2. What is Agroecology?
• “ecology of sustainable food systems"
(Gliessman)
• “it has already begun to change the way
agriculture is perceived and practiced from scales
ranging from the soil food web, to polycultural
cropping regimes and the political economy of
local food systems”(Toensmeier).
• “at minimum, agroecological production
attempts to bypass the damage done by
corporate-led agro-industrial food regimes that
control the majority of the agro-food
infrastructure” (Altieri)
7. What is a Polyculture? An integrative crop system
designed to take advantage of multiple plant-plant and
plant-animal synergies to create a resilient, sustainable
and abundant socio-ecological system
16. What tools and leverage points are available to
us to operationalize agroecology in complex
multi-stakeholder systems?
17. Strategies and Leverage Points?
Personal Practice
• Esbjörn-Hargens & Zimmerman: Perspective & Depth
• Bland & Bell: Holonic "Flickering”
Complex System Process Facilitation
• Participatory epistemology, interdisciplinary research and
transdisciplinary practice
Context specific design, scaled application
• Gliessman: 4 Levels of Conversion to agroecology
An Evolving Critically (Kincheloe, 2008)
• How has agroecology manifest in Ontario within and aside
from industrial agriculture? In what ways has it been co-
opted? How should it be contested? Or celebrated?
22. An evolving criticality of our agricultural
pedagogy, markets and policy both locally
and globally
23. An Evolving Criticality: Future Research on
Agroecology in Ontario
Is it happening?
What is being done?
What?
On what level(s) is
the intervention
How?
Theory of
change
Impacts/outcomes
, shortcomings &
synergies
Behavior:
Education & Training
Initiatives
Systems:
Production &
Consumption
Networks
Culture:
Research, Policy and
Politics
