Organic Farmers and Indigenous Knowledge

by Jennifer Sumner, PhD

A recent conference paper proposes that organic farmers’ knowledge can be understood as indigenous knowledge – local knowledge that is closely tied to sustainable ways of life. Such knowledge is vital to individual health, community resilience, national food security and overall sustainabilty.

Indigenous knowledge is sometimes limited to the knowledge of indigenous peoples, and other times applied in a broader context, such as to farmers. Overall, indigenous knowledge can be understood as the local knowledge of a defined community that has developed over time and forms the basis for agriculture, food preparation, health care, education, conservation and a wide range of other activities that sustain a society and its environment.

Organic farmers are a clearly defined community, set apart from other farmers by the certification process they must undertake. They depend on older forms of knowledge, such as traditional farming practices, to understand how farming was carried out before the introduction of chemical agriculture. They also depend on newer forms of knowledge, produced by both organic farmers and a fledgling number of researchers in university settings, to understand how to more fully address current, complex problems.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) summarizes indigenous knowledge as:

1. locally bound, indigenous to a specific area
2. culture- and context-specific
3. non-formal knowledge
4. orally transmitted, and generally not documented
5. dynamic and adaptive
6. holistic in nature
7. closely related to survival and subsistence for many people worldwide.

Based on these seven UNESCO criteria, organic farmers’ knowledge would qualify as indigenous knowledge. As lifelong learners, organic farmers have ‘learned their way out’ of unsustainable farming practices and ‘learned their way in’ to more sustainable ways of life. Their indigenous knowledge systems have emerged from years of practice and critical reflection on how best to farm in Nature’s image, favouring on-farm resources and not depending on costly, and destructive, purchased inputs.

In contrast, conventional farming is rapidly losing its knowledge base. The drive to industrialize agriculture has centralized farming decisions within large multinational corporations and reduced conventional farmers to technicians who read pesticide and fertilizer labels or to contract labourers on their own farms. Either way, there is little need for a system of knowledge on which to base farming decisions.

Like other indigenous knowledge systems, organic farmers’ highly developed indigenous knowledge system is under threat as organics becomes more industrialized and absorbed into the global corporate food system. If we lose organic farmers’ indigenous knowledge, we will lose a great deal of our capacity to grow our own food and become vulnerable to manipulation by powerful multinational business interests that can profit from our vulnerability. The end of peak oil and the projected reduction of imported foods brought to us by increasingly expensive, oil-dependent global transportation systems make this potential loss a vital concern of national food security. In order to avoid such problems, organic farmers must continue on their lifelong learning journey, follow the organic philosophy, protect and build their indigenous knowledge systems and encourage others to join them.

An alliance with environmental adult education can help to avoid such problems. Using an indigenous knowledge framework, environmental adult education can help to pull back the veil that obscures full knowledge about the food we eat, thus making the links from field to fork. By participating in such adult learning opportunities as the slow food movement, community food kitchens, food banks, farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, healthy school lunch programs, fair/alternative trade and the organic farming movement, environmental adult educators can unveil knowledge about industrial food that is deliberately hidden from consumers and promote knowledge about organic food. While such knowledge might endanger the profit margins of large operators in the global food system, this ‘dangerous knowledge’ is crucial to any fully functioning system of indigenous knowledge, food security and sustainability. It would link farmers’ knowledge and consumer knowledge, open up opportunities for individual and collective learning, offer outlets for community activism and engagement, challenge current forms of globalization and combine learning with the development of environmental consciousness.

By supporting organic farmers’ indigenous knowledge, environmental adult education can make concrete links between the environment and the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of people’s lives. In this way, it helps to open new pathways for adult education, to confirm it as a community-based enterprise, and to make it a leader in the field of sustainability because, in the end, sustainability must be learned.

Complete conference paper


Jennifer Sumner, Ph.D., Adult Education and Community Development Program
OISE/University of Toronto contributed highlights of her conference paper in this article written for the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada (OACC). She welcomes your comments at jsumner@oise.utoronto.ca or at 902-893-7256.


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Posted September 2006