern homes with the • Land speculation boom and bust cycles begin use of reinforced concrete (boom 1992-1997, and bust 1998-2005) spreads • Farmers sell some portion of land for newcomers • Biogas spreads across and build new homes; • Cattle sheds improvement; • Public natural resources less available – pushing • Agro-forestry spreads for biogas and natural gas from the market; • Organic farming and • Biogas companies are set up and new technicians permaculture in villages, are trained; although not formal • Kyoto protocal leads to new Clean Development certification Mechanism that provided subsidies to the biogas; • Densification of trees in • Improvement in biogas design led to ease of farms including a few maintenance and cost-cutting; private woodlots for • Public policies encouraging private health and producing fast-growing education – growth of private hospitals and bakeno for local saw mills; educations • Spread of cover crops • Intractable insect and fungal attacks in commercial • Off-farm income including vegetable farms; overseas labour migration • Cover crop and green manure cropping by non- increases governmental organizations • Mechanization of farm • Post-1990 liberalization led to the setting up of increases: ploughing, NGOs as a mechanism for channeling international threshing, winnowing, aid money;

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milling • Entrepreneurs with travelling machines go around • Commercial vegetable providing mechanization services; growing • Spread of agro-input shops • Labour based on family • Improvements of road networks inside the valley; labor but also wage labor, • Spread of private schools and health care facilities the labor pool from the including college education squatter settlement and in- • In-migration of seasonal labour from Southern migrant seasonal laborers plains and North Indian villages • Motorcycles use spreads • Mechanization of several tasks

Migrant work overseas and off-farm work is also becoming important part of agricultural households. According to the latest report, over 10 percent of Chitwan district’s total households had at least one member of the family working overseas. Besides the overseas labor market, it is common to observe members of households doing off-farm works: ranging from daily wage labour to formal employment in government, non-government, and private enterprise.

Manufacturing employment is small and on the decline.

Observations also show that people’s consumption of market goods and services has gone up.

The use of marketed goods for building homes has gone up. Farms contain a variety of things, both the built structures and others. According to the latest population census, houses are made of different materials. The census data on type of houses does not distinguish between agricultural and non-agricultural households, but this provides a glimpse of the kind of houses.

This type of houses emerged over time. The early settlers had very different homes. Similarly, the type and number of animals in farms, the type of crops and the intensity of cropping has changed over time.

Meanwhile, the population of Chitwan has increased twenty-eight-fold between 1921 and 2011, from a little over 20,000 to 579,000. The number of households has nearly quadrupled between

1981 and 2011 (DDCC, 2015, p.23). Over 99% of these households are individual families. The

117 family size has seen consistent decline during the last five decades. Over 50% of the population is under 25 years old, and over 95% of the population live within municipal boundaries, Nepal's criteria for calculating urban population. Of the 470,927 people 10 years or older, 53% were economically active, the rest in school, too old to work, or unemployed (DDCC, 2015, p46).

Over 55% of those economically active population work in agriculture. The number of agricultural households has gone up from 71,429 in 2001 to 88242 in 2011 (ibid, p.48), while the total cultivated land has slightly declined from 42,113 hectares in 2001 to 40,631 ha in 2011.

Eighty-eight percent of the cultivated area is under temporary, seasonal crops. As of 2011, there were 465 different types of agricultural cooperatives with membership of over 150,000 (p.53-

54). The non-agricultural industrial units numbered 3,383 in 2011 which employed about 19,000 people. Even with a conservative estimate, over 14,000 households have installed biogas including 259 in Fulbari (p.71). This constitutes almost 18% of the total agricultural households in the district and almost one third of the households in Fulbari.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are moving across places more often in motorized transportation. Half of Chitwan's current population is below 25 years of age and most of it goes to schools, both private and public. Banks and other financial institutions dot the landscapes in cities, towns, markets and villages. Colleges have sprung up in different town centers. There are

390 community schools and 165 private schools at primary, secondary and higher-secondary levels. The total number of students enrolled in these institutions stood at 149,736 in 2011 (p.79).

More people are going to schools now than in the past; the number of private and public health facilities have expanded; they have access to mobile phones, watch television, listen to different radio stations and they have switched from thatched-roof, mud-buildings to modern buildings

118 constructed out of fired-bricks, cements and reinforced steel. People are wearing a wide variety of clothes. Consumption of processed food has increased.

During the last two decades, Nepali citizens have migrated into international labour markets in large numbers (Ministry of Labour and Employment (MOLE), 2016). An estimated 4 million

Nepali workers of predominantly 20-45 age group now work in countries such as Malaysia,

Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle-Eastern countries (Bhattarai, 2017). It is common to hear reports of villages emptied of young hands, and left with elderly, children, and women.

As I showed above, out-migration of Nepali youths started with the Gurkha recruitment for the

British Army starting around the early nineteenth century as well as invitation of Nepali settlers in Assam, Bhutam and even Burma (now Myanmar) to clear swampy areas and prepare for settlement (Ojha, 1983).

A little over half of the number of households in Nepal have at least one person, mostly male, working outside the country (CBS, 2012). Foreign remittance has become an important component of family livelihoods in Nepal (Nepal Rastra Bank, 2015; Seddon, Adhikari, and

Gurung, 2002). These demographic changes are also having profound effects on the broader agrarian landscapes across Nepal. It is outside the purview of this dissertation to document the effects of these developments on ecological agriculture; however, the popular understanding of recent developments recognizes the complex ways in which the practices of ecological farming correlate with migration, remittances and off-farm incomes. For households, remittance is part of the resource pool for making their livelihoods in farm.

Markets: Chitwan’s agrarian households are in constant interactions with a variety of market places, some fixed in place, other temporary, and yet others mobile and virtual. Until now, the

119 virtual-based market interaction is highly limited. They participate in these markets as buyers and sellers of goods and services.

One area where virtual market-place is enacted is in arranging labour during the peak labour periods: such as planting of crops and harvesting. Families send in information to labor contractors in their locality asking to arrange the required number of workers and the contractor

(called naike) goes around the wage-working households doing the job. The naike is paid a fixed sum per worker by the farming households. The naike system of labour emerged in different parts of Chitwan in mid-1980s (Bhandari et al., 1996-1997), although a good study is still lacking on this aspect. The availability of wage workers seems to have changed. It is common to see migrant labors from outside the valley working as temporary laborers during the peak labour periods. Some of them come from villages in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The market places themselves have undergone major transformations. The towns have become denser over time, and new town centers have emerged. There has also been change in the importance of particular markets. For instance, until the 1970s, the small towns near the main river ferrying points used to be important centers of exchange. The building of the highway and a bridge over the river in late 1970s led to the collapse of those towns. Moreover, during the late

1970s, a big chunk of the river was incorporated into the Chitwan National Park, thereby curtailing the mobility of people across the rivers. Similarly, until the East-West highway was built, Bhikha Thori, about 70 kilometers south from Narayangarh used to be the major town bordering India where people used to go to procure household essentials such as clothes, kerosene and salt. The new highway connected Chitwan residents with market centers away from

Bhikha Thori. That town is no longer important for the people living beyond the immediate villages.

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Figure 5.3: An outdoor market place

Source: Center for Environmental and Agricultural Policy Research, Extension, and Development (CEPRED)

The border town along the Nepal-India border, Bhikha Thori used to also be the main market for collecting the surplus grains from farms in Chitwan valley. The traders would come in bullock- drawn wooden carts to collect grains such as rice and oilseed, and they would carry them to the town. The road-building has led to the building of town centers along the highway, with

Narayangarh being the main commercial center. Other towns radiate out from this core into different directions. Because of the 1000-km long highway that runs through this city, and that connects it to trading centers at the borders with India, its growth has become spectacular. Now, major market centers have emerged along the main highways and road-side towns.

There are also weekly bazaars for both agricultural goods and household essentials. They are organized in different days of the weeks and different times. While some bazaars operate the whole day, others open only in the evening. Some of these market places were set up by local government agencies in different periods. The establishment of fixed market centers was spurred

121 by the road-building activities, increased tourism activities, expansion of schools and colleges, and growth in populations.

During the last three decades, the agricultural input shops have also expanded across Chitwan.

The government-run sajha shops have closed down and their buildings lay in different level of ruins across different places, including near the Fulbari village administration office. Beginning with the mid-1980s, the government allowed private operators to run input shops and that has led to the expansion. This expansion has also been spurred by the growth in the private technical schools that produce agricultural technicians and veterinarians. The graduates of these institutes set up their own shops in the emerging village and town centers.

There are three more areas which have significantly expanded the integration of the households in the monetized economic exchange. First, if one looks at the houses people have built, there has been clear shifts towards materials that are procured through the market. The change in house-building occurred incrementally. Barring a few big land-holding families, most houses used to be built with local materials or materials procured from the nearby forests and the stream banks: stones, mud, thatch grass, bamboo, and wood. Until late 1970s, wood was available from the nearby forests although at times people had to deal with the forest guards, but most used to get away with bribing small sum. In the late 1970s, a few brick-kilns were established in the eastern part of the valley, where the relatively clayey soil was thought to be good for brick- making. Use of brick then led to use of fired tiles, corrugated iron sheets and reinforced concrete roofs. These changes were recounted by residents. I also witnessed them in my own family and the neighborhoods around us. Those who could afford began to build cement and concrete homes early on but the trend to build with these materials caught on in mid-1990s at a mass level. The only detailed data regarding the changing house-building practices comes from census and living

122 standard survey conducted over the last twenty years for Nepal (GON, 2011; HMG-N 1996,

2004).

Chitwan has also seen a significant growth of private medical care and medical schooling. While we do not have robust data on how people are using these services and what they mean in terms of diverse family-household’s resource flows, observations show they are significant in several ways. When it comes to schooling, householders perceive that they are paying high fees for putting their children into private schools, but fees are only one part of the expenditure. The overall schooling cost seems to be significant part of the household expenditure. As far as the health services are concerned, I heard people worried about the potential financial costs in times of illnesses. Private medical services have expanded during the last three decades. While the government health service system has its facilities across places, observations show that those with money prefer the private service providers. Moreover, private providers are ubiquitous: from settlement-level medical-shops to medical doctors’ clinics at a relatively bigger town centers, to specialty hospitals in the big cities like Narayangarh, Tandi and Parsa. Here also, we do not have good primary data to make definitive statement, but it is important to acknowledge that private health care and schooling are significant part of family households’ expenses and efforts at generating livelihoods and raising and reproducing families (more in Chapter 6 – 8).

Beyond the monetized sectors, the livelihoods of agrarian households also revolve around non- monetized exchanges such as gifts and barter. Gifts take many forms. It can be cash given to the sons and daughters of married daughters. This kind of gifts are given mostly during festivals. We do not know the extent of this, but this practice is widespread. Gifts also can take the form of support during emergencies such as donations during illnesses or fire or other natural disasters such as the earthquakes, floods and landslides. During my field work, I did not witness any of

123 these natural disasters in Chitwan, but past events and events after I finished my research saw people offering gifts. The widespread gift-giving occurred in the aftermath of major earthquakes in 2015. Many services are voluntarily performed among households. These are not accounted in statistics, but it is important to acknowledge them because they show that society is not only about accounted and recorded things (Gibson-Graham, 2006). News reports show us that people donate cash, land, objects and their own time for a variety of purposes ranging from building schools and hospitals to relief after natural disasters and health emergencies. Even if we do not have good research into the extent of gift-giving, it is important to acknowledge it so that we are aware of the plurality of exchange relations.

A longtime part of Nepali agrarian practice, I also witnessed barter exchange takeing place in many forms. The latest agricultural census gives some data on barter of labour, but at inter- household level, barter is common. Barters also happen at the fairs, although this seems to have declined over the last several decades. When I grew up, several market fairs used to happen in which people bartered different goods. A very common barter was between the Tharu households and Chepang households of eastern part of Chitwan in October after rice harvest.

Tharus would take their rice on sling baskets all the way to the mountain villages where

Chepangs used to grow different varieties of bananas, oranges and other wild fruits. This exchange of rice for banana or banana for rice does not happen anymore.

The census record shows that labor bartering is still common. The common name for this barter is parma, but different communities have different names for it. Wage labour seems to have increased, but that has not fully displaced the barter. According to the latest census, almost half of the agricultural households engaged in some form of barter in labour. In Chitwan 43,863 householders (out of 88,000) told the census enumerators in 2011 that they participated in labour

124 exchange during the previous year. The agricultural censuses carried out before 2011 did not generate data on labour exchange, but it has remained a common labour practice among agricultural households for a long time. The census data do not cover a lot of different forms of barters. For example, it is still common to barter seeds among households. Similarly, tools are routinely shared. House construction used to be based on labour exchange in the past, but that has changed into mostly wage-labour based construction.

Conclusion

This chapter has sketched out the conjunctural moments in the making of the rapidly changing agrarian world of the Chitwan Valley. It provided a broad picture of different forces that are involved in the transformation of agrarian reality of Chitwan valley, including the material composition of farms. The specific ways in which these forces transform ecology of farms in

Fulbari is explored in the subsequent chapter. Here, I have presented material composition of farms in Chitwan valley as a contingent outcome of historically specific interactions among different actors: the family farmers and their family members, governmental and non- governmental organizations, the international development agencies, and a variety of traders and processors. I have traced the conjunctural moments when different forces aligned to produce specific ecological and other practices in the farms in the valley. This valley also is connected with places and actors beyond it. The main focus has been the changing nature of smallholder farms, the emerging world of exchange within which these farms exist, and the shifting assemblage of development actors that shapes the context within which farms evolve.

Each actor has limitations, but change is explored as contingent combinations among these actors. It is important to highlight the differential capacity among these actors to effect change, but that capacity itself is not given a priori. Rather it emerges in relation with other actors and

125 over history. This chapter, thus, also sets a broad context for examining the agroecological changes within farms. It is in this complex landscape that some family farmers have adopted ecological farming practices. These emerging agroecosystems are not external to this complex reality but form dynamic components of it.

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Chapter 6 : Every Farm an Ecosystem

In the previous chapter, I discuss various conjunctural moments and the assemblages of forces that set in motion particular changes in the socio-ecological landscapes of the Chitwan Valley.

That chapter also gave a broad overview of the actors that make up the changing agrarian world.

The valley’s history of settlement, the remaking of the valley through reclamation in the twentieth century, establishment and expansion of state and other organizations, and the arrival and spread of migrant farmers from the hills in the valley were the main focus of that chapter.

The present chapter zooms in on Fulbari to explore some nuanced changes in the making of the farms including the conjunctural moments and forces that led to these changes.

This chapter explores the gradual incorporation of these discrete sets of things/practices in farms including, starting in the early 1990s, what farmers called ‘organic farming.’ I specifically explore practices related to the changes in three entities of in different farms: animals; perennial plants; and seasonal plants.

The rest of the chapter is divided into three sections and a brief conclusion. In the first section, I will describe some farms. I will begin by describing what existed in these farms during my fieldwork in 2010-2011. My focus here will be on the ecologically intensive integration of different elements, beginning with the 1970s. In the second section, I will describe some conjunctural aspects of these. For this chapter, I have relied on data from different sources: documents from government agencies; personal observations through travel; ethnographic observations in Fulbari; and several secondary literatures related to the geography and ecology of

127 farms in Fulbari. The chapter will conclude with some general insights about the changing organization of farms.

Adhikari Farm Revisit

On September 28, 2010 I visited Fulbari again to formally begin my doctoral research. With me were eighteen others who were there to participate in a daylong workshop on "Natural

Architecture and Homestead Ecosystem." This workshop was itself a part of the 14-day long

Permaculture Design Course (PDC) organized by ECOSCENTRE. The participants had come there to observe how plants, animals, buildings, and other elements in Adhikari Farm were placed in relation to each other, and what each participant could learn from it. At the end of the course, the participants had to integrate insights from this and several other study visits and classroom lectures to a) design their own farms into an ecologically integrated habitat on a cardboard paper by placing various elements in relation to each other; and b) plan time-bound activities required to make a transition from present condition of their land to that envisioned future.5 With permission from the organizers of this visit, I had travelled with the group to

Fulbari that day. This event in Fulbari was divided into two sessions. During the first two-hour- and-half session, participants shared their experiences of the changing forms of building homes.

Following this, Chandra dai led the participants on a tour of his farm.

This was my second tour of the farm which was also going to be my place of homestay during the field work. There were a few notable changes between my last visit and this one. Chandra dai’s son, Raj, had graduated from the agricultural college, gotten married, and had started working with an international non-governmental organization. The family had added a two-room

5 See appendix 1 for full details of the course. Courtesy ECOSCENTRE.

128 story on the house, with corrugated roof painted blue. During the conversation, Chandra dai said that they had discontinued raising catfish, and both the ponds behind the house had grass carps in them. Most of the plots were under monsoon rice. The live snakes he had kept in cages were gone. The authorities of Chitwan National Park had told him to release them because it was illegal to keep snakes in private farms. They were allowed to keep a few dead snakes in formaldehyde-filled jars. The biogas was still there, and for most participants who visited this time, biogas was a familiar object. Some participants asked Chandra dai how he had managed producing rice without using synthetic nitrogen. He told them he had been using dhaincha

(sesabania bispinosa) for the last two and half decades and had stopped using any nitrogen fertilizer since 1991. He also repeated his story of why he switched to organic farming.

The story went like this. In the late 1970s, the Adhikari family and a few other households had started growing vegetables for selling in the markets. They used to harvest the produce the night before, and at around four in the morning, they then would load their bullock-driven carts with the produce. These carts had wooden wheels crafted by carpenters who seasonally visited

Chitwan’s villages from the villages across the Indian border. Several years later, the carts got rubber-tired wheels manufactured in India. In Narayangarh, the nearby town that has become one of Nepal's major trading centres now, they would sit on a side of a street at the main crossroad and sell their produce. Permanent vegetable market places began to be set up in Narayangarh only in the mid-1980s. Initially, street peddlers would buy vegetables in bulk from the producers in the market junction, and these peddlers then would re-sell them going from door to door.

Growing vegetables involved a lot of work, and most of the inputs were supplied by a cooperative famously called Sajha. I have mentioned the emergence of this institution in Chapter

5 above. Sajha literally means 'common' in Nepali language. It was the government organized

129 agricultural cooperative established to supply inputs to newly-settled farmers in Chitwan in

1950s. By 1980s, Sajha had branched out across main parts of Nepal. Another government- owned corporation, Agriculture Input Corporation (AIC) procured fertilizers, pesticides, and modern implements, and sold it through the networks of Sajha depots (AIC, 2013). While all the fertilizers and pesticides were imported, many agricultural implements were manufactured at the government-run Agricultural Tools Factory in Birgunj, one of major trading posts along Nepal-

India border. Farmers in Fulbari procured their inputs from local Sajha depot which used to be located at the village centre. The building existed in severely dilapidated condition in 2011. Land in Chitwan was priced based on the rough calculations of soil fertility and some commercial vegetable growers saved enough even to buy some new plots of land.

According to Chandra dai, the major trigger for adopting ecological farming came in 1990. In winter that year, the commercial vegetable farms were infested by borer insects, and they also suffered widespread fungal attacks. No amount of pesticides and fungicides worked to get rid of borer infestation. Farmers went to consult with agricultural scientists at IAAS. They went to meet Prof. Phanindra Neupane, Nepal's first entomologist trained in a land-grant agricultural university in the US, and he personally came for a visit and recommended required sever different types of pesticide. However, those pesticides did not work. By the late 1980s, agricultural inputs, especially pesticides and seeds, began to be sold through private shops in

Narayangarh. The shop owners, who often were agricultural graduates from IAAS, also recommended different pesticides and fungicides. None of them worked. "I gave up and started organic," Chandra dai told the visitors. Others in his neighborhood in Fulbari gave up, too.

By the time I finished my field work in August 2011, there were around 200 farms out of 947

(CBS, 2014) which were collectively certified as organic. The certification was granted based on

130 what is known as participatory guarantee system. Under this system, farmers would monitor each other’s farms to ensure that they followed the organic standards which included not using pesticides, not using genetically modified seeds, and not selling milk from cattle that were injected with antibiotics within the last one week.

What I saw and heard about during the field work, and during my years of growing up in the valley, however, was the beginning of not only ‘organic’ farming, but also different ecological organization of farms over time. Over decades farmers had been inserting discrete elements in their farms to achieve a variety of goals: lessening their dependence on chemical inputs, generating fodder for animals within the farm, and other materials in-farm, producing cooking energy, intensifying the production process, creating modern homes, and providing shade during summer heat, to name a few. They had also added elements that increasingly tied them up with markets, such as the cement and concrete houses, and corrugated iron roofs for their cattle sheds.

The making of the farms: Changing Assemblages

Farmers have enacted various ecological practices over different period of time. In late June

2011, I had a panoramic view of the relatively flat Fulbari landscape and beyond from the roof of

Fulbari’s Shreepur Higher Secondary School building. By then, I had been coming in and going out of this village for almost a year. Monsoon rain was in progress. The surrounding hills were bathed in deep green. From the rooftop, Fulbari was a mosaic of agricultural plots of different sizes.

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Figure 6.1 Map of Chitwan District’s lower-level administrative units

By looking at the plots, I could not figure out if they belonged to one family, a person, or many families. Most households farm multiple non-contiguous plots in Chitwan district. These plots were filled with trees and houses. Roads crisscrossed framing agricultural plots in rectangular shapes. Fulbari was among the first and only a few planned settlements in the valley. Recent

Google Earth images show the rectangular plots and sub-plots within them. According to farmers

I interviewed, each original household was allotted a little over 3 hectares of land in the 1950s.

