Farmerama’s Principles for Knowledge Sharing & Building a More Ecological Future
Farmerama Radio is an award-winning podcast sharing the voices behind regenerative farming. Each month, the show features farmers and growers rebuilding our food and ecosystems from the ground up.
We are committed to positive ecological futures for the earth and its people, and we believe that farmers of the world will determine this. By giving them a voice, we hope to rejuvenate the confidence and vibrancy of regenerative farmers and rural communities and demonstrate how their decisions affect us all — from our food, to our health, and the planet.
At Farmerama, we communicate these stories and share knowledge within the farming community and to those at the seams of a more ecological future that is already happening. In doing so, we aim to embody the following principles:
1. Speak your truth: share your knowledge and personal experiences while also creating space for others to share theirs
We understand that everyone has a reason for believing what they believe and doing what they do — whether we agree with them, or not. While it’s important to us to behave with integrity and to uphold our own truths, it’s also important not to let that get in the way of allowing others to do so, too.
We also recognise that wisdom comes in many forms, shapes and sizes — from the intellectual, to the experiential and embodied, to the spiritual. We understand that all these ways of understanding and knowing are important pieces of the puzzle of existence.
2. Listen deeply
No two people go through the world in exactly the same way, and each of us has a wealth and depth of intelligence which informs the way we see and interpret the world. The only way to truly honour that intelligence, and to collectively learn and benefit from it, is to practice the art of listening deeply.
3. Embrace nuance and complexity: there is a world beyond dualities
In a world so full of crisis and upheaval, we can tend to cling to our beliefs as a safe haven, or a source of certainty amidst increasing uncertainty. But while we think it’s important to believe in what you have learnt, we think that it’s just as important not to treat them as dogma.
The world is complex — the ecosystems that we and the farmers whose stories we share teach us that, unequivocally. Entangled relationships lead to emergent outcomes, and it’s important to be able to lean into that complexity rather than shying away from it. We don’t try to simplify the stories we share, and we try not to portray things in terms of ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’.
4. Appreciate the courage and care in sharing emotions
We know that shaming or blaming others doesn’t convince them we’re right — it just entrenches divisions. Sharing our truth — and allowing others to do the same — holds great power; it is a fundamental tool for building a more collaborative, caring future. We also respect the value of emotions as a form of intelligence — a more ecological future cannot be built on reason alone. Hearts matter, as well as minds.
5. Recognise that new words may be needed as we imagine and craft collective futures
As storytellers, words are our tools. They contain great power not only to name the world but also to shape it. We believe that the way we talk about things matters — it creates a powerful framing for how we see the world. Language is born from the world we live in, and it shapes the way we see and understand that world: “[w]ords are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.”
By experimenting with words and language (like in this blog post written by Abby for agroecological funders Farming the Future) we recognise that new ways of describing the world might be needed as we work together to understand how to live together on and with the changing world.
Of course, these ‘new’ ways of speaking, of naming, of knowing might only be new to us; other cultures, other languages, and indeed the languages of our own pasts, may often already have the words we need to call upon. Our own languages may be missing the words we need to express concepts, ideas, relationships, and feelings that are unfamiliar — or that we feel and know in our hearts, but don’t know how to speak of. But we recognise that in this regard we have much to learn from other ways of speaking and knowing. As Wade Davis put it, “[e]very language is an old-growth forest of the mind,” and they can teach us a great deal that we don’t yet know we’re missing.
