Modes of Production: Farming and Herding

Introduction to Modes of Production

• This chapter studies farming, herding, and diversified economies through human behavioral ecology (HBE)
• HBE considers farming and herding significant due to their impact on human survival and reproduction
• Farming/herding and foraging share trade-offs regarding time, energy, and opportunity cost
• Farming and herding are components of the human adaptive phenotype.
• Throughout the Holocene, societies adapted by varying their reliance on wild and domesticated foods
• Farming/herding are linked to environment, ecology, evolution, cognition, economy, politics, and culture
• Farming/herding are symbiotic between humans and plant/animal prey
• Harvesting resources causes microevolutionary changes in prey and predators
• This includes diet adaptation, and increased disease resistance

Evolution through Food Production

• Food production has economic dimensions, creating goods for consumption, exchange, and investment.
• Food production has cognitive facets, needing thought and choice.
• Food production is political because of the resource conflicts that involve land, labor, crops, and livestock
• Farming/herding is significant in the evolution of sociality, cooperation, division of labor, and inequality
• HBE research is less developed for farming/herding compared to hunting and gathering studies
• HBE has borrowed questions/models from behavioral ecology
• Behavioral ecology borrowed terms from microeconomics
• Shared concepts include return rates, efficiency, diminishing marginal returns/value, opportunity cost, indifference, and preference

Core Issues in Farming and Herding Studies

• The chapter emphasizes five issues unavoidable when studying farming and herding: time, risk, inputs and intensification, markets, and institutions
• The chapter starts with three ethnographic case studies: Kofyar farmers of Nigeria, Turkana herders of Kenya, and Mikea forager-farmer-herders of Madagascar
• The chapter explores three theoretical starting points: foraging theory, agricultural household economics, and cultural ecology
• Commensurability, or how to compare dissimilar forms of value, are discussed
• The chapter will address future directions that involve niche construction, embodied capital, cooperation/competition, culture, and applied evolutionary anthropology

Kofyar Farmers of Nigeria

• Kofyar farmers are located on the Jos Plateau of central Nigeria
• The Jos Plateau consists of steep-sloped hills rising above the Benue floodplain
• The Kofyar are land-intensive farmers invest much labor for high productivity per land unit
• Soil is rocky and prone to erosion, so Kofyar develop the soil and landscape

Soil Cultivation Techniques

• Kofyar mulch plant matter with manure in goat pens and transport fertilizer to fields
• They sculpt the land into cross-cutting waffle ridges to trap rainwater
• Kofyar grow maize, millet, sorghum, acha, yam, Hausa potatoes, sweet potatoes, cowpeas, peanuts, pumpkins, palms, and fruits
• The Kofyar use polyculture strategies and grow species together
• Crops have different properties, leading to different trade-offs

Crop Harvesting

• Grains are domesticated grasses with distinct and predictable seasons
• Seeds germinate after planting, producing grain, and then the plant dies

Time Portfolio

• Kofyar plant a mix of grains that have varying harvesting times
• Acha and millet provide seed after 2 and 4 months respectively.
• Sorghum requires 8 months but is less vulnerable to insufficient, early rainfall
• Unlike grains, roots and tubers lack predetermined harvesting seasons
• The farmer must choose timing, balancing immediate need with tuber size and risk
• Tubers can become increasingly toxic or woody with age.
• Legumes like grains, have a distinct season, providing protein and fat, and replacing soil nitrogen

Land Tenure on Jos Plateau

• Limited land leads to shared understanding of land tenure
• Land is clan property; in practice, farmers operate as if it is private property
• Cash crop markets in the 1950s encouraged clearing land in the plains
• These migrant, lowland farmers faced labor shortages, not land shortage

Extensive Farming

• These farmers then began doing extensive farming, also known as horticulture
• Extensive farmers put very little labor toward improving unit land production

Turkana Herders of Kenya

• Turkana people of northern Kenya live in the semiarid plain between Uganda and Lake Turkana
• Plant matter is inedible to humans, so humans live by herding
• Turkana use domesticated camels, cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys to transform resources to nutrition