The landscape was also dotted with public buildings such as the health posts, schools, and the village administration office; poultry farms; plots of land under seasonal crops, banyan trees in road intersections, and a few small plots left fallow. Plots closer to, and around homes, were under a dense canopy of trees. Several households had planted trees on dikes of irrigation canal that either ran through their plots or bordered them.

When the first settlers were allotted the plots in Fulbari in 1955, large patches of public grazing plots were kept aside as a part of planned resettlement project. Known as gauchars, those grazing plots were utilized by the migrant farmers for a few decades. Over successive waves of

132 squatting during the last three decades, however, most of the public grazing lands had been converted into small, privately owned homestead plots and fenced-off institutional lands. Public institutions such as various temples, office of Fulbari Village Development Committee, sub- health post and public schools, took control of remaining patches of gauchars and other public land (see, Ghimire, 1993, for details of squatter-led land reclamation movements in Chitwan

Valley in the 1980s). The original three-hectare plots allotted to each of the first settler families had also been further divided and sub-divided into smaller plots through property divisions among the next generations of farmers, and/or through sale over time.

Ecological Integration

An important element of ecological agriculture is intensive integration (Pretty 2011; Altieri

2011; Gliessman 2011). Farming in Fulbari has always been integrated activities. What we were seeing in farms in Puhulbari was further increase in the integration. This integration involved increasing number and kind of entities in farms and establishing beneficial relationships among them. More specifically, it is reflected in the integration of animals, perennials and seasonal plants within the farm that also included built forms.

Animals: The composition of animals ranged from one to two cattle. Because the households in

Fulbari had installed biogas, each of them had at least one milking animal, but some had two cattle. According to farmers, only three households in Fulbari had kept oxen in 2010, which they used for ploughing their own fields and also for renting out to other households. The other common animal in farms was goat, although their numbers varied from household to household.

Bishnu madam had one female goat, while Semanta dai had half a dozen of them. Adhikari family had rabbits and guinea pigs. Cattle were mostly tethered and, by 2010, this practice was a long-established strategy for the maximization of soil nutrients and household cooking energy.

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Stall-feeding cattle was the result of biogas installation that required the collection ot cattle dung, the gradual shift in cropping patterns virtually eliminating the fallow days, and the disappearance of public grazing lands.

Perennial Plants: These farms had a variety of perennial plants: vines, trees, and bamboo

(grass). Yams were the most common among the vines. A few households also had black pepper and flower vines climbing up trees. Yams, both the roots as well as above ground tubers, were harvested once a year, mostly during December-March period, but some vines remained for several years. Front yards also had flowering vines, which were also pollen source for the bees.

Different trees have different fruiting and flowering times. Fruiting period was distributed over time. A few fruit trees gave fruits for several months, while some gave fruit in one big batch.

Different types of trees were located in different places in farms and their locations differed from one farm to another. Fruits were often located in the backyards. Fodder trees lined up the roadside edges of the farms. There also, fodder trees were integrated with vines, fruits and intensively maintained understory made up of ginger, pineapple, and turmeric. Bananas often grew in the front. Bamboo groves were tucked away at the far end. In Fulbari, canal dikes were major sites for planting bamboo and fodder trees.

The perennial plants were very diverse. In Fulbari, there were five different types of bamboos-- kept for different purposes. Some bamboos were good for roof structures, while others were grown for their edible shoots. Many were kept both for shoots and for their fibers. Bamboo leaves were used as fodder, especially for the oxen and other drought animals.

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Ubiquitous among the tree was bakaino. Every household had planted this tree and they were in different stages of growth in all the farms. They were planted most often along the roadside edges of the plots, and along the dikes that separate slightly dry upland from rice-fields and along the canal dikes. Bakaino trees were kept for a variety of purposes, but the most common uses were fodder, firewood, and timber in different stages of their life-cycle. Its seeds were generally left on the ground from where new saplings sprouted up during spring. Another tree found in most houses was neem, although its number was very limited as it was planted for its twig as tooth brush, and its leaves used against different skin illnesses as well as in making home-made bio-pesticides, besides providing shades both for the members of the households and passers-by.

Bananas were commonly planted on the front, road-side edges together with other trees such as bakaino, which gave extra support to banana trunks. During my field work, there were three different types of bananas--fusre, malbhog, and hajariya. Fushre was considered low-quality and was thought to cause stomach ache if eaten much, whereas malbhog was the most sought after for its aroma and texture. It was also the most expensive variety of banana in the market. Banana flower was also used as food – cooked as vegetable and pickled. It was also common to use unripe banana itself to cook as vegetable. Banana trunks were good source of organic matter for earthworms and fish, and leaves were used for serving special dishes during some festivals and disposed of as fodder for animals.

Other fruits planted in Fulbari farms included different varieties of mango, jackfruit, pineapple, jamun, and star-fruit. Mangoes and jackfruits were common fruit trees. Pineapples were planted as ground level understory. A few households had also planted coffee trees together with straight-shooting betel nut (areca nut) and coconut trees.

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It is important to emphasize here that the classification of trees into fruit, fodder, firewood, timber, and vegetables can belie the fact that, at times, one single tree species provides all or many of these outputs. Many of these trees provide different kinds of food depending on when these fruits are picked. Let me elaborate this with the example of jackfruit. The fruiting of jackfruit begins in April. The young fruits are used as curry vegetables. These fruits ripen into succulent fruits in about three months. The mature seeds are good source of protein, eaten either roasted or curried, after they are sun-dried. Leaves of jackfruits are used as fodder, while the old jackfruit trees are used as timber for trusses and household furniture.

The placement of trees varied in different farms. In the 17-hectare farm, trees were integrated right from the moment it began to transition to sustainable practices. When I visited that farm for the first time in December 2010, it had already been in formal organic operation for the last three years. Different nitrogen fixing trees were planted together with fruits and herbal trees around the edges of the land. On a small scale, T. Gyawali had integrated many fruit trees at the edges of her small homestead.

Seasonal Crops: Besides these relatively permanent features—both human-built structures as well as perennial entities—each of these farms also underwent seasonal cycles of vegetable and crop production. There were diverse vegetables grown in the farms in Fulbari, a few of them on commercial scale for sale at local markets. Most of the commercial organic vegetables were grown during winter season. Fulbari organic farmers grew carrots and broad beans. Some also grew cabbage, cauliflower, and different types of mustard greens, fava beans, winter snap beans, peas, cabbages, spinach, turnips, daikon radishes, broccoli, and potatoes. Many of them were planted together in the same plots. The pre-monsoon vegetables included tomatoes, beans, different varieties of squash, and grams. During monsoon, which often starts in late June in

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Chitwan, farmers grew varieties of beans and squash both in the vegetable plots on their backyards as well as in cornfields. Taro, ginger, turmeric, and lufa squash were grown as an understory of fruit-fodder-firewood garden. The main winter grain crops were mustard oil, wheat, buckwheat, winter rice (in swampy areas), and broad beans.

These components were not discrete elements. There were no fixed blueprints to follow. Nor are they parts of a seamless system. Each farm had variable and changing integration of these components over time, and the family members improvised them based on their own learning and particular niche in the farm. In other words, dynamic integration was an important part of the emerging agroecosystems. These ecosystems emerged over time and, as is clear, are constantly evolving entities.

In some sense, what I descried above is a rather ‘mundane’ parts of making farms. A closer attention to them, however, can reveal the many complex processes involved in creating these farms. These organizations came into existence over time. Farmers were the main catalysts in the process of these changes, but they were not the only ones.

This integration emerged through the deployment of a variety of skilled labour through daily activities informed by meticulous observations. These activities were performed on a routine basis—seasonally, annually and daily. Tree planting was often done immediately before monsoon and during monsoon. Timing of lopping of fodder trees was dependent on the nature of trees. For instance, bakeno, the most common tree in Fulbari farms, was lopped throughout the year. New coppices easily emerged out of stumps, too. Here it is important to note that the decision of when to use particular part of a tree was not only dependent on the nature of that particular species, but also on the particular location of particular tree in the farms. Thus, the

137 trees adjacent to rice field were lopped before rice-planting, while those along the canal dikes were lopped during winter. Bamboo poles were harvested in April—the period when bamboos reach the highest stage of their growth. Shoots were harvested within a day or two after they pop up from the ground.

The integration was not only about relationships among entities that typically constitute

‘farming’. Here, farm-making can be a better lens to examine the integration. As I elaborate more on Chapter 7, Farmers have got biogas installed as an important component of the farm integration. The collection of urine and protection of manure from sun and rain were other important ecological integration practices. According to one estimate, these practices could generate as much nitrogen as is required by farming households with around .8 hectare in land, obviating the need for store-bought nitrogen (Rajbhandari et al, 2009). There is a growing worldwide concern for recovering nutrients from the farms. Cordell et al (2009) have made compelling case for recovering phosphate from food and other sources such as human urine and excreta as phosphate rock is dwindling in supply and will most likely peak in production within a few decades. As humans excrete almost 100% of phosphorus they consume from food, Cordell et. al (2009) argue, recovering from excreta and urine is an important measure for recycling a major nutrient for food production. Biogas such as those installed in households in Fulbari offered a good way of doing that, as did the placing of pigeon-coops in the farm.

There had also been changes in the way compost is used in the field. It used to be common to spread compost in the field whenever there was labour available. The manure used to be piled up in heaps across the field for several days before it was ploughed. Farmers began to keep manure covered in the field until the day cultivation happened. This meant better nutrient management of the compost.

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Several households had also begun producing vermicompost—both for household needs as well as selling to outsiders. Small-scale backyard gardeners in nearby towns regularly bought vermicompost from farmers in Fulbari. A number of faculty and students from IAAS regularly carried out different experiments with vermicompost, some of which they sourced from Fulbari farmers. A few farmers also sold earthworms to new vermicompost makers. Most of the vermicompost was used in one's own fields including for winter vegetables, which are very nutrient-demanding.

Soil management was an ongoing and diverse activity. Different seasons and crops demanded different techniques. For instance, soil preparation for monsoon rice was different from winter wheat. Across Fulbari, both organic farmers and others had begun using high nitrogen-fixing green manure such as dhaincha and sun hemp. Dhaincha was the most popular green manure, and rice fields were sown with dhaincha in May—sometimes inside a cornfield, and sometimes after the harvest of wheat. Dhaincha worked both as a cover crop to protect the soil from wind as well as a generator of nitrogen in the form of green manure.

Crop rotation was a part of the annual cultivation cycle. Immediately after settling, most farmers kept land fallow during pre-monsoon spring. During this period, cattle used to be tethered in the field. That would provide much needed manure for rice fields. Fallowing, however, stopped over time.

Seeds for almost all of the grain crops were saved either in farm or exchanged within the village.

Seeds for winter vegetables were bought from the seed shops. Several farmers in the village had also started producing seeds of diverse rice varieties including those which they had stopped planting many years ago.

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Farmers claimed that the use of green manure over the last two decades had improved most of the land to the extent that farmers were at times worried about 'over-nutrition'. "If we add additional manure for monsoon rice, plants will lodge," Subedi ba told me in July 2011. Almost all the farmers I talked to and who had used green manures in monsoon and manure during winter crop, told me that they did not need to add any more compost for rice crop. The rotation system involved rice, wheat, and legumes, with some farmers planting corn and green manure together.

In Fulbari, ploughing was done mostly by tractor. There were only a handful of tractors around the village and those tractors provided the service on hourly rates. A handful of households had kept oxen or male buffalo. They also provided service—sometimes on hourly and sometimes on daily basis—for the whole village. Farmers realized that the regular use of tractors compacted the bottom layer of the soil. It is called 'hard pan' effect. Many of them began using cattle ploughs in every few years as a part of rectifying the hard pan effect created by the use of tractor for ploughing.

Using high-nutrient soil amendments such as seed cakes seemed to be on the rise. A few farmers used mustard oil cakes. These were procured from grain mills around the village. Many who grew mustard in the winter kept their own mustard seed cake as fertilizer. Recently, chiuri seed cake had entered the village, as one of the agricultural inputs. In 2011, farmers bought 20 tons of chiuri cake from a chiuri processing factory, located eighteen kilometers away. This factory was run by Alternative Herbal Industry (AHI), one of Nepal's pioneers in processing non-timber forest products. Chiuri trees grow in forests across the middle hills of Nepal and are abundant in the northern hilly slopes of the Chitwan Valley.

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To recap, the particular agroecological landscapes were produced through a number of routine practices. These practices themselves were evolving along with the landscape, often taking cues from changes occurring around. Not all farmers farmed their land in the same ways. Some practices were widely adopted than others. For instance, every household used green manures during rice cultivation. Growing number of households had bio-gas plants which, besides providing energy for cooking, were also excellent source of high-nutrient fertilizers.

Differentiated Ecological Integration in Farms

The ecological integration is reflected in different farms differently. Let’s begin with the example of Mrs. Gyawali’s home I visited in March 2011. With a brick-walled compound and metal gate, this house resembled the emerging typical homestead across urbanizing Nepal. In the statistical language of the Government of Nepal, this size of landholding is considered so small that it is labelled as ‘holding without land’ (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The house was made of brick walls with concrete roof, and around the house the Gyawali family had planted flowers, vegetables, and fruits. Vines of yam, luffa squash, gourd, and bitter melon, climbed up the bamboo stakes posted around the house. The front yard was covered with several pots where different vegetables, flowers, and cacti were growing. At one corner was a three-chamber vermicomposting structure, where all the organic wastes from the house were fed to earthworms.

The roof was covered with over fifty different types of pots—earthen, tin, and plastic—filled with different kinds of seasonal vegetables. On the living room facing south, Tulasa Gyawali had grown many plants on pots placed on windowsills. During our conversation, she told me that her family had been producing all of their vegetables on the roof and the small area of land around the house, that they gave away some surplus to neighbors and relatives, and that, over the last

141 two years, she had inspired many of her neighbors to start vermicomposting their waste within their own homes.

She had learned about vermicomposting during a training organized by district agriculture development office. Bharatpur Municipality had also organized a visit for her and a few others to go to Mumbai to learn about organic solid waste management through vermicomposting. The brick-chambers she had built at her home were based on the design she had seen during her

Mumbai visit. Making of farms is about how built forms are integrated into the use of land, in this case a tiny plot of land. At the same time, several actors beyond the households were involved in the making of this tiny farm.

The size and location of land plots in relation to core residence areas had effects on the way land was utilized. Chandra Adhikari’s family had vegetable gardens on the back side of their house, as the house was facing north-east. In contrast, Adhikari family’s neighbor, Bishnu madam had mixed vegetable gardens on the side and front of her house. During summer, most of the households let vines climb up and over the house roofs. Growing food is not the sole criterion of particular niche utilization, however. Several households in Fulbari had planted different species of trees in the front to create shaded area that remains relatively cool during intense late spring and summer heat in semi-tropical Chitwan. But, in both the cases, plots beyond farms were less intensively utilized and they were generally under different seasonal crops.

Besides homes, the cattle sheds are also important built structures of most farms. Expectedly, these structures existed only in farms that had kept cattle. T. Gyawali’s was too small a homestead to support a milking animal. The family also is less reliant on farming for its livelihoods as both Mrs. Gyawali and her husband are involved in off-farm jobs.

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There was an outlier farm I observed: a 17-hectare farm in the north-eastern part of Chitwan.

Here, the organic production system did not include the integration of animals. Rather it used tractors for ploughing, imported manures from nearby farms, bought mineral supplements from agricultural input suppliers, and, most importantly, used cover-cropping and legume-based green manuring for soil management. The caretakers of the farm were hired managers, who hired wage labourers for routine tasks; and the produce was entirely meant for a five-star hotel in

Kathmandu, which marketed itself in offering authentic and farm-grown organic food. This farm in Chitwan was among a few others that the hotel had started in the mid-2000s as a part of managing their own food supply chain. Checking account books was beyond the scope of my investigation here, but size, purpose and nature of farm organization have had some influence in the way the ‘home’ (actually the office building) and the immediate vicinity was used. It had beautiful flower garden with zacaranda trees growing on the edges. The food production was tucked away from the homestead areas. The hired caretaker family lived in the building part time as the family also had their own home nearby. The managers commuted to the office daily.

Minute Tweaks: Ecological farming also involved what we can call ‘minute tweaks.’ I illustrate this point with the example of changes taking place in one part of cattle shed. Most of the farmers had slightly modified the cattle shed design as a part of nutrient management in farms. This modification included two specific changes: the construction of a small urine collection pit at the edge of cattle tethering area, and shades over manure collection pits. While urine collection pit was generally of one cubic foot in volume, the materials used for shading the manure collection pit varied: ranging from corrugated iron roof to rudimentary thatched roof covered with yam and squash vines. These modifications aimed to enhance the availability of

143 nutrients in farms both in Fulbari and beyond as these changes keept nitrogen and other nutrients from leaching and evaporating into the water and air (Rajbhandari et al., 2012).

Most farms in Fulbari also had biogas digesters, built at different points in time in the last two and half decades. In Fulbari, over fifty percent of the members of Fulbari Organic Producer’s

Cooperative had installed biogas, which had become an important component of soil nutrient and household energy management in these farms.

Given the goat operations are small in scale, goat pens are usually built on a corner of the cattle shed. Several households had built pigeon coops that are either nailed on the side of houses, below the roofs, or attached to wooden poles, often near the cattle shed or at the edge of the front yard. Although farmers did not mention nutrient deposition and other ecological services these birds were probably providing, pigeon castings are rich in nutrients such as phosphorus, and these pigeons eat insects and bugs, expectedly contributing to the maintenance of predator-prey balance in farms and in broader landscapes.

Two households in Fulbari had constructed fishponds. Chandra Adhikari’s household had integrated fishpond with vermicomposting through ingenuous design that maximized fish and vermicompost production and kept predators away from worms. Vermicompost heaps were often built adjacent to the shaded compost and manure pit. A few of the households had kept pens for rabbits and guinea pigs. Beehives dotted the front and back yards of several households in

Fulbari.

Farms in Fulbari have been changing for the last seven decades. They were first constructed in mid-1950s through the conversion of swamps and forests. The land was distributed to families

144 who migrated from different parts of Nepal’s mountain districts. These migrants then continuously transformed these farms over the last several decades. One obvious change has been the gradual decline in the size of farm holdings. I have given the current data on the distribution of holdings of different sizes in previous chapter. I did not take any survey of

Fulbari, but farmers I interviewed ranged from those with 4 kattha (1/7th of a hectare) to about two bighas (a little over one hectare) of land. Moreover, more families had migrated after the first distribution of lands. Some of those families occupied public lands. Many bought lands from the existing holders. Many new families were formed out of the old ones. For example, while

Chandra Adhikari’s parents had five bighas, he now has one and half bigha of land from the original plot.

Many of the households in Fulbari in 2010/2011 were subdivisions of the households that originally settled there when the first round of land distribution began in 1955. The built structures—such as homes and cattle sheds—had undergone significant changes during these decades, and the number of homes had gone up in Fulbari.

Most of the first settlers had built mud houses with wooden beams, walls from reeds plastered with mud. Elevated front porch was common feature of most of those houses with notched roofs.

Until around 1980s, most of the houses had thatch roofs. Farmers recalled how they used to hang vegetable seeds, garlic, and onion on porch ceilings. These houses were built with family labour and shared labour from neighbours, and some skilled work by local skilled carpenters. By early

1980s, many of the old houses were replaced with fired-brick walls, and corrugated iron roofs— the first major instance of their integration to economic world beyond the village. In the 1980s, a few households in the village also began to build houses with concrete roofs. Brick-making began to thrive in eastern part of Chitwan valley in the late 1970s.

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It has become common to see cattle sheds with corrugated iron roofs, too, unlike in the past when these roofs were mostly thatched. The floor of the sheds is being transformed from mostly wooden ones to concrete, primarily for making it easier to clean the surface and collect cattle dung and urine.

The present tree cover emerged over time. Tree cover grew significantly both in terms of canopy cover and diversity. Farms that did not have trees thirty years ago had them along the dikes, roadsides and around the houses by early 1990s. But what kind of trees?

The private farms and public lands had different types of trees. Public lands, such as schools, health centres, and temples were lined with banyan trees, exotic trees such as ashoka, pine, and jacaranda—which provided shades during hot season and are good habitats for birds. These ecological services aside, these ornamental trees did not have direct material usage for humans or animals. The exotic trees were rare in private farms.

There had also been changes in the mix of seasonal crops. These changes involved increased diversification and crop-rotation, and intensification of cropping patterns. Many organic farmers in Fulbari owned plots that were not contiguous. Land parcels away from home had exclusively been under seasonal crops. The crop-rotation was meticulous, alternating between legumes and grains during winter, mixing of maize with squash and beans during pre-monsoon season, and growing green manures to be ploughed in immediately before rice planting season began. Farms were also subdivided into even smaller chunks to plant different vegetables and legumes.

Fish was important part of some farms during monsoon. For example, Chandra Adhikari's family began integrating fish in his rice fields in 2006. In 2010, 2 other farmers joined in. By 2011,

146 there were 8 organic farmers who had begun integrating fish in the rice fields. Integrating fish in the rice plots required digging a shallow, one foot and half deep and two feet wide trench across a section of the plot as a refuge for fish. Soybean was planted on dikes after one month of rice planting and harvested during different times. It was picked up green to use as snacks or vegetable after one and half month of planting. It matured with rice and is harvested together with rice in October.

