Food production does not merely take place because plants take up nutrients from the soil, because animals convert biomass into meat, because there is DNA, or because the sun is shining. These are conditions for development, growth and production, but it is only when people work the soil, select seeds, tend animals, use new tools, store harvests, exchange produce, and so on, that agriculture gets its shape. This implies that agricultural science covers a broader field than just the study of plant and animal growth; it also includes the human activities that give plants and animals shape and meaning. In this line, technology is the human practice – with or without tools – of working the soil, managing crops and tending animals. Accordingly, technology is embedded in a context that influences knowledge and goals of people and organizations. Knowledge and goals usually vary and are often conflicting. Understanding technology options and challenges therefore requires an understanding of the developers and users, and the contexts in which they operate. The problems that the life sciences have to address – in relation to persistent rural poverty, food security, the impact of climate change, the prospective scarcity of energy sources and the unsustainable use of natural resources – are usually complex. They cannot be addressed by a single discipline. This conclusion leads increasingly to calls for interdisciplinarity. However, we face a scientific world characterized by a tendency to specialize and split disciplines further into sub- and even sub-sub-disciplines.
In the early 1990s, Wageningen University in the Netherlands founded the Technology and Agrarian Development Group to research the topic of interdisciplinarity in agricultural science and technology development in relation to the aforementioned contemporary problems. This special issue presents a sample of the work done in this field. The articles in this issue build on the intellectual contribution of Paul Richards – who led the group from 1993 until 2010 – to crossing the boundaries between the technical–natural sciences on the one hand and social sciences on the other. The articles have in common that they analyse technology as a set of practices determined by social–technical configurations of farmers, researchers and others involved in development and use of technology. The articles also have in common the attention for methodological approaches to interdisciplinarity. The papers in this special issue of NJAS – Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences show that interdisciplinarity is more than just good communication between scientists. Interdisciplinary approaches specifically ask for appropriate methodologies. The various papers aim to contribute to the understanding of such methodologies. They introduce, discuss and provide examples of technography as an approach to the systematic study of the social–technical nature of agricultural and scientific practices. The concept of performance and the focus on people's practices, including the scientific practice of experiments and combining research styles, are paramount in technography, as they bring out how technology is embedded in its context and how it interacts with the social world. Together, these articles explore and show how carefully shaped research questions that cross the natural–social science boundaries and take practice and performance around technology development and use as a starting point, can produce relevant insights for addressing the major contemporary problems that agricultural science has to face.