Herding Considerations

• Camels, cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys have advantages and disadvantages
• Cattle, donkeys, and sheep graze grass, while camels and goats browse tree leaves and bark
• Camels are large, expensive, slow to reproduce, produce a lot of milk, and are drought-tolerant
• Cattle are very prone to drought but provide milk.
• Sheep and goats ("smallstock") are smaller, cheaper, quick breeders with less milk and drought-prone

Turkana Diet and Livestock

• Turkana face the challenge of daily family feeding
• It’s cost prohibitive to slaughter animals weekly
• Turkana are reluctant to slaughter animals
• Livestock are walking banks with stored value accruing interest as animals reproduce
• Individual animals have differing interest rates
• Milk and blood, called secondary products, are one way to feed families
• Turkana bleed camels and cattle with minimal impact
• They eat animal blood raw, mixed with milk, or cooked
• Ngisonyoka Turkana acquire 90% of calories from milk during wet season
• Other ways that Turkana meet daily food needs are purchased foods, hunting, gathering, and stealing livestock

Turkana Livestock

• Because livestock are walking property, it is significant for Turkana to know ownership
• Turkana livestock tenure is complex
• Adult married men (sometimes widowed women) manage animal care, allocation, distribution, slaughter and sales
• Livestock is branded marking property of the man’s patrilineage, reminding men to be ready for aid
• Milking stock is allocated to wives for daily food needs
• Turkana share animals across Social networks that is called stock associations
• Herds may reduce risks from drought/raid, since losses will not affect all animals

Mikea of Southwestern Madagascar

• Mikea live in the dry forests of Madagascar's semiarid southwest
• Despite calling themselves hunter-gatherers, Mikea have often practiced diversified subsistence
• The Mikea forage for wild ovy tubers, honey, and small game.
• Mikea also cultivate maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, and irrigated wet rice; herd zebu cattle/goats, poultry
• They also do wage labor and market exchange
• Each household has unique portfolios of foraging, farming, herding, and marketing

Mikea Foraging Numbers

• Wild ovy tubers, adults average 2043 kcal/h and children average 844 kcal/h
• Unlike other foragers, Mikea have almost no large game to hunt
• Mikea spend almost as many calories getting small prey as gaining
• Tambotrike tenrecs average −69 kcal/h acquisition rate
• These game sell for higher price and profits are used to purchase cheaper food

Mikea Cultivation

• Farmers do little to improve crop yield
• They plant both maize and manioc: maize for heavy rain, manioc for light rain
• Maize must be harvested after 3 months and Manioc can grow a long time
• Mikea use livestock as wealth, milk, and traction, as well as ancestor sacrifices
• Livestock and land were owned by clans, but were later transformed into private property ownership
• Mikea sell wild and domesticated foods and do mobile retailing
• Mikea have sold goods for export, like wild silk in the 1920s, and cash-cropped maize and marine products more recently

Trade-offs in Farming and Herding

• Farming and herding are an overview of trade-offs that relate to time, risk, input/intensification, market, and institutions
• Farming and herding decisions are intertemporal or over time
• Kofyar must decide fast but low-yielding acha or slow but drought-hardy sorghum
• Kofyar and Mikea must decide how long root crops mature, trading waiting verses greater size
• Turkana must choose large/slow camels or fast/small goats and sheep

Risk Management

• Risk: the probability of shortfall or loss (Stephens 1990:24; Winterhalder et al. 1999:302).
• Variability in rainfall, wind, temperature, pests, and disease may lead to lose crops.
• Markowitz suggested portfolios of uncorrelated returns to reduce risk
• Kofyar, Mikea, and Turkana follow this practice when combining millet/cattle with drought-hardy plants
• Kofyar also improve through intensifying agriculture and reduces variability
• Turkana move herds and share through stock associations, to improve risk

Investment of Input

• Inputs are labor, land, cash, tech, etc. to enhance yield
• Intensification occurs during an increase in investment for increase productivity
• Mikea are extensive because they use few techniques
• Highland Kofyar are land-intensive: improving land by fertilizing, ridging, terracing, and polyculture with labor
• Intensification can also occur during foraging/herding
• Mikea tuber foraging is extensive; Turkana is herding contrasting factory model

Market Dynamics

• Markets bring exchanges for material gain through marketplaces
• Markets transform production value
• Mikea transform small game (low calories) into cash for cheaper foods
• Mikea profit through regional supply/demand
• With markets, farmers can potentially sell staples for revenue to buy goods