Farmers had also begun integrating Azolla in the rice fields. Azolla is one of the most nitrogen- fixing aquatic plants in the world. Chandra Adhikari first brought Azolla from nearby swamp in late 1990s. Once Azolla is grown in a field, it proliferates with the flow of water. Chandra

Adhikari's downstream neighbours had Azolla in their rice fields. They did not need to sow the seed every year. It was prolific and its spores lay dormant until it rained and water began to collect in the fields during monsoon season. Azolla is also a good food for the fish, and fish and

Azolla are good combinations because too much Azolla in the water can reduce the amount of oxygen required by microbes in the soil.

Bees were becoming integral part of farm landscapes. Although only 6 families kept bees in

2011, not many years ago it was only Chandra Adhikari's family which kept beehives. Main bee foraging season was in October, a month after the end of monsoon. Keeping flowers in the front yard had become common and bees forage on them. Trees such as mangoes, bakaino, and lychee, among others, bloomed during various months of spring, providing forage for bees and butterflies. Bees foraged across the landscape and, like birds, they also epitomized an overlap between private boundary of households and what we can call the emergent 'pollen commons.'

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The level of integration in farms differed. Some farms were highly integrated, while many were in the preliminary stage. For instance, Bishnu madam’s farm of a three quarter of a hectare of which about one tenth was homestead and the rest under seasonal crops. Hers was among the few plots without many trees on the dikes, but the edges of her homestead, both at the front adjoining the road and on the sides, were lined with bakaino, neem, guava, grape fruit, jackfruit, and citrus trees. Her neighbour across the road had part of their homestead land under dense canopy. About hundred meters to the west from Bishnu madam’s house was a village intersection with a chautari, an elevated public resting platform built around banyan trees. These chautaris were ubiquitous features of landscapes across Nepal including in Chitwan valley, and intersections such as this one in Fulbari were part of the grids created in the initial days of reclamation.

Anecdotal evidences suggested that there had also been appearance of more birds in the village.

In early 1990s, farms across the southern plains of Nepal including in Fulbari village were infested with snails during the rainy season. Snails, according to many farmers, appeared from the eastern part of Nepal, although no one had studied systematically to find out exactly how snails emerged and spread all over the places. The interest in bird was the consequence of its effect on fish pond operation for Chandra dai. In the late 1990s, he discovered that snails were excellent feed for catfish. He built a pond to raise the fish and asked villagers to catch snails and sell them to him. He bought them for Rs. 5 (7 Canadian cents) per kilogram. For several years, a nuisance was converted into a resource. In 2010, however, he had to stop raising catfish and switch to raising carp. Farmers began seeing that snails were declining in numbers from 2006 and, by 2010, very few snails were left around the farms.

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Chandra dai and many others in the village told me that they had begun spotting a new bird in the village. Chandra dai had been recording the birds that appear in Fulbari and he knew them by name. He did not know the name of this strange bird. After I heard about the bird from Chandra dai and his wife, Maya bhauju, I also talked to Bhatta jee, a member of cooperative. He called it kalikalchu. Villagers saw that kalikalchu feasted on snails. By 2010, snails were rare in Fulbari village. Was the bird the culprit? It could be. It could also be that regular picking by farmers eventually kept the number under check and reduced their number so low that they did not have minimum numbers required for reproductive success.

There seemed to have been beneficial prey-predator balance in farms and across the landscapes.

Over the last two decades, Fulbari's organic farmers stopped using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Farmers' told me that over the years, pest-damage had become negligible problem in their farms. More spiders in rice fields were commonly seen. Wasps nested in trees. Birds fed on insects. A common refrain I heard from many: "khoi, yetatira ta kira-sira tettiko chinta chaina"

(Around here we don't worry about pests (bugs)).

Farmers recalled how pesticide smelled in the 1970s when they were using them. They used to store in their house the betahexachloride (BHC powder), a common pesticide used during those days and sold by now-defunct Sajha store in the village. In 2011, it was still common across

Nepal to see small retail outlets sell pesticides and food from the same stall. Those familiar with

Chitwan's agrarian landscapes also knew that eastern Chitwan farms used excessive amount of pesticides in commercial vegetables and rice fields. Many of those farms lay very near the East-

West highway. Those who traveled along the highway could smell pesticide around those farms on a regular basis. Fulbari was devoid of that smell.

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Similarly, because of fields being under green cover, there had been less dust in the air than used to be the case a few decades ago when there were far smaller number of trees on the dikes and when plots used to be left fallow during spring season. Farmers had begun to experience less severe wind during the spring season, and they related it to the growing number of trees across the landscape. As they matured, these trees increasingly worked as wind-barriers. Thirty years ago, it was common to see huge dust storms rising from fields during the spring. Moreover, the cover crops and green manures also kept the soil from being blown away. These phenomena were not limited to Fulbari village alone. Tree cover had increased throughout the farms across

Chitwan valley.

Cropping patterns evolved in diverse ways over the last five decades. Mustard used to be dominant crop during winter immediately after the settlement began. Chitwan was famous for its mustard oil and mustard fields with yellow flowers were important part of the memory of people who grew up in 1960s and after.

Farmers observed some qualitative changes in soil fertility, too, and they attributed it to many things, primarily the crop rotation, green manuring and composting. What seemed to be obvious was that soil was much more intensively used and at the same time protected from erosion through the presence of green cover and wind barriers in the form of growing number of trees.

The small changes, such as collection of cattle urine and protected manure pits, were also significant parts of landscape transformation.

The changes in the microbial conditions of the soil was not the scope of this research, but those changes must have taken place with other changes. I talked to a mycologist at IAAS in June

2011. By then, he had been studying soil fungi for several years in IAAS farms and surrounding

150 swamps. He was harvesting fungi from swamps as they were depleted from farms. Fungus called trichoderma, which used to be common in farms, were becoming difficult to see in farmlands, according to that IAAS mycologist. There were some scientists who are harvesting these fungi from a few remaining wetlands and swamps, and they were beginning to produce vermicompost inoculated with these fungi (Khadgi 2003, pp.47-54).

Catalysts: There were some important catalysts in the process—both humans and no-humans.

As far as organic farming was concerned, some of the immediate catalysts could be traced to early 1990s when Chandra Adhikari and other commercial vegetable farmers were faced with recurring bouts of severe pest attacks in their tomatoes and winter vegetables. However, there were other, long-range factors that were central in the overall making of the farms. The Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (IAAS) had already produced thousands of agricultural experts by mid-1980s. For a long time, the emphasis in both teaching in the campus and agricultural extension across Nepal was on the promotion of what came to be loosely known as

'modern farming'. A lot of Nepalis got the idea of modern farming from radio, too. There was a particularly sought-after radio program in the evening called 'Budhi Aamai ra JTA" (An Old woman and JTA) aired during the prime time in the evening on Radio Nepal, Nepal's only radio station until mid-1990s. JTA stands for Junior Technical Assistants. They were and continue to be the first-line of agriculture extension workers across Nepal. This radio program was presented in the form of a didactic drama involving the transmission of information about farming: seasonally timed for different ecological regions and different crops, vegetables, and diseases. A lot of people in Nepal, who grew up during the 1980s or before, remember the iconic voice of the

'old woman' in the drama. This drama made JTA and modern farming a household topic (Joshi

1987).

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The emphasis was beginning to shift at the level of the institutions such as IAAS. It was at IAAS that some graduates had begun to articulate ideas of sustainable agriculture. It is hard to pin-point the exact moment when this idea began to develop, but by mid-1980s question of environment, sustainability, and conservation had begun to spread among international development agencies.

In the 1970s, environmental degradation had been linked mostly with uncontrolled population growth and rampant destruction of forests (Echolm 1975). That much of the Shangri-la, the imaginary fairyland across the Himalayas was going to be converted into desolate desert became one of the defining elements of population control activities across Nepal (Bhattarai 2002; 2004).

It was during this time (late 1970s) that Nepal saw an expansion of reforestation activities. While reforestation activities proved to be failures, several experiments in community-based management of forests emerged across Nepal, which eventually became the basis for one of the world's most successful examples of community-managed and community-controlled examples of revitalization of forests (Nightingale 2011).

In 1987, Bill Mollison, one of the persons who coined the term 'permaculture' in the 1970s, was invited to organize what had by then been called advanced permaculture design course in India and Nepal. In Nepal, the workshop was held on the IAAS campus and participants included some of the faculty and students of IAAS. One of the Nepali participants, a graduate from IAAS, set up a private consulting company called Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Nepal (INSAN), considered to be the pioneer in Nepal-based permaculture design training. INSAN became an

NGO after the political opening in 1990. In early 1990s, it organized another design course in

IAAS. One of the participants was Chandra Adhikari.

By the time Chandra Adhikari participated in the 14-day design course, he had already stopped using chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides in farm. In 1980s, use of dhaincha was

152 popularized by IAAS as partial substitute of nitrogen fertilizer. Use of manure was integral part of the agricultural practices in Fulbari and across Nepal. What permaculture training did was to give Chandra Adhikari a more nuanced sense of integration, which was reflected in the organization of his family farm. "I begin to see my land very differently," Chandra dai told me.

In the patriarchal family structure, he could make most of the farming decisions. Maya bhauju,

Chandra dai's wife, told me how she had feared that stopping the use of chemical fertilizer would ruin the production and that they might have had trouble producing enough to eat. She had enough reason to worry about. There was no other source of sustenance. He also consulted with other family members, but he came back from the training determined to tweak designs of his farm. He added three ponds. He converted the rather big front yard into a multi-storied garden.

As a patriarchal head of the family, he could take major decisions, even bypassing the concerns raised by his wife.

Conclusion

The making of farms underwent significant changes since they were created in the 1950s. The nature of built structures, the composition of plants, and the presence of animals have changed dramatically. When some farmers started adopting ‘organic’ farming in 1990s in Fulbari, some of significant ecological changes were already underway for a long time.

These changes were enacted not as a part of a ‘switch’ from old farming to new one, but through incremental adoption of different practices over time. New farms have been added over time as grazing lands and swamps were cultivated. These changes have resulted from actions taken by both the farmers and a new cadre of professional agriculturalists such as the graduates of IAAS, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, among others. The adoption of different practices was also varied among farmers. Farms were not homogeneous in size, but they hovered

153 around three-quarter of a hectare. Although size differentials among farmers were not significant, the use patterns were defined in relation to the distance from the core residences. Cattle sheds have also changed both in terms of the materials as well as a few minute changes in the designs such as the ditch and hole created to capture urine as important nutrient for farming. There had been more trees in the farms and more intensive cropping patterns emerged.

There were some conjunctural moments in which specific practices were adopted. The arrival of the idea of permaculture in the mid-1980s was an important event for some of the new practices to emerge in Fulbari. But this idea itself was contingent upon the existence of other institutions and other practices that had taken place earlier. For instance, the establishment of Institute of

Agriculture and Animal Sciences played crucial role in spreading some cover crops in early

1980s, while the government-run horticultural center was absolutely essential for the planting of fruit trees in farms. IAAS had also been a main source of many new breeds of maize and rice.

The construction of urine collection at cattle shed, protection of manure pit from sun and rain, the building of biogas plants, and the use of fish had been the results initially of active involvement of governmental and non-governmental organizations.

There had also been some important catalysts from within the households. Stall-feeding of cattle became common as the availability of working hands at homes dwindled, the common grazing lands were enclosed and squatted upon, and private lands were intensively cultivated without leaving any fallow period. These changes, then, cascaded into increased number of fodder trees in farms. The availability of fodder trees reinforced the stall feeding of cattle, and also pumped nutrients from deep sub-soils and processed it as fodder through cattle into dung and urine which fed the biogas plants. Trees also provided refuge for birds, fodder for animals, firewood for households, and flowers for the foragers. The transition was, thus, both constitutive of emerging

154 diverse networks as well as the result of networks of actions involving many people and also non-human entities like fodder trees, soil-amendments, birds, bees, animals, among many other things. Some of the changes, such as reduced soil erosion or effective pest control were emergent properties of many changes such as increased refuge for birds and predators, and near-permanent ground cover. While farming households were the key drivers of transition, these households co- produced the landscape with many actors at multiple locations. We will explore the roles of these actors in the spread of ecological farming in the following chapter.

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Chapter 7 : Assemblages of Knowledge and Skills in Constructing and Maintaining Farms

In the previous chapter, I documented the changing ecological farming practices in Fulbari over the last several decades. During the ethnographic study, I observed the way various elements of farms were organized. In order to arrange these elements, farmers did many things. They prepared soils, planted seeds, lopped trees, irrigated fields, weeded crops, grew green manures, chased birds, fed cattle and other animals, harvested the produce, processed grains, cleaned up and repaired the biogas dome that were over twenty-years old, added floors to the house, repaired cattle shed, and many others. Farms also included built structures.

I had gone to Fulbari to explore changes in farming, and I had devised farming-related research questions (See Appendix 1). However, I began to gradually realize that farming and constructing farms and a farm-based living were not the same thing. Farming was a part of activities in farms, but making farms was more than farming. They also built and maintained other structures such as cattle sheds, biogas, animal pens, pigeon and chicken coops, fish tanks, compost pits, vermiculture sheds, among others. Constructing and maintaining farms involved producing and maintaining, refining, and placing different elements of farms.

Each of the activities that farmers perform in their farms, and each of the things that are placed in farms, presupposes knowledge and skills to mobilize human labour and materials. For example, the daily acts such as mixing of cattle dung for biogas, making of composts, and maintaining

156 vermicomposting piles in the farms; and dealing with other households, different traders, and other farmers, require specific sets of knowledge and skills. Seen this way, farm-making emerges as highly knowledge- and skill-intensive work.

How are these practices, technologies and objects generated? Who are involved in putting those elements in farms? For a long time, the acquiring of these skills was an inherent part of farming life through inter-household and inter-generational learning. This process of knowledge and skills generation still exists as farmers integrated their own experiences daily in constructing practices and refining them. What we see at present, however, is a much more expanded and complex network of actors involved in the generation, refinement, and transfer of these elements.

I call this network the practical assemblages, the networks that produce, refine and distribute skills and technologies in constructing farms.

In this chapter, I explore the expansion of ecological practices as the latest conjuncture in

Fulbari. My focus is the the generation, transformation, and spread of key ecological practices: biogas, agroforestry, and cover-cropping. As we have seen in previous chapter, farms consist of broadly three elements: the built forms, perennial plants, and seasonal plants. These three case studies represent these three elements in Fulbari’s farms. In this chapter, I use data generated through key informant interviews, secondary literature, and participation observation to examine different timelines and forces that led to the origin and spread of these practices.

Biogas: Fulbari and Beyond

Biogas plant has become a common component of farms across Nepal including in Fulbari. The latest data as of 2017 suggest that almost half a million household-level biogas plants have been built across Nepal (Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, 2017). This number has to be seen in

157 relation to the potential for biogas plants in farms in Nepal. There are around 3.7 million farm- holdings across Nepal, according to the latest census (CBS, 2013). According to the latest estimate, around 1.1 million of these farms can potentially generate enough feedstock (cattle- dung, primarily) for running family-sized biogas plants. In that sense, almost one in two of the biogas-viable farms already has built one.

According to the Chitwan District Development Committee, the district-level administrative- political body coordinating various public interventions, over 250 of Fulbari's households had installed biogas in their homes by 2004. Most of these biogas units were installed over the two decades, although a few bio-gas plants were in operation during the early 1980s. A large land- owning household in the village was the first one to install biogas plant in the late 1970s (DDC-

Chitwan 2004). During my field research, I interviewed over 30 organic farmers and all of them had biogas installed at their home. Although the size of the plant varied a little bit, all of the biogas plants were of the same design. How did this now ubiquitous feature of farms across

Nepal emerge and spread? What kind of knowledge emerged? What were some broad timelines of the emergence, spread, and transformation of this technology? What kind of institutions emerged in the process?

Basic science: Biogas plants produce colorless and odorless (when in room temperature) methane gas, commonly called gobar gyas in Nepali (literally, “gas from cattle dung”). The production of gas in constructed bio-gas plant such as the ones in farms in Fulbari is based on the understanding of the generation of methane in nature. Methane is generated by the conversion of organic compounds through a series of bacterial activities. It is a highly complex process and still is partially understood (AEPC, 2015, p.37). All methane gas on the earth is produced out of the

158 biological materials. Based on the current understanding, there are primarily three processes involving four different species of bacteria in producing methane (Abbasi and Abbasi, 2012).

First, the organic matter is transformed into fatty acids, amino acid, sugar, and other compounds by decomposing bacteria. This process is called hydrolysis. Following this first decomposition process, another set of bacteria convert these acids into another set of acids through a process called acidogenesis. These acids are then acted upon by other bacteria to produce hydrogen, carbon dioxide and acetates through a process called acetogenesis. The naturally occurring methanogenic bacteria finally convert these elements into methane and other gases. Biogas digesters are designed to capture methane either to directly burn it as a fuel or to use it to produce electricity. All of these bacteria survive in a condition bereft of oxygen (Abbasi and

Abbasi, 2012).

All of these processes are important for the generation of methane. Without the first two processes, there won’t be necessary feedstock for the methane-generating bacteria to work on. At the same time, without methane-generating bacteria, the accumulated acids produced by other two types of bacteria lead to unfavorable conditions for the survival of methano-genic bacteria themselves. These basic processes were understood over centuries. In fact, the actual biophysical process is still very partially understood. The gas is named methane in 1866. It was first scientifically isolated by the Italian physicist Allessandro Volta in 1778. Before Volta isolated the gas in pure forms, it was commonly called as marsh flammable gas (Abbasi and Abbasi,

2012).

Technology: The potential of methane for generating energy was gradually realized through observations, technology experimentations, and scientific investigations. In Nepal, biogas

159 primarily provides energy for cooking for the family (AEPC, 2015). Biogas is produced by methanogenic bacteria that feed on organic matter in an oxygen-deprived (anaerobic), semi- underground concrete chamber. This chamber is filled primarily with cattle dung and human excreta and urine. The biogas plant includes an inlet tank to daily feed the underground chamber with several buckets of fresh cattle dung and urine. Human urine and excreta from the toilet are also piped directly down to the bottom of the biogas dome. As a by-product, the processed slurry from the biogas digester flow out daily through a small channel into a composting pit located next to the biogas plant (Figure 4.1 for a typical household-level biogas design popular in

Nepal).

This slurry is used as a starter material for composting. The biogas technology mimics the process of decomposition of organic matter in forests, compost heaps, and peat lands, except for one notable difference. Unlike in natural conditions where the generated methane always escapes into the atmosphere, the methane gas thus produced is piped to the kitchen and connected to a double-burner stove. The biogas plants in Fulbari were constructed at different times. The oldest one I saw was built in 1989. A house-hold size biogas plant connected with the toilet can generate gas enough for most of the days to cook three meals daily for six adults and occasional guests.

Biogas plants are integrated into the household in primarily three ways. First, they generate clean-burning fuel for cooking, and in some households, also for lighting. Second, these plants work as fast-processor of cattle urine and dung and, in most of the households, also human excreta. In this sense, the biogas plant also works as replacement for septic tank, which often costs more than the cost of biogas plant but whose function is only to hold the human excreta for years in a perennially putrefied state for years. Instead, the biogas plant instantly processes the

160 excrements into fertilizer within 70-80 days (Alternative Energy Promotion Center (AEPC),

2015). As I will discuss later, biogas slurry is often used in composting pit that are covered with roof to keep nutrients from leaching due to sun and rain.

This physical structure in farms connects Fulbari with a host of other actors across space and time. What is called ‘biogas’ is a group of gas composed of methane, carbon dioxide and other inert gases (Abbasi, Tousseef and Abbasi, 2012). It was this property of methane, which led to several innovations to generate and capture methane from the late nineteenth century onwards, of which biogas digesters in Fulbari village are among the latest one (Rai, 2018). Not all anaerobic decomposition process generates methane. The presence of methanogenic bacteria is a necessary condition for the generation of methane. The process itself is complex at molecular level, and the nature of organic matter, together with the temperature inside the chamber determine the amount and quality of gases generated (Abbasi, Touseef and Abbasi, 2012, pp. 3-4). In Fulbari, biogas is exclusively used as cooking fuel. In the late seventies, when only a few households had installed biogas plant, the gas was used both for lighting and cooking. The arrival of electricity in the village in mid-1980s made it unnecessary for people to use methane for lighting (Abbasi, Tousif and Abbasi, 2012).

All the biogas plants in Fulbari’s farming households are made up of three structural components: a dome which collects the generated methane; an inlet chamber to which prepared slurry is fed and at the bottom of which is connected the outlet of a toilet; and an outlet chamber for slurry to come out of the dome. Since the toilet is often connected directly to the biogas digester, most of the households that have biogas do not have separate septic tanks. A few households have decided not to connect their toilets to the biogas digester, for it was hard for them to associate their kitchen fuel with human excreta. In the early 1990s, when biogas building

161 took off in Fulbari, many maverick households went ahead and connected their toilets to the biogas whereas most others refrained from doing that.

Figure 7.1 A household-level biogas design used in Nepal

Source: Alternative Energy Promotion Center (2015)

This design based on fixed-dome and underground digester tank emerged in mid-1980s. The idea of biogas was first explored in Nepal by a missionary priest in a Catholic school in Kathmandu in 1950s (Rai, 2017). The first biogas plant was installed in a 200-litre polythene tank and utilized kitchen waste from the canteen of the residential school. Globally, methane gas was first discovered in late nineteenth century and a few municipalities in European countries experimented with generating methane from sewage (Abbasi, Touseef and Abbasi, 2012). Until the second half of the twentieth century, however, the generation of methane from solid waste as a usable source of fuel remained rather experimental. Even in the early decades of the second half of the twentieth century, biogas did not have smooth sailing in many countries where serious

162 efforts were made for its promotion (Abbasi, Tauseef and Abbasi 2012). Part of the problem lay in the design that involved expensive metal chamber and that also made it hard to operate. The innovation in design with underground chamber constructed out of cement, brick and concrete significantly cut down on cost and made the plant user-friendly (AEPC, 2015).

