ABSTRACT
The transformation of agriculture has been a continuous process ever since its invention, multiple times, thousands of years ago. As with other technological issues, such transformations are sometimes slow in coming, sometimes fast, sometimes simple and obvious, sometimes complicated and obscure. A detailed accounting, either historically situated or restricted to contemporary operation, is challenging to say the least. Yet there are clearly modes and tempos that are discernable — longue durées, so to speak — within which a kind of sociotechnological homeostasis can be recognized, 1 a framework that we employed at the beginning of this book (Chapter 1). Such a framework, obvious at the level of whole-farm operations, exists at a variety of levels in ecosystems, some with perhaps trivial consequences, such as a sharp increase of the population density of an ant species, but others with dramatic consequences, such as the epidemic of coffee rust in 2013 in northern Latin America. Likewise, some are purely technical transformations of underlying mechanisms (e.g., the possible change in mode of repressing colony expansion of Azteca in Chapter 4), while others result from the interplay of ecological, economic and political changes.
