{"id":54880,"date":"2020-09-01T07:05:19","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T12:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54880"},"modified":"2020-09-01T07:05:19","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T12:05:19","slug":"an-alternative-agriculturists-guide-to-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54880","title":{"rendered":"An alternative agriculturist\u2019s guide to science"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2020\/08\/an-alternative-agriculturists-guide-to-science\/\">An alternative agriculturist\u2019s guide to science<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>To begin, just a heads up on a couple of new things on the site. First, I\u2019ve posted on the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/my-book\/\">My Book<\/a>\u00a0page advanced comments about my forthcoming book that have come in from a number of interesting thinkers. It\u2019s nice to get such positive notices. Currently, I\u2019m pretty busy gearing up for the book launch on 15 October (21 October in the USA) and I\u2019ll be devoting some blog posts to the book thereafter.<\/p>\n<p>Also, an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/about\/#comment-203996\">interesting comment<\/a>\u00a0has come in concerning my house rules on the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/about\/\">About<\/a>\u00a0page, to which I replied\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/about\/#comment-204129\">here<\/a>. I don\u2019t promise to debate my rules with all comers, but I think the issues in this instance are thought-provoking, so I (cautiously) welcome further comments.<\/p>\n<p>And now to work with a few thoughts on science and alternative agriculture, inspired partly by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/johnkempf.com\/politics-of-peer-review-and-published-literature-in-regenerative-agriculture-systems\/\">this article<\/a>\u00a0and partly by the themes explored in Chapter 16 of my book (\u201cFrom religion to science (and back)\u201d). I\u2019m not going to engage systematically with either source, but instead just use them as points of departure for a few remarks concerning the need as I see it for many of us in the alternative agriculture movement to develop a more nuanced approach to science.<\/p>\n<p>Let me start by invoking a distinction I made\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2017\/07\/of-bad-science-and-bad-science-the-angry-farmer-meets-the-angry-chef\/\">some time ago<\/a> between what I call \u2018science\u2019 and \u2018SCIENCE\u2019. Lowercase \u2018science\u2019 is the everyday, generally unglamorous work that scientists do in laboratories, field study sites and the like, where they use carefully-formulated techniques to tease out the relationships between entities in the biophysical world. A vital aspect of \u2018science\u2019 in this sense is that the people engaged in it \u2013 almost uniquely in human discourse \u2013 have developed rigorous procedures for conceding when they\u2019ve got things wrong and the evidence doesn\u2019t support their contentions.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An alternative agriculturist\u2019s guide to science To begin, just a heads up on a couple of new things on the site. First, I\u2019ve posted on the\u00a0My Book\u00a0page advanced comments about my forthcoming book that have come in from a number of interesting thinkers. It\u2019s nice to get such positive notices. Currently, I\u2019m pretty busy gearing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[20,30244,15683,22932,705,9738],"class_list":["post-54880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-agriculture","tag-alternative-agriculture","tag-chris-smaje","tag-scepticism","tag-science","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54881,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54880\/revisions\/54881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}