Institutionalized effort at promoting biogas in Nepal began in the early years of modernization.

The impetus was the rising concern about energy costs in the early 1970s. In the aftermath of the global oil crisis in 1973, the then His Majesty's Government of Nepal set up a Biogas

Development Committee in 1976 as a component of the Energy Research and Development

Group (ERDG) located within the Tribhuvan University (AEPC, 2015, 2). This was also a period of emerging discourse on desertification and land degradation across the Nepal Himalaya

(Blaikie 1985; Echolm 1975). Widespread deforestation was identified as the supposedly dire future of desertification across the middle-hills. Biogas was presented as a solution to this crisis, besides being a way of addressing the energy crisis. The government introduced incentives for farming households to adopt biogas, including interest-free loans (AEPC, 2015).

This first design was brought from India. This was developed by Khadi and Village Industries

Commission, an independent body within the Government of India (Rai, 2017). This design had a floating drum that repeatedly broke down. They were also expensive, and most farmers could not afford the cost even when the loan was provided interest-free. Only 250 plants were installed in different parts of the country in 1976. The generation of biogas technology also brought into existence other private agencies, international bilateral agencies, and non-governmental organizations, and Agricultural Development Bank (AEPC, 2015). Over one hundred private companies operate across Nepal constructing biogas plants, and producing appliances (Rai,

2017).

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Several groups within Nepal were involved in creating new designs. Gobar Gas and Agricultural

Equipment Development Company (GGC) was set up in 1977 as a joint enterprise of

Development and Consulting Services, a private service wing of the United Mission to Nepal, the Agricultural Development Bank of Nepal, and the Nepal Government-owned Fuel

Corporation (AEPC, 2015). Until the early 1990s GGC remained the only company with technical expertise in installing biogas. Biogas spread more rapidly in the 1990s. The major push came from Dutch aid agency’s setting up of Biogas Support Program (BSP) in 1992 that generated highly complex institutional arrangements and design innovation process (AEPC,

2015 [2005]).

Following this, the Government of Nepal set up Alternative Energy Promotion Center in 1996 which coordinated with BSP to promote biogas among farming households across the country.

The biogas field is now populated by several private companies, non-governmental agencies, government agencies, and international development agencies. Together, a practical assemblage has emerged that generates demands for biogas, innovates on design, provides finances, carries out regular research on various aspects of biogas, manufactures equipment, and trains human resources to install and operate these biogas systems (Rai, 2017).

This particular biogas design, based on under-ground digester, has also spread in other countries and Biogas groups from Nepal are actively involved in its promotion. Climate change has added a new dimension to biogas promotion (Rai, 2017). The World Bank has set up funding for what it considers as climate smart technologies that include biogas (Rai, 2017). Biogas has now become a part of carbon calculations through carbon trading scheme designed under Clean

Development Mechanism (Rai, 2017). CDM is an institutional mechanism created to promote carbon-mitigating technologies in the global south as a way for the industrialized countries of the

164 global north to compensate the global south for sequestering carbon or avoiding the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere under the Kyoto protocol (Rai, 2017). What we see is an emerging transnational linkage among a variety of actors that links farming households with these growing assemblages.

Table 7.1 Number of biogas units installed across Nepal (1992-2016)

Year No. 1992/93 3,318 1993/94 3,506 1994/95 5,117 1995/96 7,157 1996/97 8,387 1997/98 9,869 1998/99 11,052 1999/00 13,265 2000/01 17,857 2001/02 15,527 2002/03 16,340 2003/04 11,259 2004/05 17,803 2005/06 16,118 2006/07 17,663 2007/08 14,884 2008/09 19,479 2009/10 21,158 2010/11 19,661 2011/12 18,979 2012/13 4,984 2013/14 31,765 2014/15 30,196 2015/16 14,247 Total 349,591 Source: Alternative Energy Promotion Center, Nepal. http://www.aepc.gov.np/?option=statistics&page=substatistics&mid=6&sub_id=49&id=4

Accessed on September 25, 2017

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The table above provides the latest data about biogas plants constructed across Nepal from 1991 onward. According to a survey carried out in 2010, 63% of the biogas plants had toilets attached to them (Rai, 2017, p.160). These are the numbers of biogas constructed under the Biogas

Support Program. We do not know how many of them were constructed before 1990.

Through this, Nepal’s biogas promotion institutions get money based on the calculations of how much greenhouse gases these plants offset over time. This means there has been a rigorous process of calculations and surveys to determine the compliance as well as to quantify various aspects of biogas (Rai, 2017). The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is yet another extension in the institutional assemblage.

The role of farmers in this technology is that of a user and at most a contributor of mostly unskilled labour during the construction phase. They are also involved in maintaining it on a daily basis and through periodic repairs, although repair works are minimal. Major maintenance work is often carried out in two decades after the construction when the dome has to be dredged of all the soil and sand that collect at the bottom over years and that reduces the volume of fermenting biomass and organic material. Other than these major tasks, farming households are basically users of this technology.

While the generation and spread of the particular form of biogas required particular set of assemblage and conjunctural moments (the discourse around mountain deforestation, the energy crisis of 1970s), the household and local dynamics created another set of conditions for its adoption in Fulbari. By early 1980s, the forests near Fulbari was mostly cut down and the government had planted a monocultured forest of sisau tree. The local grazing ground was taken over by landless squatting families and local institutions. Most importantly, the younger

166 generation had begun to spend increasing amount of time outside of farming and in schools and/or off-farm income.

Table 7.2: Biogas: Timelines and Forces/Triggers/Actors Time Changes Forces/Actors/Triggers 1950s- -Non existence of biogas in -First experiments in biogas generation in 1955 1960s Farms by Father Bertrand Saubolle, a Jesuit priest stationed in St Xavier’s School in Kathmandu

1970s -Adoption of biogas in a small -Government promotion of biogas number of farms, mostly well- -Small subsidies provided to-do farmers; in Fulbari, on a -Designed in India based on the use of steel handful of farmers adopted it drum -Expensive and difficult to operate system -Promoted as a response to energy crisis/price rise of petroleum in 1970s 1980s -Increased adoption in farms, -A Chinese design-based biogas system -Growing desire as firewood -Easy to operate availability dwindled -Larger subsidies to farmers -Dwindling grazing land led to -Promoted as a means of arresting the perceived stall feeding which was deforestation/desertification necessary for adopting biogas -Involvement of international agencies in -Income from off-farm sources, financing and technical training and exchange subsidy, and sale of land (the World Bank, the USAID, United Missions to provided resources Nepal -Cheaper design made it possible for smallholders to adopt it 1990s and -Impressive growth -Design improvement by a network of non- 2000s governmental organizations -Several private institutions were set up including by the technicians such as masons and equipment repair mechanics -Increased role of international development institutions in financing, especially for the provision of subsidies and technical supports -Climate Change related financing through Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism 2010s -Saturation and challenges -Dwindling animal husbandry in farms -Easy availability of natural gas in the market -Dwindling labor for managing farms leading to cut down on animals -Lack of design innovation to cater to non-animal based biogas system

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As we will see, it was this shift that first led farmers to plant multipurpose trees in farms, especially along the road-side edges of their farms. The declining availability of firewood and fodder from the forest and some supplementary incomes generated through off-farm income or commercial vegetable farming, coupled with the availability of subsidies made biogas an attractive option. The biogas required animals to be stall-fed so that their dung could be efficiently collected. Moreover, as farmers discovered later, biogas also fit in with their desire for modern sanitation as this technology worked as two-in-one, working as both the generator of household cooking energy as well as improved version of safety-tanks for the toilet.

Thus, one component that emerged in farms in Fulbari in the 1980s is the result of the involvement of many actors beyond the farms over time: in understanding the microbes that generate methane in anaerobic conditions; in experimenting with designs; in creating institutions for the refinements of designs, arrangement of finances, transfer of the designs to farmers’ fields, and continuous refinement and innovations in technology, institutions, and inter-institutional relationships (Rai, 2017).

Trees in farms (agroforestry)

As I showed, trees were integral part of most farms in Fulbari. Trees were planted in those parcels where farmers also built their homes and cattle sheds. The other parcels are often under seasonal crops and vegetables. A few households converted their entire land into private forests, but these were limited in number. According to the latest agricultural census of Chitwan district,

70,000 holdings out of 88,000 had some trees in the farm (CBS, 2013, p.18).

How did the land look like before three decades? On one of the winter days in December of

2010, I asked Bishnu madam, one of the members of Fulbari Organic Producers Cooperative.

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“You can imagine how it was like in the past, Anil sir,” she told me. The day was warm for winter and we were sitting on a wooden cot at the west-facing front-porch of her house, which also faced a graveled road that connected this side of Fulbari village with a paved road one and half kilometre to the north. Across the road and beyond a plot of land was a government-built irrigation canal running almost parallel to the road. “You see those trees there now, right? You can’t see much that is beyond the canal right now. That bamboo over there completely blocks the view on the other side. But before these bamboos were there, we could wave at people in houses at the other end of this five-bigha6 plot. We used to holler at each other. In the night, we would see light from kerosene lanterns flickering that far.” She said pointing to the densely forested patches of canal dikes.

In Fulbari and throughout the Chitwan Valley, the first settlers planted banyan trees in public land, and especially at the road intersections, immediately after they settled down in the plains.

This was one of the agroecological and agroforestry technologies these settlers brought to the valley from their hill ecosystems. Not only the connection of memory between the hills and their new habitat, Bananas also added some nutritional elements and familiar taste in their diet. That is why bananas were among the oldest trees in the village. Farmers said that these road-side banyan trees were planted by early travelers who used to trek to Indian border town in the past to procure some basic necessities. Before the over 1000 km-long East-West highway was built in 1970s and

1980s, connecting the western border town of Mahendranagar to easternmost border town of

Kakarbhitta, salt and textile traders also used to trek down from the mountains and across the valley to Bhikha Thori, the Indian border town in the south. These banyan trees were integral

6 'Bigha' is the official unit of measurement, and 1.5 bigha is approximately a hectare. The five-bigha plot is the first allotment to the settlers in 1958.

169 part of chautaris, raised platforms constructed around them. The activity of constructing chautaris around these trees grew after hill migrants began to settle down in Chitwan valley, and after the grids of roads created marked intersections. With the dense canopy of banyan trees, these platforms are commonly used public spaces. Children climb up these trees and pick up berries when they are ripe. Men play cards and chess, smoke cigarettes, or indulge in daily conversations. Trekkers take rest under the shade. A variety of posters and signboards are nailed and stapled on these tree trunks and branches. Men and women also worship the banyan tree in the morning. This is how the new settlers from the hills of Nepal recreated their own version of the Chautari commons in the Chitwan Valley.

For over two decades after the first batch of settlers arrived in Fulbari, the trend among the householders was to clear up remaining tree stumps and elephant grass and reed patches in the private land. The first round of clearing was a tough job. Government provided the pieces of clearing equipment such as bulldozers and high-powered tractors in the early years of settlement.

Several rounds of official surveys also provided legal entitlements and created clear boundary between privately held and public lands, like the gauchars (grazing lands) and the lands set aside for schools, hospitals and other government offices. By 1980, Fulbari was an open field with houses and seasonally-cropped plots, with trees limited to a few road intersections.

Fear of malaria remained a big part of living in Chitwan valley and settlers commonly believed that trees provided breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Hill people had built a pattern of settlements in the mountains that involved temporary migrations between valleys, where a lot of them planted rice fields, and hill tops, where they had their houses and homestead dryland plots, called pakho. It used to be common for farming households in the hills to have houses on hilltops with temporary residences down the valleys where they would go to perform agricultural works

170 during the day and move back to hilltops in the evening to avoid mosquito bites. The spraying of

DDT in the 1950s opened up the possibility of largescale migration of the hill households down to Chitwan and many other places across the southern plains in Nepal (Skerry et. al. 1991).

Migrants from the hill environment had to learn a variety of “make do” readjustments in Chitwan

Valley. Some did not like these changes and how the new place looked and felt like. Yet, the attraction of the schools, accessible roads and facilities such as hospitals retained them in this rather foreign environment. They also noticed that compared to the hills, they were growing and eating more rice and more easily, without having to walk on foot uphill and downhill to grow paddy. They expressed the dilemma of their new land this way: “bhat ta ramro, ghaam ta naramro” (meaning, we got a lot more rice to eat but the heat is too much to bear). While a very few returned to the hills, a general consensus emerged: it was better to tolerate extra heat in order to grow more rice and send children to schools in Chitwan.

So the settlers began to embrace the realities of the Chitwan Valley with renewed enthusiasm and confidence. Most of agricultural land has been devoted to seasonal crops in Fulbari and

Chitwan valley (CBC 2013). The latest census shows that out of over 40,000 hectares of agricultural land, over 35,000 hectares are devoted to temporary crops. The rest of the land was under permanent crops, trees, meadows and pastures (CBS, 2013, pp.5-6). Observations around the village showed plots with different seasonal crops. However, the growth of trees in farms had also been noticeable. This growth had been incremental and involved different actors. Primary actors are the farmers who decided to plant the trees. However, the trees themselves came from diverse sources.

When farms in Fulbari were created in 1955, it was filled with grasslands and silk cotton trees.

The swamps were particularly overgrown with reeds and other wild grasses. It took a lot of hard

171 work and mobilization of heavy machinery to create these farms in the first place. Most of the transformation had been gradual. In the initial phase, the goal of the settlers was to get rid of the remnants of the wild: the trees, the swamp, and the grasslands. Dirt roads were constructed as grids, and these roads provided edges for farmers to plant trees several decades later.

Malaria was controlled with the use of DDT. Farmers recalled how tough it was getting rid of the stumps of trees and the matted roots of the reeds. The heavy machinery was not available for all the clearing. Once the farms were handed over to the families, they were mostly on their own in making the field more cultivable and livable. Some farms had tree-stumps in them till early

1980s. While at present some farms look like an organized agroforestry with tree lining the edges and different parts of the farm, these trees appeared slowly, beginning with the late 1960s.

Walking around Fulbari, one sees that most of the homes are surrounded by several varieties of trees. The nature of trees and their number and location in the farm is determined by the particular feature of the farm, the feature of the adjoining land, and the nature of the households.

The growth of homes – with new migrants from hills and other parts of Nepal, and with the formation of new families - has given rise to the growth of trees. Homestead areas, the road-side edges and the canal dikes are the main areas of tree planting.

After bananas, the first trees to arrive were papaya. Farmers had brought the papaya seeds from their mountain villages. We see these varieties of papayas in Chitwan even now. These seeds were easy to carry. Once a ripe papaya is cut open, the dark seeds are dried in the sun. Once dry, they last for a few years, and can remain dormant until they are in contact with soil. The common practice in Chitwan, including in Fulbari, was to throw the papaya seeds into the garden. After they sprout, the saplings are selectively thinned. Birds do not like to eat the seeds as they are

172 coated with strong chemicals. Papayas were easy to establish, and they do not have big canopy, and they, thus, did not take up much of the farm space, although their roots spread wide. This is why papayas are often found at the edges and around the houses. They give fruits the year round.

There were a few varieties of fodder trees that farmers brought from their mountain villages.

Common among them is dabdabe (garuga pinnata). It is propagated by stem and has a very high success rate. The stem is alive for several months and can be planted any time of the year, rain or no rain. Farmers considered that fodder from this tree was not good for milking cattle, but they thought it was good for the draft animals and goats. The composition of trees varies in farms, but the most dominant tree variety in Fulbari and in most of the western Chitwan is bakeno. Its ubiquity on the farming landscape across all part of the Chitwan valley can give an impression that it must have been part of the farms for a very long time. However, it began to appear in farms only in the early 1970s. Farmers got many trees from their relatives.

There were also several formal institutions tasked with promoting trees in farms. Until mid-

1990s, the IAAS and a government-run horticultural farm and nurseries were two main sources of tree saplings. Some of the trees in farms arrived as a part of the tree promotion by these institutions in different years. For example, ipil ipil tree is seen in farms in Fulbari and other places in Chitwan and other districts of Nepal. Until mid-1980s, this tree did not exist in the

Chitwan Valley. It was promoted by the IAAS’s animal science division as nutritious fodder for farmers. It is also a nitrogen-fixing leguminous tree. While there was initially high enthusiasm among farmers for this tree, over time it suffered from aphid attacks. Ipil ipil is planted in rows mixed with other trees and perennial grasses such as amriso.

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The benefit of having trees in farm did not get lost to farmers who migrated to the valley.

However, the appearance of trees in farm was not quick and there were a number of reasons for this. Although they migrated to Chitwan when malaria was effectively under control (Skerry et al., 1991), they had endemic fear of the disease and most thought that trees breed mosquitoes.

Therefore, they preferred to keep most of the land free from dense bushes and perennial plants.

Papaya did not bother them because it did not have dense canopy. Moreover, as it grew, the leaves at the lower levels were automatically shed. Having trees with permanent leaf cover was different. Therefore, even now, farmers prefer to tuck away dense bamboo groves as far away as possible from their farms.

Table 7.3: Agroforestry: Timelines and Forces/Triggers/Actors Timelines Actors/Triggers/Forces 1950s -Virtually non-existent; -Availability of fodder and firewood from nearby forests -The old stumps from cleared forest also used for firewood; -Papaya was planted early on 1960s -A few fruit trees planted by a small number of farmers; -A few fodder trees planted by farmers who brought these trees from their mountain villages -Government sets up horticultural center in Yagyapuri and this center was the main source of fruit saplings in Chitwan 1970s -More trees in farms -Government promotion of tree planting begins -Government subsidizes the tree plantation through free seedlings distributed to farms -Declining access to forest resources and onset of planting multipurpose trees such as Bakeno along the road side edges of farms and around the home buildings for shade; 1980 -Tree planting picks up across the Valley including in Fulbari; -Bakena is easy to grow because of its nature (seed is easy to germinate; high survival rate; transplanting is very easy/ almost effortless; requires minimal care -Used as multipurpose tree: fodder, firewood, wood, medicine -Squatter movement leads to initial phase of squatting in the public grazing lands around Chitwan valley (Ghimire) 1990s/2000 -Tree planting spreads -Fruit and fodder multipurpose trees -Onset of the planting of a few ornamental trees, especially in the institutional lands such as on school fields, hospital campuses, and cooperative buildings -Stall feeding of animals for biogas, conversion of grazing land into institutional land and squatter settlements, and reduced availability of firewood/fodder from the

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forests were direct triggers; -Squatting has been one of the major land movements in Nepal and is directly tied to political mobilization by Nepal’s communist parties (Ghimire 1998, Forest or Farm) 2010s -Trees planting spreads and increases with the formation of new homesteads. -New migrants from hills continues and that leads to growth in the tree planting in farms, especially around the homes -Private nurseries cater to the need for fruit and ornamental plant seedlings; -Bakeno is available for free across the villages/towns from neighboring households; easy to propagate;

Indeed, while integration of trees in farms was part of ecological farming, this process began much before the arrival of the ideas of ‘sustainable agriculture’ or ‘organic farming’ or

‘permaculture.’ There were other important changes occurring around the village since late

1970s. According to some farmers in Fulbari, the IAAS had brought seeds of bakaino tree from

India to promote in Chitwan valley. A few farmers started planting this tree at their front yard in late 1970s. Early pioneers in Fulbari and nearby villagers saw that this tree grew very fast and was proving to be a good source of fodder. It was very good firewood and, if protected from exposure to rain, bakaino wood was resistant to bugs because of its inherent insecticidal property. The planting of bakaino spread very fast and bakaino dominates the patches of trees in farms in Fulbari today.

Besides bakaino, many farmers also began to plant some fruit trees and bamboo groves. A few of them had brought a few of fodder tree saplings from mountains, such as dubdabe, amaro and pakhuri that we see now dotting the mosaic of Fulbari. Many of the trees were common to hills and Chitwan forests. Many of the domesticated trees from the middle-hills across Nepal were integral parts of Chitwan’s tropical forest systems such as koiralo and tanki, which also are, among other things, excellent nitrogen-fixing trees. Besides providing very nutritious fodders to the cattle, they are also excellent source of vegetables (sort of wild greens during flowering seasons), and they also provide pollens for bees. The purple and white flowers of koiralo are

175 particularly sought after across Nepal and have begun to appear in some supermarkets in

Kathmandu and Pokhara. What emerged in Fulbari and Chitwan Valley was the creative mixture of agroforestry trees from the hills as well as the government-induced trees such as Ipil-Ipil and bakaino. In a way, these practices symbolized hybridity at the eco-system levels.

The government had set up agricultural training center in Kathmandu in late 1950s and established a formal college (the IAAS) in Rampur in 1970s. To promote extension services to a major horticultural demonstration farm was set up 6 kilometers to the north-west from Fulbari in

Yagyapuri in the 1960s. This land is now converted into Nepal’s premier cancer hospital built with aid from Chinese government. But until mid-1990s, this horticultural station and IAAS remained the major sources of fruit and fodder trees for farming households in Chitwan.

By late 1970s, much of the remaining forest along Narayani River in the west—about 6 kilometers from Fulbari village – was also cut down in successive rounds of forest clearance.