Institutions for Society

• Institutions organize rights to laborers, land, livestock, tools and foods
• These are collective norms and practices that solve collective actions
• Kofyar, Turkana, and Mikea own land and livestock through clans.
• Other institutions may include gendered rights and supernatural elements
• By following accepted rules, coordination problems avoid property tragedies

Foraging Theory as an Anchor

• Foraging theory is an optimal model building that tests human decisions
• Foraging-theory assumes that the choice to make a “good” decision to forage has reproductive benefit
• Frequency of the best decision should, overtime, have selection via the environment
• This could predict that human behavior relates to fitness in some useful way
• When the models do not predict behavior, that there are alternate goals such as time-minimization

Agricultural Economics as an Anchor

• Neoclassical economics has similar assumptions that value what generates decisions
• But economists believe that that people tend to generally maximize utility
• Utility includes things such as the level of satisfaction among different values
• For most goods, there is less value as an increase in consumption

Analyzing People Based on Choices

• Utlity is an easy concept as it avoids assumptions
• It assumes what someone wants has to do with maximizing what they want

Social Ecology as an Anchor

• Steward that societies alter their tools to cope
• Although difficult to be generalized to a diverse group of people, helpful in finding shared conditions for similar ecological issues

Communal Challenges for HBE

• Challenges require that they incorporate time, risk, intensification, markets, and institutions that require comparisons
• Commensurability for human models has more to do with time and energy
• A man, farmer, or herder, is constrained by land, cash, or money and may need other types of resources
• An answer would result from data on what they would expect

Evaluating with Rewards

• An evaluation using rewards as gain, and a value for unit
• Unit should be the currency used and those that lack resource
• Foraging uses time over labor as the basis of comparison

Future Discounting

• Mazur's hyperbolic discounting function relates value through the following:
• VD= A/1+kD where VD is the value of reward, A is reward, and 'k' indicates discounted value over time

Shortcomings of Discounting Models

• Model predictions rely on selected values
• There may be variations among studies
• Hyperbolic discounting is based on intertemporal choice, not its explanation

Key Studies in Discounting

• Moving from farming to foraging becomes a choice between intertemporal rewards of domesticated animals

Time Discounting

• Time-discounting can help in why the the people did not dedicate in farming
• Agriculture became a part-time suppliment to hunting
• Factor 'k' at the time represents immediate food
• Higher values lead subjective returns
• The cycle reduces motivation

Risk Assessment

• Basic risk can measured from calculating the number of food events over many harvests
• It provides a way of understanding the competition in the area in that region

Behavioral Ecologists and Risk

• Scientists are able to use the “Z model” to compare risk
• Model evaluates risk as a way to have less to ensure a minimum
• Reduced variance can be expressed using a number system such as 'z' number on the deviates

Harvests and Variables that Interfere

• There may be variables that cause harm with variance
• An illustrative may include a farmer attempting to perform several cropping strategies

Exposure Units

• To reduce potential harm, farmers are to spread out their activities
• This also allows to have many baskets to avoid breaking each egg if things go wrong

Diversification

• Increasing production may intendify as well, but often it decreases change
• Increasing the average yields means you need to understand what affects variance as well

Key Studies In Farming

• Field scattering can reduces variance
• Diversifying fields leads to a reduction in exposure to certain risks

Mace and Houston Studies

• There may be an optimum composition relative to the overall wealth
• They also found that the amount relates to wealth

Optimal Investment

• Money should be placed on the trees
• To the get an apple there is a cost - so one has to reduce pest or look at fertilizers

Agricultural Economics

• There is a choice for what to feed a field based on crop response and rate
• Beyond a certain level you will not be able to gain as much or achieve what you set out to do

Optimal vs. Gross

• Important to note is that that investment by the farmer is small what what one has
• Farmers want a lot of more power

Models of intensification

• Those that invest gain more land
• Labor becomes efficient to the methods
• Farmers benefit based on scarcity

Development Projects

• Development projects encourage the people to seek maximum development from farmers

Use of Input

• For all uses, optimizing inputs are the proper way
• A lot of methods would maximize one self, but you must consider the potential for other things