Skill talk: The struggle over agricultural decision-making

There have been sharply divergent interpretations of farmer decision-making—especially related to technology adoption—stemming from the vested interests of observers. Agricultural input companies predictably attribute the adoption of their products to farmer wisdom and non-adoption to cases of farmer ignorance. Green Revolution hero Norman Borlaug insisted ignorance to be a general condition of “traditional” (or Small Scale Third World (SSTW)) farmers; willfully oblivious to research on SSTW agriculture, he normalized an apparently limitless disdain for the decision-making of farmers who had not been “shocked” into dependence on agri-chemicals. Academia has experienced disciplinary struggles over explanatory hegemony. The sociologist-initiated field of innovation adoption emphasized social aspects of farmer decision making was eclipsed by applied economists who explained adoption decisions as pure functions of economic advantage. The critical agrarian tradition recognizes how political-economic factors constrain farmers' decision-making. The author has developed a synthetic tri-part framework recognizing empirical observations, social factors, and “didactic” inputs from off-farm entities with their vested interests.