Large part of the bank now unprotected was washed away by monsoon floods in the river. In the subsequent years, the government planted monoculture of sisau trees that was a far cry from the original mixed tropical riverine forests. This plantation was in no way adequate to cater to the fodder, biomass and other nutritional needs of the farming households around.

Many of the Fulbari residents used to go to the 300-hectare campus of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (IAAS) in Rampur, two and half kilometers away from Fulbari’s VDC office, to harvest grass to feed farm animals. Farmers would wake up in the early morning hours and head to IAAS campus to cut fodder grass for their cattle. Their access to the campus grass was also possible because several people from Fulbari and other neighboring villages had full- time and part time jobs there. “By seven we used to be back home,” Maya bhauju, Chandra dai’s

176 wife told me once. By early 1990s, procuring grass from the institute was becoming more and more difficult with increasing numbers of young kids going to school, thereby making their time unavailable for farm works. This intensified when private 'boarding' schools sprouted with widespread practices of heavy drilling and homework. Moreover, the land had also been subdivided into smaller holdings as joint families divided the properties, and as land was sold to new settlers.

In 1980s, cropping patterns also began to change. Many started growing vegetables during winter/spring months that used to be fallow period in the past. New crops such as buckwheat, broad beans, and wheat began to be grown by increasing number of farmers. Many of them began to grow commercial fresh vegetables. All of these factors pushed increasing number of farmers to plant fodder trees in their farms. Tree planting activities was also aggressively pushed across Nepal from 1980s onward (Jackson 1987). Integrating trees in the farms have transformed

Chitwan’s landscape very significantly. The patches of trees in privately owned land, around the perimeters of school compound and, in some cases, growing commercial tree plantation have created niche habitats for birds, butterflies, and animals such as mongoose and jackals.

Agroforestry, thus, is an emergent phenomenon in farms.

Green-manures/cover crops

A common sight across Fulbari during May is hip-tall dhaincha growing in most farms.

Dhaincha is grown either as a stand-alone crop or inside the maize-bean-squash crops. The monsoon rain arrives between the first and second week of June and farmers are hard-pressed to harvest the green beans and maize. If there is excessive rain early on, the fields are often flooded and farmers cut down the maize even if the cobs are not ripe. That’s what happened in 2011.

While the green cobs and beans were harvested, most of the plants were ploughed under to

177 prepare for the fields for rice transplanting. Some fields had dhaincha as stand-alone crops while others had sown it inside the corn-fields. Often, before sowing the dhaincha inside the corn-field, the inside of the field is weeded. The dhaincha together with corn-stubs and left-over from the bean vines are ploughed under. They work as cover crops while standing, they are ploughed into the soil after certain level of maturity.

Cover crops are temporary or permanent plants grown to cover the soil. In that sense, all plants that grow in farms are cover-crops. However, here cover-crops are taken as purposeful covering of soil to achieve multiple objectives: generation and recycling of soil nutrients, prevention of soil from leaching and eroding, and maintenance of soil structure. While the practice of cover cropping is thousands of years old, it was not systematically understood until recently. In fact, the fuller biophysical complexity of soil including plants and other entities that make it up is only being investigated (Lal, 2012).

Use of cover crops took different forms across different parts of the world. In many places, cover-cropping was part of the cropping system itself. For instance, in Fulbari, farmers have been planting of corn, beans and squash during the Spring season for a long time. This combination of cropping pattern was mostly dominant in dryland and less swampy low-lands.

We do not have adequate historical documentation of what kind of cropping systems were prevalent in the cultivated land in Chitwan valley prior to the arrival of hill migrants. One observation shows that the indigenous Tharu people did scatter-sowing of rice in some land

(Sharma and Malla, 1958). The corn-bean-squash cropping system was brought by the hill migrants. It was already quite prevalent across Nepal’s hills ever since the introduction of corn in early eighteenth century (Regmi, 1984). Corn-bean-squash system actually evolved in meso-

American region. We do not know how and when this cropping system spread across Nepal. It is

178 also important to note here that, while we know this cropping system as by the three food items grown together, another important resource is often excluded. This cropping system also includes a variety of grasses that grow on its own together with these three-items, providing complete cover to the soil during the three-month growing season. Often weed is not included as the product of the cropping system because those who do the research forget that weeds are important both as cover-crops as well as good source of fodder for the stall-fed animals.

Table 7.4: Cover Cropping: Timelines and Forces/Actors/Triggers Timeline Forces/Triggers/Actors 1950s -Nearly non-existent; -Fallow farming was more common and animal grazing in the fallow farms during the fallow period; -Summer fields were under maize bean squash + weed-as-fodder farming 1960s -Continuation of summer four-crop system with fallow and animal grazing in fallow land 1970s -Experiments of green manure in Rampur -Experiments in farmers fields for demonstration in summer rice field 1980s -Spread of dhaincha in rice-field -Initial promotion by agricultural extension technicians and the IAAS, but spread through farmers-to-farmers network 1990s/2000s --Widely adopted by farmers -Promotion by non-government organizations, farmers’ groups, farmers cooperatives -Word of mouth spread -green cover seed available in agricultural input shops and also easily propagated in farmers -Seeds also available through farmers 2010s -Continued adoption of green manuring in rice field; -The farmers-to-farm informal network as major source of the promotion; -The idea also seems to spread through social media

Cover cropping went out of favor from the late nineteenth century in industrialized countries as farmers began to access synthetic chemical inputs (Fitzgerald, 2003). The discovery of nitrogen and other synthetic fertilizers, and the gradual adoption of monoculture farming, resulted in the decline in the use of cover crops as a way of protecting soils. In the US, cover cropping was revived after the devastating dust-bowls of the 1930s and was integral part of soil conversation

179 activities of the United States Department of Agriculture. It is interesting to note here that the first batch of agricultural experts who went to Nepal to start agricultural modernization programs were the ones who had worked as county agricultural extension agents in the United States of

America (USA). They emphasized the use of cover-crops and soil protection as a part of agricultural interventions (Skerry et al, 1991).

In Fulbari, the primary way farmers thought about cover cropping was as nutrient and protection of soil from wind erosion. The understanding about the complex soil biology is beginning to emerge among farmers. Green manure (hario mal) is the commonly used term. It is the literal translation of the English words into Nepali. This very mixture of crops provides covers to the soil while also providing different foods directly and indirectly. The direct foods that come out of this cropping system are maize, pumpkins and beans. This system also provides grasses for the tethered animals such as cattle, goats and pigs. There is not much study done about the grass- fodder production in the corn-bean-squash system in Nepal. A review of 500 abstracts produced by graduate students and teachers at the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences shows that much of the focus of the research was on individual crops or the problems associated with particular pests on particular crops, or the chemical nutrient management for particular seasonal crop. Moreover, we do not have study of the yield of this cropping system. We have yield study for corn, wheat, millet, and rice, for example. However, the total system yield has not been studied. It is important to point this out because it is common for policy makers and experts to claim that agricultural productivity in Nepal is low. What they actually mean is yield of a particular crop is low or high. For example, agricultural experts study rice yields and compare them with assumed potential yields and with yields in other places. However, what is important is to compare the total yield of a system especially in a situation where crops are grown in mixed

180 stands. As is recommended in the concluding chapter, diversifying the very notion of yield and farm productivity/profitability is one of the important areas of inquiry for the future.

Almost all farmers in Fulbari use cover-crops as green manures in their fields for rice crops. The most widely used cover crop is dhaincha, although some other crops are also sown as cover crops such as sesame and sun-hemp. Most farmers did not practice green-manuring through cover crops until mid-1975s. The idea of cover cropping first began with the demonstration activities of the nearby agricultural college, and spread through extension activities, and farmers- to-farmer formal and informal networks. Green-manuring involves several material networks.

Farmers get their seeds from different sources. Some produce their own seeds, while others get them from their neighbors. Sometimes the seeds are bartered while other times it is bought with cash. In a few instances, seeds are also given as gift.

During my visits in May-June, it was common to see dhaincha growing in farmers’ fields, including in those of Chandra dai. This crop is grown either as a mixed stand or stand-alone, depending on the type of land. If the land is maize-growing dryland which is used for canal irrigation-based rice planting, then it is often sown inside a maize crop. Once maize is harvested, dhaincha together with whatever weed is in the field is ploughed into the soil. If the land is mostly used for growing rice and maize is not grown, then dhaincha is sown as stand-alone crop.

The method of converting the cover crops into green manures in Nepal that I have seen until now is ploughing. In many parts of the world this practice of ploughing is changing and giving way to cover-cropping in no-till farming. No-till is in experimental phase in Nepal and is alien to farmers. It is the most counter-intuitive practice in farming. Why do farmers plough the cover crops? Because they need to prepare the land for rice-planting.

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Although Nepal’s agricultural development clearly involved the promotion of synthetic chemicals, it was one part of it. In fact, government planners and policy makers also actively emphasized the need of non-synthetic mode of maintaining soil fertility. Farmers did not have the experience of growing cover crops and green manuring the field. These practices were promoted initially by a few agricultural experts from the Institute of Agriculture and Animal

Sciences (IAAS).

Different crops are grown as green manures such as dhaincha, sun hemp, and sesame. Among them, the dhaincha is the most widely used. If one walks around the fields in late May, it is common to see most fields filled with maturing dhaincha plants. Farmers used to dhaincha at the edge of their homestead for other purposes in the past. Mature dhaincha produces sturdy poles that work well as trellises for climbers such as lentils, squash and beans. Only in the late 1970s, that a few farmers began to experiment with dhaincha.

Before it arrived in the field of farmers, agricultural scientists carried out trials in the experimental farms at Rampur and other places of Nepal (Basnyat, 2001). Why were the IAAS scientists interested in cover crops? If we go by some claims, IAAS mostly epitomized and implemented destructive western science of green revolution. However, it seems that this institution was itself composed of actors with varied interests. While promotion of chemicals and pesticides was an important part of its projects; there were other projects that aimed to do things differently, among them the promotion of cover-cropping.

Dhaincha seed was procured from different sources. Because this plant also grows into a sturdy pole over a year’s time when it matures, farmers often planted this along the edges for the purpose of generating seeds for their cover crops, while the poles would be used in many ways:

182 as trellises for the beans and other vines, as rafters for the roof, and as firewood. Seeds are also exchanged and bartered among the neighbors. Nowadays, the agricultural input shops in major towns and village squares stock up on dhaincha as cover crop/green manuring materials.

However, market-based procurement seemed to have been minuscule. Only one farmer told me during the study that she got the seeds for 2011 from an agricultural input shop. She said she was going to harvest seeds for the coming year from her own plants. A few farmers also bought dhaincha seeds from the nearby agricultural college.

The other cover crops include sun hemp and sesame. Sesame is particularly used as cover crop before the plantation of April corn. Green-manuring for crops other than the rice was rare, though. Some parts of the farms are by their very design permanently under cover. For instance, the backyard orchards are multi-layered system with some seasonal tubers and vegetables at the bottom, trees and bushes forming the primary canopy of the orchard. This type of cover-cropping also emerged over a long period of time and spread among farmer through informal networks.

The intensification of cropping systems over the last two decades has also led to cover-cropping by default. Until early 1980s, farmers grew three main crops: rice, maize, and mustard. The maize was and continue to be integrated with bean, squash and self-seeding fodder grasses. Rice and mustards are often grown as stand-alone crops. In between the harvest of the main crops and planting of new ones, there used to be time when the land used to remain fallow for a few months. These fallow periods have gradually declined since 1990s. Farmers are utilizing the period between main crops to grow fast-growing vegetables. In the past, animals used to be let loose in farms during these fallow periods. While most farmers kept their farms within their own fields, at times the private fields used to become common grazing grounds. Farmers also took grazing as important part of manuring the fields. The growing use of biogas provided the major

183 impetus for stall-feeding the animals so that the dung could be saved in the shed for generating biogas. This allowed for some farmers to grow more crops: both for home consumption as well as for sale.

What I witnessed, thus, in Fulbari were discrete changes involving many actors. While some of the cover-cropping practices were old, some new elements are fashioned into it over time. For example, the corn-bean-squash-fodder-grass system got further intensified with the addition of dhaincha as nitrogen-fixing cover crop and green manure. These subtle changes were enacted through formal and informal experiments. The agricultural experts were not only doing ‘modern chemical experiments’ but also modern non-chemical ones, such as the ones using dhaincha.

Similarly, the various training programs carried out by non-governmental organizations and government extension agencies also reinforced the need for cover cropping. Farmers were also responding to subtle changes in their animal husbandry practices, notable among them being the growing stall-feeding of cattle due to the disappearance of grazing lands and the need for conserving cattle dung for bio-gas generation. At the same time, these practices also get refined by the continuous work put in by a plethora of agricultural scientists, extension agents, ecological activists, non-governmental organizations, and many others (Montgomery, 2016).

Let’s look at one instance of this process. On the second day of the permaculture design course in Chitwan, participants visited a patch of forest 5 kilometers north from Narayangarh town along the Mugling-Narayangarh Highway. The main objective of the visit to the forest was to observe how the natural systems worked and what pattern of relationships existed among diverse entities in them (see the course outline at Appendix-1). Instructors for the course included

Basanta Ranabhat, a graduate of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (IAAS), and

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Rishi Adhikari, one of Nepal's early permaculture graduates, both of them working at

ECOSCENTRE. They accompanied the participants during the trip.

At the forest, they asked these 18 participants a series of questions and prompted them to do some field exercises. They began by asking the participants to make a list of things they could see in the forest patch. Notebooks and pens in hand, participants began to list everything they saw within the ten minutes allotted for the exercise. The main monsoon season had ended a few weeks ago, and the forest was filled with lush green vegetation. Most of the participants were familiar with many of the plants. The forest consisted of hardwood sal trees as its dominant plant species. There were vines climbing up trees. There were some trees commonly used as a source of animal fodder. There were also some plants they had seen but whose name they did not know.

A few participants saw an anthill in that forest patch. Some noticed mushrooms and lichens on the bark of trees. One participant said that, although she did not see any big animals then, she knew that animals such as deer, wild boar, and even leopard existed in that forest.

"Did you smell the soil?" Basanta Ranabhat asked.

"No, but we know what it smells like," some participants replied.

"Do you know that a lot of micro-organisms (sukshma jivanu) exist in the soil?"

"Yes," one participant, who was studying environmental science, replied.

The next exercise involved figuring out what kind of relationships existed between these different things they had seen in that patch of forest.

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"Who planted these trees?" Rishi Adhikari asked.

"Nobody," participants replied. The discussion then revolved around the question as to why farmers had to do so many things to produce food in their farm whereas a forest grew on its own.

During the discussions, participants reflected on the symbiotic relationships among various things in that small patch of forest: among plants, birds, insects, and the fungi, for example.

"Do you find any waste here?" Rishi Adhikari asked.

"No."

"Why did this forest have no waste?"

Rishi jee then summed up the relationships existing in the forest in two pithy points: "many helping one" and "one thing helping many."

"In permaculture, we design our farms in such a way that each of those things does more than one thing - at least, three things,” Rishi jee said. “We do that in such a way that these things are also beneficial to each other and that the waste from one entity becomes food for another."

Conclusion

Ecological farming involves doing many things: carrying out different types of labour, and placement of different things in different places and times. Those ‘things’ (materials and technologies) are not pre-given but are the results of lots of works by lots of actors over time.

Some of the ecological farming practices appear and spread at particular conjunctural moments and require the works of a multiple assemblage of actors and materials. The farming landscape

186 in Fulbari and the Chitwan valley is vastly different from seven decades ago when farming families were the near exclusive actors in generation, transformation, and utilization of knowledge. Now, the number of actors has burgeoned creating extended networks that I call practical assemblages. I have explored the assemblages with reference to three important ecological farming practices in Fulbari Village: biogas, agroforestry, and cover cropping. Several factors led to these changes. Inside the households, the declining labour availability and declining access to common pool resources such as forests and grazing lands pushed farmers to plant multi-purpose trees and build biogas plants. The perceived decline in soil fertility led them to adopt cover cropping and green manuring. These forces coalesced with policies and programs that promoted the ecological practices through subsidies, educational exposures and demonstration activities.

Indeed, we do not see in these farms only the assemblages of ecologically prudent practices at work. Moreover, exploring these assemblages also reveals the shifting positions of actors as well as the complex nature of institutions. Generating an ecological practice is not merely the outcome of prudent smallholders, but also results from the establishment of technical institutions, financing mechanisms, promotional activities, and, of course, the family farmers’ ability to provide for initial costs, the changes in the animal husbandry practices, the declining access to firewood, and need to change the quality of the kitchen. Householders also face diverse challenges in, as well as opportunities for, adopting ecological farming practices. We will explore them in the next chapter.

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Chapter 8 : Challenges of Ecological Farming: The Changing Livelihood Assemblages

In the previous chapter, I examined the conjunctural moments and the assemblage of actors that led to the generation and spread of three ecological practices: the biogas plants, agroforestry, and cover-cropping. While these changes materialized in specific farms in Fulbari, they were the outcomes of conjunctural moments and scale of involvement of actors that lay beyond these farms. Those factors beyond the farms were elaborated in chapter 5. In chapter 7, my objective was to show that while farmers made decisions about making their farms, they did so in the context of the host of other actors involved in the agrarian world. The present chapter zooms in further to examine the issue of the challenges of making a living in a farm as a condition of possibility for the making of ecological farms. I argue that farms are only one among many other sources of household livelihoods. Diversification of resource base seems to be an important condition for enabling farmers to stay in farming and to adopt and innovate ecological farming practices. It also seems that the growing privatization of schooling and health care, the aspirations for building modern homes, and the shift in perception towards farming among young people are factors that create constraints for the households to stay on their farms and continue building and maintaining ecological farming.

In this chapter, I specifically explore changes in three broad aspects of making a living by family farming households. In the first section, I will examine some changes in agricultural aspects.

What were the useful things being produced in these farms? How had the adoption of ecological

188 practices transformed the composition of outputs? How were those outputs distributed? What institutional mechanisms existed in the process of disposing those outputs? What new inputs were coming into agricultural production? From where are farmers sourcing these inputs? What institutional mechanisms had emerged in the procurements of these inputs? In other words, what kind of agricultural economy was emerging?

The second section will examine those aspects of economy that are not directly related to agricultural production. Here, I will specifically focus on economies as they pertain to changing modes of house building, medical expenses, and schooling of kids. Given the paucity of quantitative data, the purpose of this exercise is not to come up with definitive conclusions about these inter-sectoral linkages, but to highlight the importance of addressing these issues through further works.

For some data, I have relied on interviews with key informants and informal conversations related to events such as house construction; particular medical visits; and schooling of kids.

Chandra dai’s records shed some light on agricultural aspects. I have also used a few secondary materials that explore crop-specific calculations. The main data, however, are qualitative, that are generated through observations, and formal and informal interviews.

Family Livelihoods: Expanding the idea of Economy

The 3rd National Organic Fair was held in Bharatpur, the headquarters of Chitwan district, on 29-

31 March 2011. On the 29th, I travelled from Kathmandu to attend this event in the morning.

Seated next to me in the bus was a man. During the 4-hour journey, we became friends. He was going to the organic fair to set up a stall to promote his company’s plastic products used for harvesting rainwater. This event was sponsored and organized by a number of government and

189 non-government organizations, and different private businesses such as the one this gentleman worked for. There were about a hundred stalls set up in the venue by government agencies, farmers’ cooperatives, savings and credit groups, non-governmental organizations, and private businesses. While most visitors hopped from one stall to another, some also listened to speeches by political leaders, organizers of the events, district bureaucrats, agricultural experts, and others.

Speaker after speaker talked about how agriculture was the backbone (merudanda, in Nepali) of national economy (rastriya arthatantra), and how the proportion of agriculture in the total national economy was decreasing. This way of talking about economy—in the sense of something that represents a national boundary, an object that contains so many things but that can be stated with relative confidence—is not widespread at the quotidian level in Nepal. Men and women who are active in politics or who are actively interested in politics; the professional economists; social scientists who have to give some background details about Nepal; and journalists who report on 'economy' for a newspaper or other medium speak about 'the economy.’

Mitchell (1998) tells us that the idea of 'the economy' as 'the totality (italics added) of the relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country' (p.820) emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the concept of economy related to the management of state affairs and thrifty utilization of available resources.

Going back to the roots, economy was related to the running of household, the Greek word for which is 'oikos.' At vernacular level, the thinking was, and continues to be, almost always about concrete things: the availability of particular objects and services; the means of accessing them; a particular loan from a particular moneylender; a particular shopkeeper who sold a set of particular things, and the daily making do with what one had to make a living.

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The concept for household management in Nepali is 'ghar vyavahar chalaune' (literally, 'running the household affairs'). The word 'arthatantra' is reserved for talking about the economy, such as

'rastriya arthatantra' (national economy), or 'chhetriya arthatantra' (regional economy). During my fieldwork, people switched between ghar vyavahar chalaune and arthatantra (Nepali word for ‘economy’) depending on where they were, or what the conversation was about. For instance, in the early morning conversations at tea shops, I heard men talk about arthatantra when they conversed about national level politics, but within a few minutes they would switch to talk about local transactions in particular land, or the market price of goods, or school fees for their kids, or hospital expenses, or the market prices of the produce such as grains, egg, meat, and milk.

