Farmers’ Creativity and Cultivated Senses: The Immediacy of Embodied Knowledge in Alternative Agriculture

The Indonesian government has promoted several forms of alternative agriculture in response to the productivity orientation and top-down bureaucratic institutions in intensive agriculture. Implemented in the late 1980s, the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) marked a paradigm shift in that it focused more on human rather than technological development. Therefore, farmers were conceived as central agents of agricultural development. Government-led organic agriculture, which began in the early 2000s, combines human- and technology-centered paradigm. For the last few decades, the bureaucratization of agricultural knowledge through its regulatory institutions has removed the subjective and bodily experiences of embodied agricultural knowledge and perpetuating an uneven terrain of knowledge-making. This argument is built on the dialogical analysis of my fieldwork with organic farmers in Yogyakarta between 2017 and 2019, and a book Seeds of Knowledge, an ethnography on IPM farmers in early 1990s in Java. I demonstrate that through their embodied knowledge, farmers reconfigure the existing knowledge hierarchy despite the continuous radical simplification of alternative agriculture. Farmers question the validity and authority of agricultural trainers’ agricultural knowledge, specifically in relation to soil quality in organic agriculture and economic threshold in IPM. The role of the model farmer in organic agriculture in bringing embodied agricultural knowledge to the fore – is central in challenging the hierarchy of “expertise.” I contend the “immediacy” of farmers’ embodied knowledge, which constitutes creativity and cultivated senses, by offering a critique to the notion of expertise, as a guide to an epistemological shift in alternative agriculture.