Open-Source Systems: How Communities Can Help Promote Regenerative Agriculture
The Great Regeneration, by farmer-technologist Dorn Cox and author-activist Courtney White, explores unique and groundbreaking research aimed at reclaiming the space where science & agriculture meet as a shared human endeavor. By employing the same tools used to visualize and identify the global instability in our climate and our communities, the authors identify ways to accelerate regenerative solutions beyond individual farms.
In the foreword below, American activist and scholar David Bollier analyzes these potential solutions and outlines a hopeful path for the future.
The following is an excerpt from The Great Regeneration by Dorn Cox with Courtney White. It has been adapted for the web.
The Great Regeneration: A Foreword by David Bollier
Of the many epic challenges that climate change is bringing to humankind, one of the most significant is surely the need to reinvent agriculture. Can the world’s farmers find a way to shift from large-scale, carbon-intensive industrial farming that is destroying soil and ecosystems to smaller-scale bioregional systems that not only respect nature but regenerate it? Can we invent systems that grow enough nutritious food, distribute it fairly to all, and remake agriculture as a decentralized, place-respecting enterprise?
At this point in the unfolding climate catastrophe, these ambitions are not simply a nice fantasy to ponder. They are existential necessities. If humankind is going to avoid fatal disruptions to the planet’s ecosystems and civilization itself, agriculture must find ways to pursue some radical shifts.
What We Can Do: Implementing New Strategies
In the short term, the top imperative must be new strategies for adapting to climate change: new cultivation practices, new crop choices, holistic com- mitments. Over the longer term, the art of farming must reintegrate itself with local ecosystems and the biosphere. Agriculture must do more than “sustain” an already degraded landscape. It must understand and improve the generativity of life itself.
Dorn Cox offers us a powerful framework for undertaking this task in The Great Regeneration, replete with myriad examples of soil restoration and ecological monitoring, farm hacks and open-source observatories, and social and ethical principles for keeping regenerative agriculture on the right track. This book introduces an impressive storehouse of innovations that illuminate many pathways forward.
The Great Regeneration does not provide a blueprint so much as a range of powerful methodological shifts needed to open up new vistas of possibility. With active participation and ingenuity, farmers can begin to take practical steps that draw on recent findings in earth sciences; new applications of open-source software, networking tools, and data systems; bold experiments that blend low-cost observational technologies with attentive human stewardship of landscapes; new organizational forms and cooperative financial models for self-reliance; and patterns of commoning that empower individuals and communities.
‘Regeneration’: What Does It Really Mean?
Regeneration, as Cox points out, is not simply a set of techniques. It is a mindset and worldview. It is a deep priority and commitment. Regenerative agriculture is not only about improving crop yields and reducing harmful ecological impacts. It is about bringing new vigor to biogeoecological systems while enlivening us as humans.
The legacy of the Green Revolution has been the destructive use of industrial techniques and “miracle technologies”—pesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, monoculture crops—to maximize yields. Soil and other natural systems are not treated as alive but as machines, essentially dead resources. In the Great Regeneration envisioned by Cox, technology plays a significantly different role. Instead of deploying powerful, poorly tested tools that often shatter the dense, symbiotic web of life in a landscape, the Great Regeneration sketches an agricultural future that revives aliveness through the skillful blending of open-source technologies, ecological wisdom, and local empowerment.
In his seminal history, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Christopher M. Kelty notes how f ree software (the politically minded precur- sor to open-source software) is “a kind of collective technical experimental system.” It blends conventional practice with daring experimentation to address evolving, real needs. It privileges creative, pragmatic solutions over proprietary business models, entrenched political interests, and even law itself. (Free and open-source software became possible only through clever, elegant “hacks” of copyright law. Expanding the scope and support of law is a part of this new future as well.)
The Benefits of Open-Source Systems
Open-source systems are at once powerful and flexible because they honor individual creativity that can be collectively shared and constantly improved upon. The technologies avoid bureaucratic and political stagnation by privileging the freedom of bottom-up agents over centralized control. They authorize and support creative modification and agile innovation. The focus is not on beggar-thy-neighbor competition and market success that tends toward economic consolidation; it is about cooperative stewardship of dispersed, autonomous systems on a holistic scale. Everyone can flourish together. Instead of intensifying the winner-take-all ethic that often prevails in capitalist markets, regenerative agriculture can deliver maximum effec- tiveness at low cost. Its “secrets” are democratic participation, sharing and collaboration, transparency and accountability, flexible innovation, and the freedom to localize solutions.
These affordances, and this ethic, are precisely what contemporary agriculture will need to navigate the difficult years ahead. As technology comes to support natural systems rather than disrupt them—through monitoring sensors, software apps, data analytics, networked cooperation, and more— Cox astutely sees a new “silicon-based nervous system” helping farmers to monitor and improve the carbon-based ecosystems of life. Open-source technology can enhance the search for more symbiotic, ecologically respectful forms of agriculture rather than ignorantly subverting the generativity of natural systems. This infrastructure, artfully knitting together agriculture, ecosystems, and technology, will itself become generative. It will usher in new forms of “cosmo-local production” by inviting a global community of agricultural players to collaborate in developing world-class designs while enabling the production of low-cost physical equipment and infrastructures at local levels.
