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Folk experiments

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Abstract

Folk experiments in agriculture are often inspired by new ideas blended with old ones, motivated by economic and environmental change. They tend to save labor or capital. These notions are illustrated with nine short case studies from Nicaragua and El Salvador. The new ideas that catalyze folk experiments may be provided by development agencies, but paradoxically, the folk experiments are so common that the agencies that inspire them usually pay little attention to them. Some folk experiments are original, but others simply copy innovations that farmers have seen somewhere else. Unlike formal scientific research, in which results are consistently written, folk experiments are rarely “inscribed,” because the results are for use by individual farmers and need not be shared with an audience.

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Abbreviations

FFS:

Farmer field school

IPM:

Integrated pest management

Promipac1 :

Programa de Manejo Integrado de Plagas en América Central (Integrated Pest Management Program in Central America)

SDC2 :

Swiss Agency for Humanitarian Aid and Development Cooperation

Zamorano:

Also known as the EAP (Escuela Agrícola Panamericana, or the Pan American School of Agriculture).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Trutmann, my partner during this fieldwork, to the SDC, especially Felix Fellmann and Jürg Benz for supporting our work, and to the staff of Promipac and other institutions. At the risk of skipping some of the many people who graciously gave us their time, I would particularly like to mention the director of Promipac, Alfredo Rueda, Orlando Cáceres (leader for El Salvador), Julio López (leader for Nicaragua), and the staff of Promipac and collaborating institutions (in alphabetical order): Antonio Vasquez, Carlos Sánchez, Felipe Pilarte, Harold Argüello, Jesús Costanza, Karin Argueta, Rodolfo “Fito” Cordón, Rodolfo Váquez, Sara Durán, and Vidal Rivas. Thanks to Alfredo Rueda, Catrin Meir, Graham Thiele, Julio López, Laura B. DeLind, and five anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version. The farmers who took time to explain their work are gratefully mentioned by name in this paper and in our report (Trutmann and Bentley, 2003).

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  1. Agricultural Anthropologist, Casilla 2695, Cochabamba, Bolivia

    Jeffery W. Bentley

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Correspondence to Jeffery W. Bentley.

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Jeffery W. Bentley is an agricultural anthropologist (PhD, University of Arizona, 1986). He has worked with smallholder farmers his whole career. He spent a year in Portugal doing participant observation with family farmers (1983–1984). After teaching for a semester at New Mexico State University, he spent seven years in Honduras (1987–1994) at Zamorano, a vocational agricultural college, helping IPM researchers and smallholders create appropriate technology. His rural Honduran dictionary, Diccionario Campesino Hondureño, was published in 2001 as an issue of Ceiba 42(2). In 2002 Bentley and Peter Baker wrote a Manual for Collaborative Research with Smallholder Coffee Farmers (CABI). Bentley lives in Bolivia and is an international consultant.

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Bentley, J.W. Folk experiments. Agric Hum Values 23, 451–462 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-006-9017-1

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