[Ffa-readinggroup] Reading Group Notes from January 23

[Jula]

Hello all,

As the next reading group meeting is already approaching, here is a 
summary of what we talked about last time.

Katie took detailed notes during our discussion in the first meeting, 
and we wanted to share a bit of these.

/During the first meeting of the Fossil Free Agriculture Reading Group, 
we had a discussion about yields in organic and industrial agriculture. 
Something that accompanied us throughout the discussion was a critical 
inquiry of terminology/language: We talked about the strictness of 
definitions of "organic" and "agroecology" and the need to distinguish 
such terms from small-scale agriculture. From a discussion about food 
waste and its relation to yields, we then moved on to issues of 
responsibility, talking about the role of civil servants and our 
communication with policy makers. This brought us back to the issue of 
language and how public discourse often presents behaviors (such as 
eating meat) as inevitable, which makes it seem like system change is 
impossible. Yields are an example of a terminology that appears to have 
no alternative, and we came up with possible other measurements, such as 
how many people are fed./

/Some of the questions that came up are:/

/What is the value of having a (legally) regulated definition with a 
very clear meaning (e.g. certified organic) vs. a less clearly defined 
but more expansive definition (like agroecology)?/

/Where does the discourse we have today, for instance regarding yields 
as a quantification of agricultural productivity, come from?/

/What else could we quantify instead of yields?/

/
/

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

Jula
//

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