Can This Vision Become A Reality?
This compelling vision is not without its complications, however. There are, most notably, tensions between open-source communities and capitalism. The history of Big Tech co-opting or neutering the expansive potential of open-source software is a cautionary story. While there should always be room for value-added proprietary business systems that revolve around open-source technologies, dangers arise when technology companies attempt to capture and dominate a knowledge commons or other shareable system, whether in a legal or de facto sense. Google has been adept at using its market power to become the dominant gatekeeper for public-domain content and certain open-source projects, for example. Apple has leveraged its proprietary iPhone (itself based on research and development financed by US taxpayers) to steer developers to work within its proprietary App Store space.
This history points to an important lesson: Open platforms are commons in only a very thin, fragile sense. One of the great achievements of the tech- nologies behind the internet and the World Wide Web was the establishment of shared protocols that let diverse computing networks interconnect and collaborate. The widespread acceptance of nonproprietary, openly shareable protocols has enabled new types of commons to arise for creative works, scholarship, science, and much else—enough so that easy, no-cost sharing on open platforms is considered a commons.
But this proposition needs closer attention. The conflation of “openness” with the “commons” is misleading. Openness implies that a technology or resource is itself, automatically, a commons, a presumption that obscures the fact that a business or group of people (Google, say, or a hacker com- munity) at one point decided how the resource could be legally used. The open/closed binary renders the agency of a community invisible because the access rules for the resource (open or closed) are presented as established facts that somehow are inherent in the resource itself. The open/closed binary also encourages people to presume that making a resource free-for-the-taking is the best, most liberating outcome possible. In fact, absent commons governance, it may actually end up inviting investors and corporations to appropriate the “free,” shared resource for their private commercial purposes.
Making Decisions As A Community
It helps to remember that there are all sorts of choices that a community can make about its shared wealth that are not strictly open or closed in char- acter. The group may choose to make a database available for some purposes but demand payment when outsiders use it. They may wish to allow limited uses of certain designs to trusted colleagues. The open/closed binary fails to name the collective power that a group must exercise in curating and controlling the value it creates (code, information, designs, infrastructure).
This is why seeing the commons as a social system (and not just a resource) is so important. Seeing the commons as a social process of governance and provisioning—commoning, the verb form—helps a group recognize its own responsibilities in stewarding and protecting shared wealth. “Open” and “closed” are not the only options.
An open platform or body of content may technically be a commons, but it is a very thin and vulnerable one. A robust commons, by contrast, has participants who actively step up to the responsibilities of peer governance, fair-minded provisioning, and social solidarity. In agricultural knowledge commons, this could entail the intelligent curation of information, development of rules for access and use, penalties for violating rules, the arrangement of secure funding, and so on. A robust commons realizes that it must preemptively prevent capitalist enclosures of its shared wealth and nourish its culture of mutual support.
Creating New Commons: Taking the Leap
The creation of new types of agricultural commons represents an enormous and necessary leap forward. It is important to keep in mind, however, that a global peer-to-peer learning community, even if governed through open-source principles, could end up privileging short-term, anthropocentric farming goals over the holistic, long-term needs of an ecosystem. We need the many constructive advances that open-source collaboration on a global scale can yield for agriculture, but might this path serve to homogenize the great diversity of farming cultures around the world? An important challenge is finding ways to honor the pluriverse of local farming cultures as they interact on a common platform (the internet) and traffic in the epistemology of Western science and information technology.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer brilliantly explains how Indigenous peoples tend to observe plants and other living systems through a different lens than the inhabitants of capitalist modernity. They see ecosystems through their own distinctive cosmovisions, spiritual beliefs, and intergenerational commitments. “Facts” are not self-evident; they arise and flourish within the framing of a living culture in communion with the Earth. George Wash- ington Carver, the great American biologist who developed crop-rotation methods and novel uses for peanuts and other crops, was a scientist but also a mystic. He declared that his agricultural discoveries came from listening closely, and with respectful awe, to what flowers and other plants had to say.
Mindful of this strain in agricultural history, we must be wary of a techno-solutionism ethic that might marginalize the role of human spirituality and culture in agricultural practices. Western scientists once dismissed the Subak irrigation systems of traditional rice farmers in Bali as religious superstition best displaced by “rational,” modern techniques. It is now seen that centuries of cultural tradition and religious practices have helped Bali farmers coordinate the timing of planting and harvesting on a community scale, so that scarce water supplies can be effectively allocated and pests kept to a minimum. A broad challenge going forward is to bring the insights of modern science (itself undergoing methodological shifts) into closer conversation with culture. Fortunately, there are constructive models for doing just this, such as the global, open-source network focused on rice agronomy, the System of Rice Intensification.
In the pages that follow, Dorn Cox documents and explains a rich convergence of so many forces that are already making agriculture more regenerative, intelligent, and decentralized. He also opens up fresh spaces for dialogue and collaboration that urgently need to expand. May the ideas in this book find a broad audience of readers—and enterprising, creative farmers around the world—as we enter the turbulence ahead.
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The Great Regeneration
Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope
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