Practicing Agroecology: Management Principles Drawn From Small Farming in Misiones (Argentina)

Abstract

In face of sustainability challenges, agronomical research has focused on the design of new production systems, whereas ethnographic studies have put forward the traditional small production systems. A gap remains between such agroecological design and the practices of farms. Our objectives are to draw principles for agroecological management from the in-depth study of practices in ecologically based farms in Argentina. We extracted three principles: 1) adjustment and observation instead of control, 2) variable and flexible management in time and space, and 3) permanent at-home experimentation. After examining their generality, we discuss the paths to take these systems as models for the ecologization of conventional systems.