Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Pointed to as South America’s largest water source and a priority region for conservation planning and research, the tropical Andes of today face compounding socio-ecological challenges linked to land use practices. Agriculture and mining interests have resulted in significant replacement of tropical forests, water contamination, soil erosion, and social conflict. Simultaneously, erratic changes in weather patterns are rapidly altering conditions for life on the mountains.
Within this landscape, the Colombian municipality of Támesis, Southwestern Antioquia, emerges as a node sheltering agroecological lighthouses; socio-ecological civic movements; and public-private hybrid organisations working to facilitate transformations intersecting agriculture with ecosystem restoration at the bioregional scale.
This study investigates agricultural transitions to soil health-enhancing practices within the municipality of Támesis. Intersecting complexity thinking with inquiry into the lived experience of transitioning farmers, this study employs qualitative methodologies in crafting a metaphorical map of the strategic landscape for transitions towards agroecological and regenerative practices. Among the findings are six possibilities and six barriers.
External input removal is, among local farming communities, perceived as placing farmers at socioeconomic risk given an overall low financial resilience and lack of governance support for farming families. The attractors of short-term yield stability offered by agrochemicals may surpass even prominent regenerative attractors such as health awareness. Such structural mechanisms are reinforced at phenomenological levels of mindsets and culture, with educational inheritances tied to chemical farming. Lack of financial and social sustainability in conventional farming are further causing growing disengagement of youth and farmers from agriculture.
Yet, there is a strong agricultural and nature-anchored identity in the studied territory. Pressing conventional disruptors such as rising prices for agrochemicals – and increasing awareness of adverse health effects from their usage – are generating increased opportunities for new attractors to form alternative, regenerative paradigms.
While a variety of factors presently make up attractors to initiate transitions journeys towards regenerative and agroecological practices in the territory, a main mechanism reinforcing the new practices was found to be a direct experience of the ecosystem responding to care – of ecological reciprocity. Hence, the strongest stabilising attractor was found to be eco-relational in nature, as well as to arise from, rather than consistently before the practices.
The study concludes with four strategic nudges, actionable for local organisations and farmers engaged in expanding regenerative transitions in the territory: Equipping early adopters to increase visibility of successful alternatives and stimulate incentivising markets; strategic design focusing on gradual transitions and what is most adjacent for local farmers to apply; empirical remembrance for soil awareness; and framing regeneration in language close to farmers' own worlds.