Impact of personal values on agricultural research

The scientific cadre often assumes that research and fanning decisions are value‐free. Biological scientists and agricultural producers need to recognize how our values influence the degree to which we engage difficult long‐term economic, environmental, and social impacts of technology. Identification and clarification of values can help shape and inform decisions on research and production practices. Envisioning activities can create an awareness of the consequences of current systems and open new vistas for the future. Envisioning how a farm or a community can appear in 25 years engenders challenges to current assumptions about efficiencies of scale, impacts of new technologies, and social consequences of changes in agricultural systems. Scientists can “learn from the future”; by examining successful and unsuccessful models tried in other places and times, and create preferable futures that reflect values of producers and society rather than accepting a trend‐based future for each farm and community.

Keywords:

• agroecology
• communities
• education
• farm families
• farmers
• rural America
• sustainable agriculture