What is Agriculture?

At first this question likely seems ridiculous, at least to my sensibilities.

Conceptually agriculture is unlike health. It does not include physical and mental aspects. It does not vary in meaning (though it almost certainly varies in practice) between places. It is the production of food.

But is it really that simple?

Shortly after my Christmas break I went to spend nine days in one of the communities where I am conducting research. I stayed with my research assistant at her home and had the opportunity to experience all facets of rural life. I helped to fetch water from a protected spring, wrote my field notes out long hand by candle light, bathed in a bucket, and helped to cook over the open fire. During our free time we visited with Thokozile’s (my research assistant) friends and family, we attended a funeral on Friday and Saturday, and church on Sunday.

In addition to experiencing every day life, we continued to conduct our research going with a couple of the Gogos to collect their monthly government pension, weeding in one family’s garden, and spending a day walking to the forest to collect muthis (traditional medicines) with a sangoma (traditional healer).

While invaluable in providing me with insight into the rhythms of rural life and into health and agriculture in this area, I had anticipated all of these experiences.

However, there was something very unexpected: food.

I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, of course I had anticipated (with a bit of anxiety) an unsettled stomach. However, I hadn’t thought much about how much I would learn by simply eating. I hadn’t really thought about how connected the act of eating is with agriculture itself. I hadn’t really connected production to consumption.

As we walked from household to household chatting with different people we would invariably stop and pull a peach off of one of their trees to see if it was ripe. As we visited different households, one family would give us a couple of plums to eat and another would give us a pear. It turns out that those trees that often line the periphery of a household’s garden are actually an important source of seasonal nutrition.

And so begins research via the stomach.

Through the simple act of snacking my original concept of agriculture as grain and vegetable crops in fields and gardens combined with livestock production expands.

Continuing on, in trying to understand the connections between consumption and production, we turn to food preparation.

Food preparation begins with gathering the ingredients. Because it is summer, almost every meal includes food from the garden as well as food from the shop. This much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the number of meals that included wild vegetables. These imifinos (green leafy vegetables) form the accidental ground cover of gardens, grow alongside rivers, and exist in forests. In summer they contribute valuable vitamins to people’s diets and are an integral part of a family’s summer menu.

Here again my stomach led me to an expanded understanding of cultivation; the inclusion of wild cultivars as a part of the subsistence side of a family’s diet expands ideas about subsistence agriculture to include non-cultivated, or wild foods.

Take this expansion of food and cultivation a step further and all of a sudden agricultural landscapes look very different.

Already some of these gardens seem quite different from the neat, rational, and scientific agricultural spaces of monocropped fields; they seem unkempt, even random in their planting patterns and varietals. If you add to this the trees on their periphery and the forests and rivers that sit on the edges of the community, suddenly the agricultural landscape is unrecognizable.

This newly expanded agricultural landscape brings us back to the question that we started with: What is agriculture? Does it require active cultivation on the part of people? If so, who is to say that by harvesting wild imifinos people aren’t “cultivating,” aren’t manipulating the environment so that imifinos grow consistently in these wild spaces? Does agriculture assume a limited spatial extent? If so, then are some wild imifinos (the ones that grow on their own in the garden) part of the agriculture system while others are not?

As seems to be the case more often than not, I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question. What I do know, however, is that when trying to understand how subsistence activities contribute to a household’s diet, and through that to their health, crops that grow in the garden, fruit that comes from trees, and wild imifinos gathered from the forest, the river, and the garden all must be included. So perhaps then agriculture does include wild spaces along with wild foods. Thoughts?