The Future of Farming: To What End and For What Purpose?

Abstract

In this conversation, Bharat Bhushan Tyagiji, national award winning farmer from western Uttar Pradesh, and social anthropologist Richa Kumar, together attempt to analyse the alternative perspective of Tyagiji on the current crisis of farming in India, especially Punjab. Unlike typical alternative perspectives that uncritically glorify ‘tradition’, romanticise nature, and dismiss science and machines, Tyagiji’s views are refreshingly different. His focus is on the present; he is not enamoured by tradition or by so-called traditional knowledge. At the same time, he seeks to put science back in its place—within a larger discourse and appreciation of the knowledge of living in this world with meaning and purpose. He argues for working with scientific knowledge rather than dismissing it entirely, and he wants to use technology as part of a system that also centrally values human labour. But before we can change agriculture, he argues, we have to first contend with questions of how we want to live, and what we want to value. This conversation is a small contribution towards helping us think through some of these vexing questions in the context of the future of farming.