On Experts
Regeneration requires a diversity of ways of knowing
One of the things that continually shows up throughout the career of a regenerative designer is curiosity. Over and over again, we find ourselves encountering a crop we’ve never worked with, strategizing around an ecosystem we haven’t designed in before, or collaborating with a community that holds a very different worldview than the ones we’re accustomed to. There’s always a new thing to learn about, and new people to learn from.
But it’s important to consider who to learn from. We must distinguish the value of regional expertise from the institutionally designated status of expert. Professional and designated experts are necessary to have in the world, but there are ways to overvalue their qualifications or undervalue those without their titles.
Powerful actors like corporations and governments often put oversized faith in credentialed knowledge, while possessing undersized appreciation in local wisdom. Even the most benevolent industries and movements are vulnerable to being seduced by the glamor of designated industry experts. Certifications and academic research traditions often anoint people outside of the agricultural livelihood as “knowing better” and thus eligible to educate farmers, prescribe best practices, and monitor outcomes. This paradigm argues that farmers must be educated and convinced to do things differently. This same mindset of trusting third-party actors over local community members resulted in the Green Revolution, Big Ag, and the colonization of indigenous communities on six continents.
In my work at Terra Genesis, I aim to make sure that our approach resists the industry’s desire to exclusively seek answers from institutional experts. This doesn’t mean I deny the insights that these experts have to share. In fact, our approach to supporting clients importantly involves literature review of publications by institutions and academics. Heck, I even cite a few research articles further in this piece. Rather, my under-emphasizing of industry experts is a result of my aim to redefine who gets to be recognized as an expert, and where expertise comes from. I posit:
- Those who are institutionally designated as “expert” have insights that are limited by their experience (as is the human experience.)
- The western way of knowing (the western epistemology) held by “traditional experts” follows an empirical and theoretical model that often results in a harmful dismissiveness of other ways of knowing (such as the California government just now incorporating indigenous fire mitigation expertise into their land management plans after over a century of dismissiveness.)
- Expertise can be developed in more ways than western epistemology typically gives credit. On-the-ground experience often develops practical expertise that is arguably more contextually grounded to the project and community at hand than expertise that is gained through approaches like academic and theoretical study alone.
- These other ways of knowing (e.g., indigenous and smallholder expertise) must be valued to the same degree to which industry values the expertise of scientists, project developers, and consultants.
In short, I’m arguing for a right-sized appreciation for a multiplicity of knowledge sources.
External industry experts are often sought to provide credible insights. Thus, the industry may be weary of allowing farmers to strongly contribute to project development and monitoring. Yet, numerous studies have found that citizen scientists (read: farmers) can collect data of comparable quality to professional scientists (see, e.g. Balazs and Morello-Frosch, 2013 and Steinke, Etten, and Zelan, 2017). Farmer-collected data enables significant quantities of data to be collected, which — as James Surowiecki illustrates in The Wisdom of the Crowds — increases its accuracy.
This stands out in stark contrast to interventions from third parties — where outsiders come in to audit results according to externally identified benchmarks, which are often guided by certification standards that are often created by yet another entity. Several field-based studies argue that, in environmental monitoring, the assumption that more technologically complex methodologies necessarily lead to more accurate results is a relatively common misconception (see e.g. Caughland & Oakly, 2001.)
A theme I find myself returning to at Terra Genesis is that everybody in a supply system has insights to share, things to learn, and an obligation to put deep faith in their farmers as equal collaborators and holders of knowledge. As Bill Nye the Science Guy often says, “Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.” Cheesy, but this notion challenges the premise that many projects need imported knowledge because the community doesn’t “know enough” to make the right decisions.
When it comes to designing regenerative agriculture systems, this means trusting farmers as knowledge authorities in their systems. They are the most intimately involved with their land and best equipped to notice changes over time, as well as what practices are most practical for supporting them. Whereas they may not have followed the traditional western process of knowledge accumulation, their way of knowing is no less valid and they frequently should be considered the contextual experts. Farmers should be engaged to co-design diverse cropping systems that utilize practices conducive to regeneration. Further, they can play an important (and credible) role as citizen scientists to monitor the outcomes of their work.
Valuing farmers’ knowledge this way should hopefully lead to more chances for farmers to learn from one another and bolster knowledge from and for their place. Processes like these, which we describe as “peer to peer” rather than “expert to farmer” or “external to internal” are borne in an environment of trust, engender a real sense of agency, and encourage participation and esteem. These efforts often have important leaders who set the tone and cultivate their community’s energy, but those leaders do not possess unchecked authority. Rather, they guide change from within.
As someone who is positioned in the industry to be viewed by others as an “expert”, I often push against that by returning to curiosity and humility. Living systems are infinitely complex, and each project warrants such a unique approach that cannot be known in advance from anybody’s expertise alone. Thus, I rely on a network of stakeholders from each project that I work on to inform the work ahead. Yes, we find science, industry publications, and other institutional work to provide important insights. But, at the end of the day, the farmers are those I turn to the most eagerly, for I know that they have a lifetime’s worth of knowledge to share.
This essay was edited by MJ Halberstadt.
