The Edible Landscape: Plant Breeding, Farming, and Sustainability in Northwest Portugal
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 The diE ble Landscape: Plant Breeding, Farming, and Sustainbility in Northwest Portugal Joseph Blanchard Powell Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Powell, Joseph Blanchard, "The dE ible Landscape: Plant Breeding, Farming, and Sustainbility in Northwest Portugal" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3750. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3750 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE EDIBLE LANDSCAPE: PLANT BREEDING, FARMING, AND SUSTAINABILITY IN NORTHWEST PORTUGAL A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Geography & Anthropology by Joseph B. Powell B.S., The College of Charleston, 1991 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1996 May 2016 To my mother, Patricia B. Powell ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincerest thanks to Dr. Silas Pêgo, farmer Francisco Meireles, the millers, farmers, and bakers of the Sousa Valley, and technical staff of the VASO Project. Financial support was provided by the following agencies: The National Science Foundation, Luso-American Foundation for Development (FLAD), Municipality of Lousada, Portugal, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The work in Portugal would not have been possible with the kind assistance of Pedro Dinis Mendes and Georgina Correia, Dr. J. Silva Dias, Inês de Albuquerque, Dona Maria Mécia de Freitas Lopes (Mécia de Sena) and her family in California and Portugal. Over the years I have received useful critique and feedback from a number of scholars including Dr. David Cleveland, Dr. Mary Hancock, Dr. Alexander “Sandy” Robertson, Dr. Andrew Sluyter, and Dr. Micha Rahder. Dr. Francesca Bray deserves special acknowledgement as an advisor, helpful critic, and friend over many years. Lastly, I would need another chapter, or perhaps another dissertation, to fully acknowledge the help, assistance, guidance, and friendship of my advisor and doctoral committee chair Dr. Kent Mathewson. Suffice to say, I look forward to many more collaborations. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................................v CHAPTER ONE ETHNOGRAPHY OF A PLANT BREEDING PROJECT ................................................1 CHAPTER TWO PROBLEMATIZATION: FROM PROJECT TO ACTOR-WORLD ...............................38 CHAPTER THREE BECOMING INTERESTED IN SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH PLANT BREEDING .....................................................................................54 CHAPTER FOUR THE MILLER TELLS HIS TALE ....................................................................................69 CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION .....................................................................................90 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................107 VITA ................................................................................................................................115 iv ABSTRACT This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of a participatory plant breeding project in northwest Portugal. Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is a crop enhancement strategy that brings farmers and plant breeders together in the effort to conserve crop genetic resources in-situ, improve yield, and increase the overall agricultural sustainability in agriculture. One strategy in PPB calls for plant breeders to spend considerable time on working farms to understand better farmers’ knowledge and skill, and to survey the existing crop genetic diversity within the existing resource limitations on farms. Although there are clear social implications for PPB, the bulk of PPB evaluative literature focuses on narrow agronomic and technological goals. This dissertation widens the evaluative scope of existing research by drawing upon actor- network theory (ANT) and developing the notion of the edible landscape. The ethnography reveals how linkages between human and non-human actors are formed in the context of the VASO Project, a PPB project in Portugal where famers and plant breeders have been working on-farm to enhance local landraces of maize (Zea mays var. mays L.) for yield increases and other traits of interest. One key trait is bread flour yielding capacity and culinary quality of local white flint-type maize. Maize flour is used primarily to make flour for the traditional Portuguese bread, broa. When viewed from the perspective of food and edible landscape formation, a wide range of human and non- human actors well beyond the spaces of the farm are revealed as critical to the agronomic goals and social reproduction of the VASO project. These actors include traditional grain millers and broa bakers to name a few. Conservation of these actors and their livelihoods, as well as sustaining the linkages between them, are just as critical to in-situ maize crop diversity conservation and PPB as are the plants and genes themselves v CHAPTER ONE ETHNOGRAPHY OF A PLANT BREEDING PROJECT Introduction Every dissertation has a unique history, and this study is no exception. I began this work at the University of California, Santa Barbara as an anthropology student and finished it at Louisiana State University in the Geography & Anthropology Department. In the very beginning of this research I had a keen interest in studying what many have called farmers’ knowledge as a subset of indigenous, local, or other form of non- specialist knowledge about plants and farm ecology. I wanted to investigate the sources of farmers’ knowledge about a range of issues dealing with the growing and maintaining crop varieties. My initial intention was to compare this knowledge with formal plant breeders’ knowledge to understand better ways for each to communicate on mutually interesting issues, such as crop improvement (Powell 1999). I chose a participatory maize breeding project in Portugal as a case study (Moreira 2006). In the course of the fieldwork, I began to take an interest in how knowledge was defined and used within the project in order to achieve certain goals, the broadest among these being “sustainability.” Thus, my focus began to shift from an exclusive concern with knowledge to a concern with the entire project as context for the formation of novel knowledges and practices related to improving crops. In essence, I became interested in evaluating the success, or failure, of the project in reaching this goal of increasing sustainability. I decided to set aside the questions of how knowledge is formed to focus on how knowledge is used as resource, how it is deployed, and how it relates to practices and specific people, places, and things. I had read about farmer and scientist knowledge, plant breeding, and crop genetics. However, I had not yet read an anthropological evaluation of a plant breeding project. Therefore, this seemed an opportunity to add to the literature. To frame an ethnographic study of the project I first drew heavily upon “Actor- Network Theory (ANT) approaches. This seemed an ideal way to frame fieldwork observations into a coherent story of how notions of agricultural sustainability pulls together farmers and formally trained plant breeders into a socially complex goal-directed project. ANT directs attention to the social relationships formed in such projects between humans and non-humans, and whether and how these relationships are durable, expandable, and transportable through time and space. ANT proved to be excellent for bringing non-human entities like plants and farm animals into the analysis of what makes a project work and succeed, as well as considering the otherwise silent non-human technological artifacts that mediate human social connections between plant breeders and farmers. However, increasingly this study was pulled in the direction of geography, particularly my reading of the geography of science literature (Adler 2014; Allen 2011; Galloway 1996; Jons 2006; Law and Mol 2001; Livingstone 2002; Murdoch 1997; Powell 2007). David Livingstone’s acute observations about science resonated with me, “Scientific knowledge is a geographical phenomenon. It is acquired in specific sites; it circulates from location to location; it transforms the world.” (Livingstone 2010:18). I found the geography of science literature 1 extremely useful for articulating what I call in this dissertation the “socio-spatial” strategy of plant breeding, following Naylor’s “internal cartographies of scientific theories and methods” or the myriad ways in which “science itself creates spaces and places for its own activities and in turn spatializes the world” (Naylor 2005:3). This refers to the way in which there is not only social geography of plant breeding science with laboratories, research