Family farmers in Chitwan do many things to make a living. One of those things is to constantly construct their farms. The very existence of farms is contingent upon the continuing active presence of members of the family. We also saw in the previous chapter that the construction of farms also involved many others outside the family. Farmers generate outputs, which they either use directly at home, or sell to a variety of markets, or barter with other households or provide as gifts to friends, relatives, and even to those in emergency need. They also need a variety of inputs to construct their farms. As I found in Fulbari and Chitwan, making a living was more than ecological farming.

Farming: input/output

Farming involves the management of inputs and outputs. These materials could be derived in farm or procured from outside. They can also be derived through a variety of forms. Some of them come for ‘free’: the wind, sunlight, rain, pollination, among others. These farms produce mostly for home consumption, and sell surplus items, both food and non-food including

‘services.’

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Chandra dai had kept a notebook in which he recorded different aspects of his farming. Every time he incurred a cost or sold something, he recorded the transaction details on his notebook. At the end of the cropping season, he would do the calculations of cost and benefit. With his permission, I copied some of those pages with my camera. His records give details of expenditure for different crops such as rice, carrot, and beans. For instance, the income and expenditure looked like the following for carrot production in 2010.

Table 8.1 Adhikari Farm’s income-expenditure table for carrot production in 2010

Items Expenditure Income Wage payment 31800 Ploughing with tractor 2150 Fertilizer (farmyard 20500 manure/compost and chicken manure) Seed 1850 Total Expenses 56300 Income (From ten batches of 68871 sales of total 9259 kg of carrots) Profit 12571

Source: Chandra Adhikari’s Diary page (Appendix)

In a way this is seemingly a simple record. It also shows that the carrot production was a profitable occupation. But probing a bit deeper reveals the details of making sense of these numbers.

Let’s begin with the categories. Expectedly non-monetary inputs were not included in the calculations. Chandra dai was recording money he spent and money he received. At times, the quantitative outputs were straightforward calculation of the weight of ‘useful parts’ of the produce and their monetary value based on the then current market price. For example, the useful parts of rice crop would be carrot root. For beans, it was the beans; and for rice the quantity of rice sold in the market. Even within this calculation, the issue was the allocation of expenditures

192 for these crops, especially when they were grown together during the same season. For instance, green beans and carrots were grown in winter for both household consumption and market sale, and often the wage workers were hired for the day, and they worked on both the crops. Similarly, some days, workers were hired for a variety of jobs: clearing up the mini-orchard, weeding the carrots, and hauling the bamboo.

In the carrot income-expenditure page, expenditure item was for fertilizer (20,500 rupees). The list of expenditures includes payments for chicken manures (4500 rupees) and farmyard manures

(16,000 rupees). I knew he did not have chicken. Therefore, I assumed that they had bought the chicken manure from one of the poultry farms nearby. What about the farmyard manure? I asked

Chandra dai if they bought the farmyard manure from other farms.

“No. It is from our own farm. But we have to account for the total expenditure. That’s why I included it in the cost.”

The main problem was in trying to calculate the cost benefit for a single crop in a farm where so many things (tangible and intangible) are produced, and so many products are both inputs and outputs. In the Adhikari farm, while some inputs are procured from outside (such as labour, some seeds, and chicken manure), others are produced in farm (farmyard manure). How do we account for the resources produced inside? Is it an expenditure or an income? In this case, Chandra dai was under-calculating the profit by a big margin. Similarly, how do we account for the longer- term effects of manures?

Further, these farms produce immensely varied things: both tangible and intangible. My first resource for understanding this was a board hung on the wall of the front porch of Adhikari

193 family's house. The title of the board was: "The plants in this farm.' This list was divided into nine different categories: Fruits, Vegetables, Spices, Herbs, Legumes, Other Trees, Grains, Oil plants, and Domestic plants.

Table 8.2: What does Adhikari family farm contain?

Categories Number Fruits 26 types Vegetables 40 types Spices 21 types Herbs 29 types Legumes 12 types Other Trees 15 types Grains 9 types Oil Plants 6 types Domestic Animals 6 types What exist within these categories? Let's have a look.

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Table 8.3: The list of biodiversity in Fulbari Farm

Fruits (24) Vegetables (40) Spices (20) Herbs (29) Legumes Amaro Potato Coriander Harro (12) Amla Radish Garlic Barro Soybean Avocado Cauliflower Onion Sarpagandha Rajma Banana Mustard green Turmeric Neem Masyang Coconut Cabbage Ginger Bakaino Maas Grapes Spinach Fennel Nettle Small peas Guava Peas Bayleaf Hade Lasun Lentil Gulab Jamun Pumpkin Curry leaf Rudraksha Pigeon pea Jamuna Gourd Beetle nut Aank Khesari Kantar Lufa squash Black pepper Titepati Mahili kerau Kyamuna Jhutte Ghiraula Pipla Ghodtappre Big kerau Lemon Pate Ghiraula Chilli pepper Menthol Mung bean Lychee Cucumber Maratthi Tulasi Fava Mango Carrot Mint Babari Mulberry Githa Coffee Gurjo Muntala (small Yam Nutmeg Gudar Gaino tangerine) Green bean Timbu Grasses Papaya Flat been Fenugreek Raj Brisha Passion Fruit Big bean (Kauche) Chinese Dad patta Peach Kuvindo coriander Mehendi Pineapple Snake gourd Rosemary Marmalos Pomegranate Broccoli Pindar Red berry (bayar) Chinese cabbage Camphor Straw berries Fava bean Sipligaan Sugar cane Taro Bojho Taro roots Dahi Chamali Tomatoes Aloe Vera Okra Aankhle Jhar Tree tomato Bhringi Raaj Egg plant Salagam Gol Kakri Mellon Bean—kattike Bean—corn Bitter gourd Amaranth Bethe Pitpite Fern (niuro) Other plants (15) Grains (9) Oilseeds (6) Domestic Animals (6) Saal Rice Sunflower Buffalo Sisau Maize Canola Cow Ipil Ipil Wheat Silam Goat Kutmiro Buckwheat Sesame Dog Thotne Oat Mustard Cat

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Dumri Junelo Radish seed Rabbit Badahar Millet Nimaro Kaguno Bamboo Jai Bori Khanayo Simal Pipal Bar Parijat Source: Chandra Adhikari Farm , 2011. (Appendix 4)

There were some items in Adhikari farm which were not on this list, notably the animals. For example, this list does not have fish (grass carp and tilapia) that are grown in different ponds, and within the rice fields. Nor does this include earthworms, pigeons, bees, and guinea pigs that

Adhikari family had raised. The earthworms were both outputs for sale as well as inputs as fertilizer in field and as a feed item for tilapia fish. Pigeons were raised for selling them to those who use them for religious sacrifice during certain festivals. Guinea pigs were sold exclusively to students and teachers who needed them to conduct scientific research in the agricultural college.

Besides these missing items, there was diversity within some of these items, too. For example,

Adhikari family had been growing many varieties of rice in their farms as a living seed bank since 2006, and by August 2011, they had 56 varieties of rice in their three-quarter of a hectare farm. These varieties of rice were grown as a part of Chandra Adhikari's initiative for agricultural biodiversity conservation.

Over years, some of these varieties have also been adopted by other farmers in the village.

Notable among them was Anadi. It is a variety of sticky rice which had disappeared from Fulbari by mid-1990s. A lot of farmers reminisced about growing anadi in their land in the mountains and during early years of settlement in Fulbari. Anadi was also a good source of long straw

196 needed for mat weaving. Anadi used to be eaten in some major festivals. By 2000s a few farmers were buying anadi from market to cook during festivals. Many households had actually stopped eating anadi in festivals by the time I was in the field. Chandra Adhikari began planting anadi in early 2000s, first in a small plot to reproduce more seed, and later in a larger area. A few farmers got seeds from him in 2008.

The farms also provided services such as shades during hot season. Pedestrians routinely rest under trees growing along the edges of farms, and trees shade homes creating pleasant conditions inside the house. Many farmers reminisced about the early days when there were not many trees in farms. The pleasantness of these emerging landscapes contrasts with dust and smoke-filled, noisy, and disorienting and chaotic Narayangarh town, which is just 11 kilometres to the north.

The same kind of image is attributed to the densely populated and dangerously polluted

Kathmandu, the capital city.

Some of the organic farms also offer 'learning services' to organic farming enthusiasts and volunteers. Volunteers from different parts of the world came to these farms through volunteer- placement agencies such as Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WOOFs). The volunteers contributed to farm works and also paid some money as support to these farms. A few people, such as Chandra Adhikari, were offered paid consulting works during training on sustainable farming or animal husbandry. These emerging opportunities seemed to have helped diversify the income streams (in this case, through access to the foreign volunteers, training consultancies, and fees for observation tours) of some farmers with links established through past associations and in-farm innovations.

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Diverse markets: Farmers also sell their products through diverse markets: the home-based direct-sale to end users; selling some of the products to local retailers; selling some products to bicycle-peddlers; and sale to premium organic retailers in big cities such as Kathmandu and

Pokhara. The dedicated efforts to cater to certified organic markets began only in 2009 with the first of certification by National Association of Sustainable Agriculture (NASA), an Australian certification agency with its inspectors working in Nepal. The second round of certification in

Fulbari began with the support of a German organic farming promotion institution called One

World, which also supported the establishment of some organic product shops in Kathmandu and

Pokhara, two major cities in Nepal. These specialized markets are evolving. The nature of market relations is dependent on the products, too. The table below shows different markets for different products.

Table 8.4: Diverse markets for different products

Items Markets Grains (Rice, • sold directly to local consumers buckwheat, beans) • given as wage in kind • sold to local grain merchants • processed in local rice mills and sold to local retailers • processed in local rice mills and sold to organic shops in Pokhara and Kathmandu • sold to grain merchants who go from door to door in bicycles • some varieties of rice, such as anadi, are sold to buyers in the village Honey • sold directly to buyers from home • sold to local retailers • sold to retailers in nearby towns • sold to organic shop in Kathmandu Fish • sold directly to buyers from home • sold to local restaurants earthworm casts • sold directly to researchers at IAAS who come to the farm to buy it Carrots • sold to vegetable wholesalers in nearby town of Narayangarh who come with their trucks in a designated day of large harvest • Individual farms also sell it directly to buyers from the farm Sources: Interviews and observations

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Complications: The organic market linkage among farmers in Fulbari was in an initial phase and a rather complicated affair. An instance involving an accident of a truck carrying some grain from Fulbari revealed this complication. In January 2011, an organic trader from Pokhara ordered two quintals of organic brown rice from the cooperative. Chandra dai had so far been the contact-person for the traders. He came in contact with them through his participation in public meetings. After Chandra dai got a call from traders asking for specified amount of a particular product, he informally would send out information to potential sellers among the organic producers in the village. As I describe below, the scale of trade was minimal and sporadic.

For example, Chandra Dai got four quintals of grain from Bishnu madam, who farmed a plot of one bigha (two-third of a hectare) of land. This was transported in a cyle-rickshaw from her home to the cooperative mill by the operator of the mill, Mr. Bhatta jee. After milling the rice, it was winnowed manually, mostly by women wage labourers and Bishnu madam. The cooperative did not have its own storage infrastructure. After cleaning up and packing in plastic sacks, this merchandise was taken to a bus stop five hundred meters to the west in the cycle rickshaw and loaded to the roof top of the bus. The bus took those sacks to Narayangarh from where they were handed to professional moving companies called ‘carriers’. When Chandra dai deposited the sacs of brown rice for delivery to the trader in Pokhara, he took a receipt from the carrier and called the trader and gave her the receipt number as well as the details of the carrier company.

Pokhara is one hundred and twenty-six kilometres away to the North west from Narayangarh, and normally a heavily laden truck would take eight hours reaching there, barring any accidents or other problems along the roads. The next day when Chandra dai called Kamala jee, she said that she had not received any call from the career company. After this, Chandra dai called the transport company, often called ‘transport’ for short, only to find out that the truck carrying the

199 rice and a lot of other stuffs for other people had met with an accident and the produce had fallen into a river.

Who would bear the cost? Chandra dai had not insured the items. After a few months of negotiation, the organic trader agreed to pay for the rice, but this event was highly revealing of the intricacy involved in trading. After this incident, Chandra dai began to insure their items sent to the traders, and the insurance cost was added to the total price.

How was the cooperative involved in these transactions? Given the small volumes of transactions, the cooperative members were not very keen to move into full-fledged trading business. Therefore, it appeared, in reality, the trading is Chandra dai’s own business “I really want to set up an organic shop in Narayangarh, sir,” Chandra dai once told me. “But who will look after the farm in that case?” "Wouldn't it be nice if we had our own shops?" But setting up a trading system is a complicated affair.

The complicated arrangements of marketing some organic products revealed to me through another incident. In Fulbari, farmers were used to producing regular crops and vegetables as a part of their subsistence strategy. In 2009, One World representative came to the village and proposed that they would provide buy-back guarantee if they produced some herbs, primary among them holy basil or ‘tulasi’ in Nepali. Additionally, One World had also provided funding for their group certification.

A long-time friend of Chandra dai, who was involved in the promotion of ecological agriculture in Nepal, Sanubhai Maharjan was working as UN volunteer in East Timor. He had bought one bigha and half of land (about one hectare) in late 2007 with savings from his UN job. A family

200 from nearby mountain area was hired to look after the land and also to oversee the plantation of fruit and other trees. That land was ideal for producing the herbs. The care-taker family was promised that the tulasi would be bought with fixed price. Several other organic farmers also decided to cultivate tulasi in small patches of their land.

Tulasi plants grew and the leaves were picked and shade-dried. But no representative from One

World came to procure, even after repeated calls. I had a chance to talk with one of the One

World traders. “They did not produce the leaves of the required quality. We have to export to

Germany and the standard has to be really high,” He told me. I saw some of the sacks in which tulsi leaves were stored. They had started developing mold. It turned out tulsi requires very detailed process of shade drying for it to be eligible for export in European market. The growers lacked infrastructure for this.

Labour: Different cooperative arrangements existed in the village to share labour among farming households. Until the mid-1980s, most of the labour was performed as parma, a form of cooperative, non-monetized labour exchange. Some smallholders were practicing parma as of the rice season of 2011, although wage labour was on the rise relative to cooperative arrangements.

A few notable changes have occurred during the last two decades in household labour allocation.

First, there has been growing number of off-farm occupations available for members of households. This has reduced the number of able-bodied people in the village. Until early 1990s, most of the young kids in Nepal including in Chitwan valley went to government-run schools which had very low home-work load. Nepal's education section saw sweeping changes from

1990s onwards, with the expansion of what in Nepal is called the English-medium, 'boarding

201 schools'. The establishment of these schools shifted the working hours of children in significant ways. These schools began 'collecting' students at around nine o clock in the morning. Students-- even as young as 5-year-olds--are routinely saddled with a lot of home assignments. Therefore, parents normally asked them not to help them out in the running of the household or agricultural chores.

It was common to see children participate in planting, weeding, cattle tending, grass-cutting and many other works. However, they are performing a lot less hours of work than children in 1980s and before. I saw children with their notebooks during day hours after they came back from school. They were pushed by parents to keep studying even during Saturdays. I had grown up in

Nepal during the time when relatively well-to-do parents tried their best to keep their children from ‘wasting’ their time in farming activities, and instead made them focus on their studies.

During my formal and informal conversations in my own hometown and almost everywhere I went including in Fulbari, I asked farmers whether their children helped them in agricultural work, and how this had changed over time. Beduram’s reply captured much of the responses:

"Oh, sir, they are studying-types (padhne khale)."

Markets: Some subtle and significant changes in market relations were underway. For several decades, Sajha depot was the primary market actor. Sajha depot was set up in Fulbari in the late

1960s. In 2011, its building lay in a dilapidated condition near Fulbari's village government office, its familiar yellow walls covered with water marks overgrown with algae, its tin roofs mostly rusted, the wide rusted metal doors in a different stage of decay, and building skirting chipping away. It still sported barbed wire fence, but in similarly dilapidated condition. In

Fulbari, it began to be the main source of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash fertilizers, DDT and

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BHC pesticides, vegetable and grain seeds, and a few farming implements such as different sized hoes and metal ploughs.

There was almost no farmer who did not use major fertilizers. It was common to see male farmers hang out there talking to government-appointed Sajha managers. For a cooperative,

Sajha was an interesting organization. It was set up by the national government to raise savings from agricultural surplus through what came to be known as 'bachat bhakari' (grain-saving).

Farmers were compelled to deposit some portion of their grain production with Sajha, which then would collect them to distribute to different Nepal Food Corporation depots. These savings were their cooperative membership fee. These food depots then transported food to different district headquarters and were part of government efforts at distributing subsidized essential items to remote areas.

The decline of Sajha shop in Fulbari coincided with the beginning of organic farming, although the direct relationship between these two events were hard to establish. In fact, the decline of

Sajha did not mean availability of synthetic chemical inputs also declined. On the contrary, from late 1980s onward, private operators were allowed to import agrochemicals as a part of economic liberalization process. It was a period when several shops for agricultural inputs and veterinary services were opened in major towns and cities across Nepal including in Chitwan valley. In

Mangalpur town, which is situated one and half kilometers away from Fulbari, retail shops sold both household items and agrochemicals.

By 2004, Chitwan district had 108 registered agrochemical shops selling chemical fertilizers, pesticides, animal feeds and agricultural implements (District Development Committee of

Chitwan 2004, pp.58-60). Only 5 of them were set up before 1990. Most were set up during mid-

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1990s. There was not a single agrochemical shop set up in Fulbari village as per the district government data of 2004. That was still the case until August 2011. According to farmers, by early 2000s, pesticide use in Fulbari had drastically declined. The in-farm recycling of nutrients had led to the elimination of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use from these Fulbari farms. For members of cooperative, not using synthetic chemicals was part of their conditions for being certified as an organic farmer. Besides them, there were many farming households in Fulbari that are also not using chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. Winter vegetable seeds were bought from the agricultural shops. Due to short winter season, none of those seeds could be saved in Chitwan's climate. Fruit tree saplings were procured from private nurseries and neighbor's fields.

Mustard seed cake had been in use as soil amendment for a long time. This cake was used not only directly in the field, but also as a shampoo for washing hair, as human food, and as feed supplements for cattle, especially the milking ones. Chitwan was once famous for its mustard oil.

Traders from India used to have network of seasonal collectors in major market towns across the valley. Collectors would travel from house to house collecting the surplus mustard seeds.

Mustard production plummeted during early 1990s due to aphid infestation and most farmers grew mustard oilseed for their own household consumption. Oil cakes were in very high demand as they were used in poultry and animal feed. Chitwan has become Nepal's biggest poultry farming area, and it has become a Nepali version of the “boiler belt” (District Development

Committee of Chitwan, 2004).

Some amount of mechanization has occurred in ploughing of land, harvesting of crops, and primary processing of agricultural produces. Tractor and thresher machines do the former two jobs, while diesel-powered and electric mills do the later. Given the small size of lands, tractors

204 are not owned by most farmers. A few who own tractors use it to plough their fields and also provide service to farmers for charge. Since most farmers cultivate small plots, the charges are often in per minute basis.

Much of the ploughing is done increasingly by ‘red-oxen’—a nick name villagers have devised for now familiar Massey Ferguson tractors. Now farmers pay hourly charge for oxen, too. This shows clear indication of decline in land size. A team of oxen can plough the size of a field in a day that a tractor does in an hour. In June 2011, tractors charged 1000 rupees for one hour of service while a team of oxen were hired for 1200 rupees for a day—six hundred for the oxen and the other six hundred for the ploughman (it is always a man).

Some processes of harvesting were done by machine. This was particularly true for threshing of rice and wheat as well as winnowing. Corn ears were harvested and husked manually, while kernels were taken out by machine. Threshing machines were brought in by mobile operators over long distances. These operators moved from one place to another along their travel providing services to farmers.

Beyond Farms: Cost of living

Farming is one of the important elements of farm families’ livelihoods, but the making of family living is much more than running the farms. Below I will discuss three main aspects of this.

Ausadhi mulo (Medical expenses): Fulbari farmers almost exclusively utilize private medical services. When someone got sick, the direct and indirect expenses seemed to be large. In fact, a whole year’s income could go in treating illnesses sometimes. I briefly document three stories to illuminate this aspect of making a living.

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Sundar (name changed) supplemented his family income by distributing newspaper across towns and villages adjoining the main markets of Narayangarh and Bharatpur. He fell to strong fever in

March 2011. The normal course for the family was to wait for a few days and to resort to home remedies such as turmeric-water, basil-tea and such. The fever did not go away for a week.

That’s when the family finally decided to take him to Bharatpur, the district headquarter where most health services are concentrated. There is one whole street named ‘Hospital Road’ lined with drug-stores, pathology labs, mini-hospitals, hospitals, doctors’ clinics, dental clinics, and eye-care shops, among others. The doctor who examined Sundar in one of the hospitals told the family that they had to keep him in the hospital for a few days. Many others during my field work told me that they themselves had or they knew many people who had spent several days in such private hospitals for treatment. This practice is called ‘bharna garne’ (To register in as an inpatient). Inpatient care costs a lot. Moreover, all laboratory tests are costly.

I asked Sundar’s father how much money he spent altogether. He gave me details every day. By the time the patient came back home, after six days in hospital beds where, according to him, they only gave him 'salen paani' (saline drips), the bill to the hospital and required medicines was to the tune of Rs.70,000 (USD800), excluding all the other expenses. His father and brother daily took public mini-bus to see him in hospital daily. Food was ordered from cafeteria nearby the nursing home.

