Towards a theory of agrarian skilling (Or, why farmer knowledge does not stop at the edge of the field)

Recent contributions to the literature on agricultural deskilling argue that the increasing commercialisation of smallholder agriculture and a reliance on externally developed technologies has undermined the environmental basis of farmer learning. Despite many compelling attributes, the initial contributions to the deskilling thesis insufficiently analyse key social dimensions of smallholder agriculture. Farming is not merely a technical activity and agricultural knowledge does not begin and end at the boundary of the fields. Rather, the pursuit of agriculture is a deeply social process and we must broaden our understanding of farmer knowledge to better incorporate the social dimensions of agriculture. Accounts of agricultural learning must therein address the skills through which farmers manage a range of relationships that underpin agricultural livelihoods, including complex market transactions, credit/debt relations, labour sourcing, off-farm employment and networks for accessing government schemes. This form of knowledge practice is what we call ‘agrarian skilling’ and stands as a necessary extension of the more bounded and technical notion of agricultural knowledge. Focusing on agrarian skilling in this manner allows greater analytical purchase on the power relations inherent to knowledge creation and dissemination within and across smallholder populations.