ABSTRACT
The shift in Turkey from farming practices of the past to capitalized agriculture has been accompanied by significant social-relational and ideational changes. This chapter examines these changes from the perspective of large-scale farmers in Beypazarı and Güdül in the province of Ankara. It explores how global biotechnology-led agro-scientific innovations and their government-backed implementation foster the transformative context for local agriculture. Several key questions arise: How and why do producers embrace an industrial agriculture that is heavily reliant on input-intensive capitalized farming practices? And what is the nature of the relationship between a capitalized model and the already existing practices and empirical knowledge base of farming? These are crucial methodological questions that bear on the larger issue of people’s own active involvement in larger, extra-local institutional processes, structural changes and ontologies. The chapter draws from my interviews with large-scale fresh-vegetable producers to provide an in-depth analysis of how and why techno-economic innovation has become acceptable to farmers, thereby supplanting old customary practices.