Sarita madam (name changed) was met with motorcycle accident in November 2010. The main roads did not have sidewalks and, therefore, farm animals, humans and vehicles of different kinds shared the same road. Roadside accidents have become very common across urbanizing

Nepal. The number of vehicles has gone up and so has the reckless driving. Among the vehicles, motorcycles have seen the biggest proportion of growth over the twenty years. In Fulbari village,

206 increasing number of families owned motorcycle while one family had a private car. Her neighbors put her in a jeep and took to a private hospital. She had to have her leg under cast. She later told me the cost was over 20,000 rupees.

In July 2011, Chandra dai's neighbor took his mother to Bharatpur for hysterectomy. One evening I followed Chandra dai to their house as he was going to see the woman convalescing from her surgery at her home. The man was an accountant in local school. They owned an acre of land. The hysterectomy cost was around Rs. 50,000. In this case also, this amount only covered the doctor's fees, hospital charges and drugs. If we add travel and food expenses together with the disruptions in the regular farming schedules, the cost would be even higher.

These are three stories among many others I witnessed during my research. I visited the Hospital

Road in Bharatpur regularly. A walk through that road is enough to make one feel the boom in private medical business in town. The drugstores are almost always full of people buying drugs, some with prescriptions in hand while others buying drugs over the counter. Chitwan's planners, politicians, private sectors have started projecting Chitwan as a potential site for medical tourism. There has been impressive growth of private medical services.

Schooling of Kids: On several weekdays, I stood on road intersections in Fulbari village to see most of the village kids walk or ride a bus to their schools. There were many English-language

'boarding' schools within Fulbari village. Quite a few of Fulbari kids also went to schools outside the village. Some went to schools thirteen kilometres away in district headquarters. Those who could not afford sent their kids to government-run public school. Shreepur Secondary School was one of them. Over eight hundred students studied there currently--not all of them from

Fulbari village.

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Most importantly, the sheer proportion of school going children in households had seen dramatic increase. During school days, it was quite a sight to stand outside on the road at around 9 in the morning, and watch students walk towards their schools. It seemed that almost half of the village would spend its time inside school classrooms for at least six hours of the six days of a week.

Schooling, like medical expenses, had become costly. The perceived and real quality of education of public education was low. The liberalized environment allowed for the establishment of schools as private business ventures since mid-1980s in Nepal. I asked many of

Fulbari farmers why they had migrated to Chitwan. The weather in Nepal's middle hills is generally more comfortable than in Chitwan. The temperature variation is milder. Water tastes much better in the hills than in Chitwan due to higher mineral content in the valley groundwater.

Almost all farmers I talked to told me that the primary reasons for their migration was to educate their children.

The education system has undergone very significant change over the last four decades. Until late 1980s, all the farmers sent their kids to government-supported public schools. The schools charged monthly fees. They also made school uniform compulsory. The students had to buy their textbooks and school supplies. There was a general consensus that expenses for schooling had shot up during the last two decades. Increasing number of people sent their kids to private schools. This trend began to intensify from early 1990s. There were several other significant changes in public life. Increasing distinction between private and public was not limited to education sector alone. In the 1990s, a lot of people also began to buy motorcycles, secluded themselves within their private television for entertainments, and opted for private medical services. The public became a space for the poor. The public schools where both rich and poor kids went to had become the leftover public goods for the poor.

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First of all, there had been clear impact on economic demand of farming families. The fees differential between public and private schools was almost ten times. In Fulbari's boarding schools, a fifth grader paid on average Rs.700 as monthly fees. That was in addition to higher registration fees at the beginning of the year. I met Bedu Ram jee during the workshop on participatory guarantee scheme. I interviewed him after the workshop. He and his family farmed a three quarter of a hectare farm in Shivapur, adjoining Fulbari. He was among five dozen others in Shivapur who were forming their own organic producers' cooperative.

"How many kids do you have?" I asked him.

"Two, one son and one daughter," he told me. They both went to a private school nearby, one in the eighth grade and the other in the tenth. Their fee was Rs. 700 rupees a month each. Each month they spent Rs.1400 for school fees. "Then, we have to pay for their dress, their textbooks, their lunch. It is endless."

The kids would come back home with loads of homework. Most importantly, " we do not want them to do anything other than study. They should study, shouldn’t they, sir?" Bedu Ram jee looked for my confirmation. "They are the padhnewala (the type that studies) in our family."

While education in general had been thought as a route to exit from agricultural drudgery, the private school phenomenon had led to internalization of that desire early on. It was common for kids to come back from school and regularly contribute to farming activities in the past.

But private education paid for with more money meant a lot of families wanted to get good return out of it. That invariably meant that they emphasized 'studying' over 'working'. Hence the growing distinction among family members between 'working types' and 'studying types.' The

209 result had been both the high expenses for farming families as well as the loss of helping hands in farming activities.

‘We have to build a house no matter what’: On 28 September 2010, Ecological Services

Centre (ECOSCENTRE) had organized a day-long workshop on "Natural Architecture and

Homestead Ecosystem" in Fulbari. Participants in this workshop discussed some aspects of the crisis of industrial system as well as ways that crisis could be addressed. This workshop was a part of a 13-day long 48th Permaculture Design Course (PDC)7 and its 17 participants had come from across different parts of Nepal. As an institutional member of Nepal Permaculture Group

(NPG), ECOSCENTRE had been running these advanced PDCs for over a decade by then.

Besides the registered participants, there were a few other people from Fulbari village itself in the workshop. I had volunteered to translate for Markus, the lead instructor, who was a professional house-builder from the United States.

Markus began the workshop by telling the participants that he had already built 52 houses in the

US during the last two decades and that ten of those built in the last two years were made of straw-bales. “I don't build with other materials anymore, but there is no housing business in the

US right now,” he added. He then asked the workshop participants to briefly tell him about the houses they were living in and the amount of land they each owned in their family. He also asked them about the skills they had had related to any aspects of house building. Most said they had cement-brick houses, and that they did not contribute their skills in building their houses. Their role at best was that of ordinary laborers passing bricks to the masons, and that of modern house

210 owners buying building materials from the market. Almost everything had to be bought--bricks, cement, steel, wood, glass, paints, roof and many other items.

The discussions set the stage for asking three simple questions related to homes people were building lately. Those three questions were: What was the single-most item they have spent most of their money on? What was the single-most place they had spent most of their time in? What was the single most important item they had invested material resources on?

The answer was already evident. A few participants who had had experience of building homes recently recounted how much money they had spent. It was common knowledge that people were spending a lot of money on homes. Homes consumed a lot of resources and most of them increasingly shipped from distant lands. Most of the participants spent a fair amount of time inside a built structure.

Built structures are important components of Fulbari farms. To name a few, they include residential homes, rental shop fronts, rental tenements, cattle sheds, chicken coops, rabbit pens, pigeon cots, vermicomposting chambers, manure pits, and fish ponds, to name a few. These physical structures provide relatively enduring spatial niche in farms. They are integral part of maintaining households, and they also impact the way land gets utilized around them. In addition, because of the embodied flow of materials and labor involved in their making and maintenance, they also signal economic relations beyond the farms.

According to the latest census data, Fulbari had 947 housing units of which 811 were occupied by the owners, 42 were rental units, 53 were occupied by institutions, and 39 were for other purposes. The following table shows different materials used for the houses (CBS, 2013).

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Table 8.5: Materials used for the 947 housing units in Fulbari, 2011

Materials No. of Houses Foundation Mud bonded (brick/stone) 165 Cement bonded (brick/stone) 595 Reinforced with Concrete and Cement Pillar 78 Wooden Pillar 69 Others 36 Not stated 2 Outer Wall Mud-bonded (brick/stone) 110 Cement-bonded (brick/stone) 721 Wood/Planks 17 Bamboo 73 Unbaked brick 4 Others 18 Not Stated 2 Roof Thatch/straw 36 Galvanized Iron 620 Tile/Slate 1 Reinforced with Concrete and Cement 274 Wood/planks 8 Mud 0 Others 1 Not Stated 5 Source, CBS, 2014.

While we do not have numerical data for what kind of houses existed in Fulbari farms in the past, we can glimpse the changes occurring across Nepal through the three Living Standard

Surveys carried out in 1996, 2004 and 2011. They show increasing shifts towards market-based

‘modern’ materials.

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Table 8.6: Changing materials of housebuilding in Nepal, 1996-2011

Materials 1996 2004 2011 Outer Walls (% of total homes) Cement bonded (bricks and stone) 10.68 18.3 26.1 Mud bonded (bricks and stone 51.84 47.5 48.1 Wood branches 24.91 18.5 23.7 Others 12.57 15.7 2.1 Roof (% of total homes) Straw/thatch 50.66 32.3 18.1 Galvanized sheets 11.21 21 28.4 Concrete 5.71 13.6 20.3 Tile/Slate 28.13 30.1 29.9 Other 4.3 3 3.3 Floor (% of total homes) Earth 90.4 79.4 Cement 5.08 15.2 Wood 3.9 Other 4.52 1.5 Foundation (%of total homes) Concrete Pillar 13.0 Cement bonded brick/stone 13.7 Mud bonded brick/stone 48.7 Wooden Pillar 21.2 Other 3.4 Average no of rooms 3.04 3.7 4.6 Size of Dwelling (sq. feet) 603.85 531 605. Size of housing plot (sq.feet) 1337.33 1473 1625.4

Sources: Central Bureau of Statistics, 1996, 2004, 2011.

During my fieldwork, I asked several households if they could recall the expenditure for building their homes. Most had not kept detailed records and receipts, but they remembered broad figures.

Even a simple building with a kitchen and three rooms was costing over a million Nepali rupees

(over 14,000 USD by recent currency exchange rate). A few had sold some piece of land during the real estate boom. Many had built homes with money saved from work as migrant workers. A few had made good money through real-estate trade in the village. But only a little over three

213 decades ago, homes were built largely with shared labour and mostly with local materials. The fired-brick production and use became widespread use during late 1970s. Cement use began to spread by mid-1980s. By late 1980s, a lot of households were beginning to incorporate increasing amount of steel and glass in their building: steel for columns and security grills on the windows and glass for windows. By late 1980s, most of the old self-built homes were already gone.

Because of sectoral focus, one of the most important parts of agrarian transformation has remained largely unanalyzed. Even permaculture design system, which ideally called for holistic total-energy and resource cost designs, failed to make inroads in Nepal as this idea was used by

Nepali permaculture experts. The first all-Nepali permaculture advanced design course was conducted in the early 1990s. By 2011 September 48 advanced courses had been conducted. It was only on the 48th that the course featured a brief workshop on detailed aspect of homebuilding. We may call that omission as a “food and vegetable bias” in the actual implementation of permaculture design in Nepal.

Who will take over?

In subtle ways farmers were expressing the anxiety and ambivalence related to the long-term viability and continuity of family farms, too. On July 31-August 2, a non-governmental organization, Society for Environment Conservation, Agriculture Research and Development

(SECARD) organized an introductory workshop on "participatory guarantee scheme" (PGS). I was roped in as one of the volunteer resource persons for the first and the last day of this workshop. There were 22 participants, 16 of them women and the rest men. Like villages across

Nepal, large number of men had migrated to overseas labour markets. One of the ground floor classrooms was rearranged into a workshop venue. In a typical classroom, desks-benches would

214 be arranged facing the teacher in the front. We rearranged the furniture in such a way that participants faced each other. Some of them had come from adjoining Shivanagar and Mangalpur villages. These villages were designated as Organic-in-progress villages (arganic-unmukh gaon, according to signboards put in place by SECARD recently).

"Do you mind if I ask you a question?" I asked the participants right before the first introductory session of the first day was over.

"Sure, why not?" (Bhaihalcha ni, kina nahunu?) They said.

Then I asked: "How many of you would really like to practice organic farming for the rest of your life?"

"We all do," said many after a short pause.

"That is why we are here, sir," one elderly woman politely reminded me.

"Yes, that's right," I concurred. "But still, I just wanted to know."

I paused for a while and then asked: "How many of you want your children to become an organic farmer?" My earlier question was a prelude to this one.

This time there was a longer pause, before a loud collective guffaw ensued.

"No, we don't want our kids to stay in farming," almost all said in unison. "Who would?" Many asked me back. Why was I even asking that? Wasn't that evident, that who would want to keep their kids in farming these days?

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Most of Fulbari's farmers are second generation farmers in Chitwan. Their parents migrated in the mid-1950s. Greater amount of land than what they had in the mountains and access to education for their children were the main reasons for them to migrate to and settle in this hot and humid valley.

During my ethnographic stint over 2010 and 2011, I talked to people in Fulbari and outside about declining interest among young people in farming. I also listened to nuanced conversations, observed the everyday life closely – in teashops, among men playing chess, ludo (snakes and ladders board game), and carom boards in village and town squares, or even during random conversations in buses or footpaths. It was common to see groups of men in village and town squares across Chitwan playing different board games, often with bets in place. It was also very common to see a lot of spectators sit around the players and watch for hours on a stretch a few play those board games.

Decline of the proportion of population in farming has become a universal phenomenon, with extremes in Northern industrialized countries. This is often presented as an indicator of progress.

In villages such as Fulbari, farmers are taking this with a sense of resignation and bafflement.

Semanta Subedi and his wife, for instance, moved to Fulbari in 1994 AD (2050 Bikram Sambat,

Nepali calendar). This was their second 'permanent' migration in life. The first was from their mountain village in western region to a village across the Narayani River in Nawalpur area. "I have never used any chemicals ever," he told me at his house in April 2011. He spent thirty years working in a textile factory in Mumbai, India. He visited home every year and took family down to the plains in 1980s for the first time. Then he moved to Fulbari in 1994. His son was married

216 and had a child. When I went to interview Semant dai and his wife, their son's family were in

Kathmandu.

"But I send everything from here, all the food, to them," he told me. "We have to send food to them," his wife added. We were sitting at their back porch of brick-cement home. The porch faced cattle shed, and goat pen. "I send all the food not because they cannot buy food themselves. They earn money, maybe not a lot, but enough to live. But who gets good food these days in the city (Kathmandu)? I want to make sure the grandson gets to eat pure food (suddha khana). I have even asked them not to buy cooking oil (pakaune tel)."

"You send them oil, too?" I asked, a bit puzzled.

"Yes. We grow sunflower and rapeseed both."

During our conversation that included topic such as how many goats and cows he had, and what he grew in different seasons, and where he got his seed, I also asked what he saw his farm to be like after his life? "Will your son come and take care of the farm?" I tried to clarify my question.

"Where will he go? This is their ancestral land (paitrik thalo)."

"You mean, will he come and farm here?" I asked again.

He shook his head. His wife seated near him also shook her head after him.

Chandra dai had come along during the interview. "I don't know about your son, but your grandson will definitely come back and take this farm to a different level," he told Semanta dai.

These were obviously speculative questions and the answers could only be speculative. But, in

217 those answers, one could read their expectations and a feeling of uncertainties and fear of the unknown.

This phenomenon is not unique to Fulbari. Among others, Kentucky-based, US farmer poet,

Wendell Berry (1978) has been writing about the depopulation of the American rural areas for over four decades now. Berry sees it as a result of conscious policy choices. The emphasis on efficiency in the United States largely translated as productivity per unit of labour meant that farmers were pushed to increase their acreage and reduce the number of workers in their land.

But there had also been cultural transformations. Although the situation in Nepal and America were very different, the angst among the aging farmers did not seem to be that different.

I sat at Fulbari village square many times myself watching young men come and play all sorts of games such as carom board, chess, snake and ladder, and tiger and goat (Bagh Chal). These games were, like tea shops, also venues where they shared their plans. What was unmistakable was how much they were talking about going to 'Saudi', or 'Katar' (Qatar), or Malaysia, among others. Many also talked about others who had fallen into bad middleman trap. They also talked about going to Iraq and Afghanistan even if those countries were risky.

"Aren't you scared?" I asked one of them.

"Oh dai (elder brother), if I die, I die. What's a big deal about that? (Ke thulo kura bho ra?).

(Mare marincha ta) If I lived, I will bring a lot (of money)."

"How much?"

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"I heard that they pay sixty-thousand (rupees) minimum for a month with residence in

Afghanistan." To note, due to safety concerns, going to Afghanistan and Iraq for work was illegal from Nepal. However, recruitment agencies routinely arranged their documents and travel.

That Nepalis have been on the move for better opportunities was not a new story. For hundreds of years, people from hills have gone to North-Eastern part of Indian sub-continent--to work as tea plantation workers, to colonize new lands, and to work in British army. The later still continues, although long-term migration to India has nearly stopped. Temporary labour migration has become the defining feature of Nepal's villages and towns (Adhikari, 2008).

The question as to if the spread of ecological practices will continue into future is directly contingent upon the reproduction of farming and family farms in society itself. One of the elements of that is continuous transfer of skills, knowledge and interest in farming. Farming requires diverse skill sets, more so in adopting ecological practices. Deskilling occurs primarily because of lack of involvement in farming and this is becoming one among many other factors pushing young people out of farms. The excessive emphasis on school grades have pushed a lot of families to keep their children from working hard in land.

Conclusion

What makes it possible for smallholder family farmers to adopt, maintain, and refine their farms?

In this chapter, I have explored this question by examining changing family livelihoods. I explored this issue with an assumption that making a living is a primary condition that makes possible the continued presence of the family farmers. Farming related incomes and expenditures

219 are one component of livelihoods. Farming families are also deriving income from other sources such as foreign employment, government jobs and some ancillary services.

Similarly, farmers are also increasingly tied with the markets of a variety of goods and services. I have explored a few vignettes of these issues by focusing on medical expenses, expenses related to the construction of homes, and the expenses related to children’s education. Through the adoption of specific technologies and practices farmers have been able to reduce their dependence on markets for inputs, and also improve their lives. Some of them are also in the process of devising diverse ways of marketing some of the surplus items generated in the farms, with the help of non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies and even traders, although there were complications in constructing these new networks.

For non-farming related expenses, though, they seem to have less control. The issue of privatization of medical care and education have directly impinged on their ability to run their families and also to avail of opportunities these services provided for reproducing their families inter-generationally, especially through access to education. At the same time, these emerging market-based relations seemed to have constrained their ability to stay in the farm or continue farming and eke a reliable mode of livelihood.

Not surprisingly, there was also a widespread desire to move away from farming, at least inter- generationally speaking. This issue is not unique to Nepal and has emerged as a pressing issue around the world (Agarwal, 2015; White, 2011). There is also decline in family sizes in Nepal both in rural and urban areas (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2014). These are related to inter- generational reproduction of farming families. All these impinge on the ability of farmers to run the family and make a living. Building ecological farms requires thinking about both what

220 farming involves and what making a living involves. In other words, farming is one part of overall livelihoods of family farmers. Practically speaking, these insights also call for planners and others to pay attention to broader livelihood issues of family farmers rather than the narrowly focused emphasis on farming.

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Chapter 9 : Conclusion

This dissertation addresses the spread of ecological farming in Fulbari village of Chitwan Valley of south-central Nepal. I set out to address two sets of broad questions in this dissertation. First, what were the conditions that made possible the generation and spread of ecological farming practices? Second, what were the challenges of spreading them across places and over time? I use data generated through a year-long ethnographic research, recollection of my own experiences of growing up in farms in Chitwan, formal and informal interviews, and observations of material organization of farms during the field works. In this conclusion, I aim to provide some answers to these questions, and identify areas that needs further investigation. I also aim to draw a few theoretical and practical conclusions.

This study demonstrates that farmers had adopted several ecological farming practices incrementally over the last five decades. The generation and spread of those practices had been the result of multiple factors both within the households and outside. Within the households, the decline in availability of family labour as children spent increasing amount of time in school, the decline in access to public grazing lands as those lands were taken over by landless squatters and public institutions, and the perceived and real biophysical changes such as decline in soil fertility were the major driving forces for the adoption of practices such as biogas system, agro-forestry and cover cropping. These changes were made possible by multiple other factors beyond the households. The promotion of alternative energy technologies in the aftermath of the energy crisis in the 1970s and following the Kyoto Protocol in the 1980s led to the setting up of institutional infrastructure for the refinement and promotion of biogas technologies. Similarly,

222 beginning with late 1970s, the agricultural educational and extension institutions had started promoting green manuring as a strategy of addressing the soil degradation. These changes were later promoted by non-governmental organizations that aimed to address ecological and livelihood issues through ecological farming practices.

This study also shows that there are multiple challenges of expanding ecological practices. The primary challenges are related to the changing family livelihoods. Through ecological farming practices, farmers have reduced their dependency on external agricultural inputs. However, they are also increasingly tied up to markets for some vital services such as education and health care.

Starting from mid1980s, the liberalization of these sectors has given rise to a commodified service sector and individual households are becoming dependent on it. The ethnographic accounts I depict suggest the out of pocket expenditures required for these services have been key livelihood challenges facing farmers. There has also been expansion of market dependence for the construction of modern homes, travel and other areas of everyday lives. Farmers address these challenges through generating off-farm income.

The rest of this conclusion is divided into three parts. The next part provides a summary of the preceding chapters. This will be followed in the next section by a discussion on the theoretical and practical points arising out of the findings from this dissertation. The conclusion will end with a few ideas for further research for better understanding of different aspects of changes taking place in Fulbari, the Chitwan Valley, and Nepal.

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Summary

The introduction chapter presents a broad overview of the dissertation including the way I decided to take up this topic for my research; the significance of this research in the light of the discussions on ecology, climate change, livelihoods, and developmentalist visions.

