A Culture of Change: Change Agents in Indian Rice Production (week 4)

HAFED, a Historical Perspective on Change Agents in India

HAFED, or The Haryana State Cooperative Supply and Marketing Federation Limited, began as a grassroots initiative by the farmers in the Haryana State of India who banded together to create a place-based cooperative where they could sort, manage, and sell their produce. The organization grew over the years as more pieces of the supply chain were added. They purchased inputs like fertilizer and seeds and resold them to other farmers creating a retail section of the co-op, and added processing mills, marketing agents, and storage and transportation agencies, all the while the co-op grew in influence and power. While the HAFED does not only work within the rice production system, they do specialize in it. They have multiple rice mills and specialized marketing schemes just for rice and work with farmers to track yields of different varieties.

Governance Relationships within Indian Rice Production (week 3)

1. Map different kinds of formal and informal (governmental) arrangements impacting the food system

SLM Management Practices in Prague

Well, this is going to be a bit of a weird post. This past weekend I went to Prague in the Czech Rebuplic. On the drive there I saw an amazing collection of Soil and Land Management techniques. I was really impressed that every area we drove around outside the city had these different practices: terracing, vertical drain lines, intercropping, agroforestry, etc. I also saw allotments in the smaller towns, but not much within the city of Prague itself. This is probably due to the fact that the city was built up a lot during its early years, then destroyed during WW2, and rebuilt during Communist times. Today there was a lot of construction going on; almost every street I went on/by had something being built, replaced, or fixed. The greenest areas I saw were attached to religious buildings in the way of small parks and cemeteries. I took pictures through the bus' dirty windows of the places outside of town so they are not the greatest, but I'll try and say something about each of them. 

The above image shows contour line planting up a hill with vertical drain lines and a forest topping the hill. Most places where there was agriculture you could find small forests and trees left intact with the crops planted around them.

Environmental Science: Soil & Land Management

My morning class this period is Land Degradation & Development. Each week we have a group project which normally culminates in a ppt presentation and sometimes a paper to go along with it. I'm going to post the powerpoints and documents we have done here to keep track.

Internships, Course Overload, and Vision Boarding

I normally post only finalized items here, because it gets confusing otherwise, but maybe a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing will benefit someone.

Global Embeddedness and Resilience in Indian Rice Production (Week 2)

Question 1: To what extent is Rice in India embedded in and shaped by globalized sets of relations, such as global commodity markets and the agroecosystem?

Rice Production Systems in India Background (week 1)

In my current class, Social Transformations Towards Sustainable Food Systems, we are focusing on a specific crop in a specific region. My group chose Rice production in India. Each week we then focus on a different aspect of that food system. The first week we just gathered background information, the second week we looked at the extent to which Rice is embedded in and shaped by globalized sets of relations, such as global commodity markets and the agroecosystem and how that effects resilience, and this week (week 3) we are looking at governance, actors, and relationships. So, I thought I'd start posting our projects/reports. Some are PPTs, which I will attempt to make into pictures, and the rest will be some version of a paper. I'll post each one separately so as not to get confusing. We also, just to make things more difficult, only have 2 class periods to create these and then on Fridays, we meet as a larger group and have to pull 4 different groups together into a new presentation. We only get 2 hours to do this.

The Background we pulled is rather messy. We have a group folder we put things in, but here's an idea of the information we are working with...