Redesigning Animal Agriculture

was intended to capture this vital interconnectedness
effectively between systemic
‘acts’ of development in the material and
social worlds and the epistemic development
of all of the ‘actors’ who ought to be
engaged in those endeavours. From such
a perspective it makes sense to now recast
the task of redesigning animal agriculture as
an initiative in systemic development that
embraces the need to extend the criteria for
improvement in agriculture way beyond
the mere efficiency and effectiveness of
livestock systems. This shift in focus has
two essential features: (i) that the emphasis
is changed from one which privileges the
relatively remote processes of research and
of design, to one which now focuses on the
participative process of development, with
all of the messiness that that connotes; and
(ii) that the particular perspective of this
development is systemic in both form and
function.
Systemic Development in Animal
Agriculture
As indicated earlier in the Division’s literature,
the welfare, health, safety and quality
of the products of animal agriculture, as well
of entire livestock production systems, must
now be regarded as essential features of the
new horizons. So too, it is argued, must be
concerns for human health and community
well-being, for social acceptance, and for
environmental sustainability. This last matter
alone provides a substantial epistemic challenge,
not the least because it is a quintessentially
contestable concept that, as Thompson
(2004) opines, combines questions about
what it is that could be made to persist, with
what it is that should be allowed to do so. It
is highly unlikely that satisfactory answers to
these questions could ever be generated from
a dualistic worldview and indeed their very
contestability demands the type of dialectical
discourse that characterizes the epistemic
state of contextual relativism, where meaning
and plans for meaningful action only
emerge through communicative inter actions
between people and the environmental cir-
A Systemic Perspective 11
cumstances that they face. And if nothing
else, this implies types of participation in
issues and engagement with the citizenry,
and with those in other relevant institutions,
that are far removed from the conventions of
animal scientists and which demand a greatly
heightened epistemic awareness as a prelude
to necessary worldview transform ations by
all concerned, including, and perhaps especially,
scientists themselves.
A reinterpretation of the redesign of
animal agriculture as systemic development
presents those committed to the quest for
new horizons with at least three epistemic
challenges. The first of these relates to the
question of how nature is known through
science and how adequate and salient that
prevailing epistemology of science is to the
development process. The second issue
concerns the impact of such matters on
citizens as they attempt to engage together
with scientists with issues of development
that are of profound significance to all. And
this then leads to the third issue of what
could and should be done from a systemic
perspective to remove the constraints to the
transformation of the current situation representing
the two other issues!
There is, of course, no single epistemology
of science, just as there is no single
model of development. It is useful, however,
to contrast two particular epistemologies that
prevail within scientific work in agriculture,
which reflect a dualistic and a contextual
position respectively. Manicas and Secord
(1983), for instance, have identified and
contrasted what they refer to as trad itional
science on the one hand and realist science
on the other. Where the former has a foundationalist
epistemology in which the test of
the truth of a proposition is the correspondence
between theory and data and theories
are deduced from the factual data, with the
latter, it is the practices of science that generate
their own criteria for which theory is
accepted or rejected. Where conventional
science accepts the logic of reductionism,
the realist position is that the natural world
is non-reductive and emergent. Where traditional
science accepts causality as a central
feature that leads to symmetry between explanations
and predictions, the realist position