The Chapter 2 reviews five schools of thoughts on ecology of agriculture. I explored their limitations as well as possible insights that can be used in building a robust framework for exploring the spread of ecological farming in Chitwan Valley. I critically examine the approach that sees the transformation of ‘pristine’ ecosystems through agriculture and other human activities as inherently destructive of ecology. This approach is incompatible with the idea of active remaking of the material landscapes by humans. I critique its idea of pristine and also the implications for practical works. However, this approach also conceptually helps us think of non- human material reality as active element in the making of the human world: this is not merely an inert backdrop within which human-led transformation occurs. This conceptual resource is important if we are to transition towards ecological farm-making, although as a whole the approach of seeing human intervention itself as problematic is too limiting.

I then examine four different schools of thought that explore ecology of agriculture in different ways. I critically examine the approach that takes inherent ecological prudence of smallholder farming. Here, I argue that while my focus is on smallholder farming, I do not do so because of their inherent prudence, but rather that, ecologically speaking, smallholder farming can have all kinds of consequences including both good and bad ones. At least in places like Chitwan Valley, where almost all farms are managed by smallholders, that approach is also too limiting. Rather,

224 the need is to focus on how ecological farming spreads, and what makes smallholder family farmers to continue to adopt this form of farming into the future.

The second approach I examine is the Marxist metabolic approach. It helps us locate the farm within the broader political economy. It also calls for epistemological connection between and human and the rest of the material world. However, it relies on a rather limited and clearly erroneous scientific understanding soil that is borrowed from the definition of soil as repository of chemical nutrients.

The third approach, political ecology, attempts to provide slightly nuanced explanations for disruption in agroecology, particularly the soil erosion, particularly by exploring the multi-scale and multi-level processes in ecological transformation. Pioneered in the 1980s by Piers Blaikie and David Cameron, political ecology has been taken up by scholars to explore many other issues. It emphasizes the need to examine political economic relations as the primary explanatory vehicle for understanding the agroecological degradation.

The fourth approach I examine is that of ecological modernization in agriculture. This approach is the latest avatar of agricultural modernization. Agricultural modernization has been the main vehicle for widespread interventions to change agriculture throughout the world. Remaking of the then existing agriculture into idealized modern versions was the main goal of these projects.

For this work, there had been investments in the creation of institutional, knowledge, and physical infrastructures. Over several decades of the second half of the twentieth century, agricultural modernization involved promoting a set of technologies and materials such as synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seeds, and controlled irrigation, among others.

Of late, there has been widespread realization that this form of agricultural development has

225 generated several problems: ecological, economic, health, and others. Ecological agriculture, manifest in diverse set of practices, has been touted by the agencies of agricultural modernization as a way out from this, often in contradictory ways. This new emphasis on ecology is often referred to as ecological modernization.

I have used the notions of conjunctures and assemblages in generating a political ecological framework for this study in Chapter 3. This approach builds the problems of ecology in agriculture in several steps: first, it sees the problem of ecology as the problem of farm-making, thus broadening the view. Second, it argues that the problem of farm-making is that of generating human practices, knowledge, and technology that can have different ecological consequences ranging from benign to malign. Third, it sees those human practices, knowledge, and technologies as not given but produced through a network. Then, fourthly, it explores the condition of the possibility of ecological farm-making in the ability of family farmers to make a living. Chapter 4 describes the research design and methodology including the methods used in collecting and analyzing data. This study can be characterized as historically informed ethnography of the rapidly changing ethnography of Fulbari village in Chitwan Valley. The methodology followed conceptual framework in generating data about multiple factors which coalesced within particular time period to generate and spread different ecological practices.

The next four chapters present the empirical data. The chapter 5 sets the context by providing a historical overview of the making of Chitwan Valley. Here, the focus has been on a general account of how different sets of agrarian actors emerged and transformed over time (pre-1950 and after 1950). This chapter specifically analyzes the transformation of farming households, public institutional actors and private agencies in specific conjunctural moments. These moments

226 are characterized by the loose coalescing of actors, forces and triggers for the production and spread of different ecological practices.

Chapter 6, 7, and 8 examine specific assemblages that led to changes in farms in Fulbari. Chapter

6 explores changes in the making of farms. It provided historical accounts based on ethnographic observations, secondary sources, and also personal experiences about changes taking place in the built forms, perennial and seasonal plants, and the animals in farms. It attempted to provide some explanations about these changes, too.

Chapter 7 provides an in-depth account of the set of actors that were involved in three different types of changes observed in farms: the agroforestry, biogas, and cover-cropping.

Chapter 8 attempts to examine the family livelihoods as a way of analyzing the challenges that farming households face in maintaining their livelihoods. The ethnographic focus has been on some perceived changes in the making of livelihoods of family farmers. The non-agricultural aspects of livelihoods are also dealt with to make a case that family livelihoods of farmers are not limited to farming but reproducing the households.

Theoretical and Practical Insights

The theoretical insights from this dissertation can be summed up in the following: first, farms have humans as keystone entities, which means active human presence is a precondition for the very existence of farms. Farms will not be farms without active human presence. To construct ecological farms is to construct them as human-centered ecosystems. At the same time, farms are also composed of other biophysical entities that are acted upon by humans in the process of the construction of farms, but that also have their historically derived properties and capacities to act

227 on the world. In other words, construction of farms involves human interactions with other humans as well as other active elements. The socio-ecological complexity results from the entanglements among the human and non-human entities in the process of constructing farms.

Second, and related to the first, is that constructing viable farms is much bigger work than farming. Farming is related to that aspects of farm which involves producing different materials by working on land. However, farms also involve constructing other built-structures as important parts of human habitats. The ecological consequences of farming arise out of both the farming activities as well as the construction and maintenance of built structures. In other words, I claim that, to understand ecological issues in agriculture in the context of smallholder family farming, we need to have this expanded notion of farming.

Third, the construction of ecological farms requires continuous utilization of skills and knowledge that allows farmers to construct farm in particular ways: to place elements in particular place of farms; to use certain elements in particular ways; to place elements in relation to each other for specific effects. Moreover, constructing farms also means utilizing skills and knowledge of many other actors. I claim that these skills and knowledge are generated through complex process involving both farmers and others. Farmers are important participants in this process, but there are many others who are also important actors in generating knowledge and skills.

Finally, this dissertation study makes the claim that the ability to construct and maintain ecological farms arises out of the extent to which there are conditions for producing dignified living for farming families. That is why I have focused on both farming aspects as well as non- farming aspects of making a living. This approach provides a broader view of making a living in

228 family farms. In a way, these claims lead to expansion of the domains of studying ecological transformations in agrarian societies: expansion by interdisciplinary synthesis of the biophysical and human elements, and expansion through the inter-sectoral synthesis.

Synthesizing these four elements also helps us understand the causality of transitions both in terms of why these changes emerge as well as what makes their continuity possible (or untenable). The causes of these transitions are not located in one specific elements, but historical coming together of all of them. For instance, the long geological history provides slow but important conditions within which human actors operate. Human actors transform the non- human world, but the latter also have relatively autonomous agency that evolved through long, tortuous, and contingent geological-biological history.

I draw several practical insights. As this study demonstrates, building ecological farms requires actions from multiple institutions/individuals located across different scales. Farming households demonstrate a certain level of autonomy in actions, but they do not exist as autarkic actors. Far from autarky, they are enmeshed in relations with multiple actors at different scales as they exchange materials and ideas (technologies, organization, and relationship with others).

Therefore, I would like to draw several policy recommendations for planners located at different government levels, researchers at educational institutions and non-governmental organizations, and farmers’ organizations.

Policy Recommendations and Future Research Areas/Issues Emanating from Current Research

This study has several policy implications. Broadly, two conceptual shifts need to follow for effective transition to ecological farming in smallholder-dominated agrarian societies including

229 in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley. The first conceptual shift is required for the very understanding of what a farm is. This point sounds obvious, but as my ethnographic accounts suggest, policies often focus on agricultural components of farms thereby leaving out the built forms out of the purview. The policies in agriculture, therefore, always focus on farming. The conceptualization of ecological consequences of farms, thus, is partial although in reality the built forms and the changes in their construction have significant consequences for ecosystems (through the flow of energy and materials) and for livelihoods. It is important to note here that built forms are also important because farms are also human habitats and built forms are places where humanity spends the bulk of its time.

The second conceptual shift is related to the family livelihoods, and to some extent, it is also related to the expanded conceptualization of farms. Ecological farms are a component of overall family livelihoods. In smallholder context, as studies throughout different parts of the world have shown, householders derive their livelihoods from a wide range of sources. My study indicates that we need to conceptualize the provision of crucial public services such as health care, education, and public transportation as part of livelihood support.

Besides these two broad recommendations, I also list below a few practical policy recommendations:

• As my study shows, the role of farmers in the generation of ecological practices are

central as these practices are often generated in actually operating farms. This role has

implications for the organization of agricultural and ecological educations. The old model

of seeing farmers as recipients of knowledge from established institutions needs to give

way to more proactive roles for farmers as generators of knowledge through collaborative

research and dissemination process. That means expanding the farmers-to-farmer

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network of practice generation to include forms in which scientists, farmers, and planners

collaborate in the design and implementation of plans for transition to ecological future.

• The study has indicated that there has been general decline in the interest of young people

in farming and this confirms trends in other parts of the world. Nepali planners can take

an out-of-the-box approach in combining early education in different levels of schools

(primary, secondary, and higher secondary) with learning on the ground through farm

visits, student-led observational research, and recruiting farmers are instructors in the

classrooms.

• As is suggested earlier, there has to be active program for providing public services to

householders in areas such as health care. This requires reversing the neoliberal health

policies and programs implemented in the early 1980s.

Besides these policy recommendations, I have also identified several areas of further inquiry which have direct and indirect relevance for the expansion of ecological agriculture.

Future Areas of Inquiry

I also identify several lines of inquiry in the future as a way of expanding the realities and issues identified in this dissertation project which has been rather exploratory in nature. I anticipate carrying out these lines of inquiry by myself or in collaboration with a team of transdisciplinary researchers. The broader thematic area of study that has emerged from this current inquiry is the socio-ecological history encompassing both theoretical and applied aspects of the Chitwan

Valley. Within this broad field, I identify the following as the future area of inquiry.

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First, one could follow the permaculture design as a guide in identifying the areas of focus.

Permaculture as a design system calls for focusing on the most intensive – in the sense of resource use, time allocation, and impacts. For instance, it rightfully puts human physical houses and other built structures as the core element of habitat design. Houses and buildings are not isolated from other elements. In fact, they serve as heuristics, different elements are identified in terms of their importance. Potential groups to carry out this research are traditional house and office builders/artisans of Nepal and the Abari Group (www.abari.org), which is doing pioneering work around bamboo-based design and structures.

Chitwan has developed and will continue to develop as Nepal’s major hub of habitation. In that respect, I personally, would like to explore the transformation of housebuilding practices over the last seven decades. Besides providing a fascinating and hitherto unexplored area of

Chitwan’s history, this work will also help us identify possibilities and challenges of creating ecologically sound building practices. Especially after the Gorkha Earthquake of 2015, there has been a wider recognition that buildings are serious issues both in terms of safety in the highly seismic geological context of Nepal, but also in terms of allocation of resources, the daily comfort of inhabitants, including the health and wellbeing.

Second, another area of inquiry could be the role of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal

Science. Popularly, known as Rampur campus and situated in the middle of theValley, IAAS played a major role in the creating the first generation of agricultural professionals who now constitute the Nepalese elites. However, only a handful of its graduates have actually remained on the land or pursued organic and sustainable agriculture. Recently, IAAS has been renamed as the Agriculture and Forestry University. The time is ripe to assess and interrogate it in relation to preparing the next generation of entrepreneurs of food economy in Nepal. This is another

232 scholarly untouched field and this inquiry also can have significant and much needed timely bearing on the debates about the organization, knowledge base and actual practices of teaching- learning-research institutes in shaping Nepal’s transition to ecological and regenerative agriculture and food economy. Such a study could focus on the assessment of its curriculum content and processes as well as the locations, positions and role of its graduates.

Third, as this current study indicates and as many other studies have shown, Nepal’s current demographic changes are characterized by generally youthful population, high level of outmigration to Golf and Asian economies (primarily for expatriate labour, mostly low paying and dangerous segment of the global labor and value chain), and important shifts in the involvement of young people in the agricultural sector. It will be important area of inquiry that can help us gauge the possibilities and challenges of reproducing ecological agricultural practices intergenerationally. In short, what is needed (and what is missing) to keep the Nepal’s young populations in gainful and meaningful sector of the food and agricultural economy while linking these sectors to Nepal’s promise in hospitality and service economy, including health and healing. Such a transdisciplinary inquiry could be enhanced and enriched by showcasing the lifepaths and life-histories of the migrants both in their home country Nepal and the host- countries, wherever they have been to. Such an inquiry could bring forth the interplays of people, places, mobilities, memories and the delicate dance of forming and shifting ethnic, gendered, and place-based identities.

Fourth, another promising and much needed area of inquiry could be the ways through which marketing, labeling, and trading practices of organic food have evolved in Nepal. Who are the actors involved in this? What kind of market formation is happening? How are institutional and legal arrangements being made? What are the promises and premises of this sector? Could

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Nepal feed the growing needs of the rising consumers and middle classes of Nepal, India and

China in the areas of food, nutrition, health and healing? These questions are especially salient as

Nepal is getting connected with the booming market places in India and China. As this study amply suggests, the foundational component of those markets is first the actual production and promotion of organic products in and from Nepal.

Fifth, it will be useful to carry out quantitative research comparing the productivity of different farms and modes of farming/gardening. Despite widespread claim about the ‘low productivity’ of ‘third world farmers’, it is important to note that there has not been any good methodologically rigorous comparison among farm level productivity. Most of the productivity studies focus on a yield trends of a single crop, such as rice, wheat or corn. This is a very reductionist and unscientific way of comparing the productivity of farms given the fact that some of the ecological farms I have documented produce chaotically and beautifully diverse things and services which are not taken into account in comparing the productivity of farms. Rather than applying just the monocultural “yield per acre” or “$ per acre,” one could also develop indicators such as “health per acre,” “resiliency per acre,” or “regenerativity per acre.”

Finally, any imagination and design in creating the emergent food economy of and for Nepal, needs a dynamic program to build on the age-old peasant traditions of agroforestry and multifunctional agroecological tradition of Nepalese who are spread over such bio- geographically diverse terrains and altitudes. Such home-grown traditions of knowledge and knowhows could be enhanced and enriched by infusing them with emergent traditions such as permaculture design, carbon-farming, silvopasture, perennial crops, ecological agriculture, culinary innovations, ecological aquaculture, biochar and holistically managed grazing. In this

234 sense, Nepalese have the rare opportunity to leapfrog into the sustainable and regenerative agriculture and agrarian livelihoods.

As in other parts of Nepal and the Himalayas, agrarian households in Chitwan Valley are undergoing tremendous changes. As this study amply demonstrates, their farms are changing; their food habits are changing, and most important, the demographics are shifting. The relations between men and women, between children and adults, and among different social groups are changing in fast and furious ways. This calls for a thorough and multifaced, transdisciplinary research with a focus not only on enabling the resilient and regenerative practices on the land but also which creates thriving livelihoods and economic security for farmers and peasants.

In anticipating these future research endeavors, I am also hopeful that my efforts invested in this exploratory dissertation study have contributed towards not only documenting but also finding the long-term agrarian solutions in this period of rapid climate disruption.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Checklists for Key Informant Interviews and Participant Observations

Key Informant Interview Checklists • Farmers from Fulbari village [50= 25 male and 25 female] • Researchers from Rampur Agriculture institute [10] • NGO workers involved in Fulbari village [10] • Government agriculture extension workers [in Chitwan district] [10] • Leaders of peasant organizations [different political parties] [10] • NGO representatives involved in the promotion of sustainable agriculture in Nepal [20]

1) Farmers= 25 men and 25 women [informal interviews during 9 months of participant observation in Fulbari village. To be conducted in different time periods.

--Age

--Caste

--Ethnicity

--When did you migrate to Chitwan? [your own time ? or your parents?]

--No. of family members?

--Major income sources?

--how was the situation of the village when you migrated?

--What kind of farming were you doing prior to the adoption of agroecological practices?

--Were you involved in subsistence grain crops production? animal husbandry?

--Were you involved in cash crop production?

--Were you involved in a mixture of both?

--How did you use to procure inputs? On farm? From the village? From the Market?

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--What inputs were used from your own farm?

--What inputs came from your own village?

--What inputs were bought from the market place?

--What had been the experience in soil fertility in the last 20 years? Is it declining? Is it increasing?

--How was the situation of biodiversity? How many crops did you grow? What types/varieties? Vegetables? Trees? Animals?

--How as the labour situation then? Did you use family labour? Did you use hired hands? Did you practice cooperative labour from the village? Did you mechanize with labour replacing machines?

--Did you produce enough food for the family?

--Did you generate surplus?

--How did you sell the surplus? in the village or in the Market?

--How was the price determined?

--Did you have any supplementary off farm income?

--When did your household decided to adopt agroecological practices? [year]

--What led to this?

Is it because of training?

Is it because of hearing from others?

Is it because of seeing other practitioners?

Is it because of learning from books?

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Is it because of health reasons? e.g. pesticide poisoning?

Is it because of decline of land fertility?

--What new practices have you adopted?

--Did you adopt them in sequences? Or did they began all at the same time?

--Have you innovated your own practices over the years? Which ones?

--What inputs are used in the farming now?

--How are these inputs procured? From your own farm? From the village? From the Market? From the other places and peoples? Which inputs?

--Do you generate surplus? What? How much?

--How do you sell this surplus? in the village? in the market?

--Do you sell it as individual producer? or do you have cooperative marketing?

--Are you a member of a cooperative?

--How do you participate in that cooperative?

2. Researchers at the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences, Rampur, Chitwan: The main objective of interviewing these researcher is to identify key research findings about the agricultural situation in Nepal. This does not include personally identifiable data about the informants.

--the research focus

--the condition of soil fertility

--the condition of biodiversity

--the condition of water resources and utilization

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These informant interviews will lead to documents that shows trends in various aspects of agriculture in Nepal

3. NGO workers involved with farmers in Fulbari: the objective of interviewing them is to both triangulate the findings from interviews with farmers as well as to explore the nature of NGO involvement in the promotion of ecological agriculture in Fulbari village. THese interviews will also complement information to be gathered from the NGO reports about their activities among Fulbari farmers. This doe snot include personally identifiable data about the informants.

--When did you begin working with Fulbari farmers?

--What activities have you been involved in?

--What have been the results of these activities?

--How long do you plan to work?

4. Government extension workers: The main purpose of interviewing these government workers is to identify the time lines of their activities. This information will also be corroborated with the government reports. This does not include personally identifiable data about the informants.

--When did they begin working with Fulbari farmers?

--When did they begin promoting ecological agriculture?

--What had been the reasons for the shift from high-energy [bikase] agriculture to ecological agriculture?

--What have been the successes?

--What new practices have they promoted?

--How did they themselves acquire the knowledge about ecological agriculture?

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5. Leaders of peasant organizations [different political parties]: the main purpose of interviewing them is to find out to what extent the political actors are aware of or involved in the promotion of ecological agriculture in Nepal. These interviews will also complement the documents from these organizations that show their involvement in peasant issues and the vision of agriculture they espouse. [This does not involve personally identifiable data about the informants.

--What are the activities the peasant organizations are involved in?

--What issues have they mobilized their farming constituencies around?

--What are the main agricultural problems in Chitwan valley?

--How do they propose to address them?

--Are they involved with farmers practicing ecological agriculture? How?

6. NGO representatives involved in the promotion of sustainable agriculture in Nepal: the main purpose of interviewing them is to find out the general trajectory of the promotion of sustainable agriculture in Nepal. These interviews will complement information gathered through reports prepared by these NGOs. This does not involve personally identifiable data about the informants.

--What activities/projects are they involved in currently?

--How long have they been involved in promoting ecological agriculture?

--What have been their successes and failures?

--What are the challenges facing the promotion of ecological agriculture?

One major network I have identified to explore this is Nepal Permaculture Group--the group I was also involved in the early 1990s and I have built contacts with several of NGOs involved in this group.

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Participant Observation in the Fulbari Village [Checklist]

I plan to spend at least nine out of 12 months in Fulbari village for my ethnographic participant observation.

Broadly I will observe • agroecological practices • the intra-household relations especially the division of labour • the inter-household relations including participation in various institutions (cooperatives, NGO activities, government programs, other activities) • their interaction with market as both sellers of their surplus produce as well as buyers of agricultural inputs

Agroecological practices • soil fertility management, • water resource use, • the biodiversity management, • labour management and • knowledge management.

Intra-household relations: • sharing of labour in the household and farms • decision making roles and practices • resource sharing within household

Inter-household relations • Sharing of resources [labour, other inputs] • Sharing of knowledge • Organized relationships with markets

Market relations • Inputs transactions • Surplus transactions

These observations will complement information gathered from interviews with 50 farmers in Fulbari village. The nine month will cover one annual agricultural production cycle.

I will record these observations through daily diary notes and photographs. These diaries will be securely locked when not in use to ensure privacy of the material collected.

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Photographs will be secured by locking the camera when not use.

I will also take videos and will take informed consent of those recorded in the video before doing the recording. These will provide a snapshot picture of the condition of the agricultural practices in the village. This will be then complemented with information gathered about histories through both key informant interviews as well as document analysis.

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Appendix 2: Permaculture Design Course Curriculum

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Appendix 3: Adhikari Farm’s Carrot Production Cost and Benefit Account (2010)

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Appendix 4: Adhikari Farm’s Biodiversity Board

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