Refusal as Radical Care? Moving Beyond Modern Industrial Agriculture

Becoming agroecologists: A pedagogical model to support graduate student learning and practice

Introduction

Agroecology has multiple beginnings in diverse knowledge systems, growing practices, and social movements which, as a whole, seek systemic transformation to build just food system futures. As graduate students, we have been inspired by agroecological movements and practitioners and endeavored to build our knowledge and capacities as agroecologists. Over the course of seven years, we have worked collectively with an evolving cohort to build relationships, understand critical lineages, and practice participatory processes that we found necessary for our development as agroecologists at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Building on this work, we sought to refine an emergent understanding of the necessary components of an agroecological pedagogy.

Methods

We thus hosted a series of workshops in summer 2019 to facilitate collective reflection and development of a pedagogy, which we further refined through collective autoethnography.

Results

The resulting model contains five key components: a cohort at the heart of the model to facilitate collective learning; critical inquiry as the foundation of knowledge production; relational centering as the basis for building and maintaining care-based relationships with self and others; participatory practice as a space for taking action through and within relationships; and situated knowledge to recognize the unique and incomplete knowledge that each individual brings to their work.

Discussion

We imagine this model as the basis for a dedicated agroecology graduate program, and we close by sharing ongoing implementation efforts, key areas for further development, and our hopes for continued integration with broader movements. Ultimately, we have experienced this process as a transformational agroecological space and hope others are inspired to adapt, imagine, and enact the process, model, and principles in their own places and communities.

IoT as a Backbone of Intelligent Homestead Automation

The concepts of smart agriculture, with the aim of highly automated industrial mass production leaning towards self-farming, can be scaled down to the level of small farms and homesteads, with the use of more affordable electronic components and open-source software. The backbone of smart agriculture, in both cases, is the Internet of Things (IoT). Single-board computers (SBCs) such as a Raspberry Pi, working under Linux or Windows IoT operating systems, make affordable platform for smart devices with modular architecture, suitable for automation of various tasks by using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision (CV). Similarly, the Arduino microcontroller enables the building of nodes in the IoT network, capable of reading various physical values, wirelessly sending them to other computers for processing and furthermore, controlling electronic elements and machines in the physical world based on the received data. This review gives a limited overview of currently available technologies for smart automation of industrial agricultural production and of alternative, smaller-scale projects applicable in homesteads, based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi hardware, as well as a draft proposal of an integrated homestead automation system based on the IoT.