‘Farming is learned in the field, not in the classroom!’

– Enacting Sustainability as Social Organisation in Southeastern European Farming

Abstract

Sustainability in agriculture is as much a policy goal as a cultural and political project:
privileging scientific expertise, innovation, and entrepreneurship, it defines what
counts as competent farming, sidelining the everyday, hands-on skills that actually
sustain it. This paper examines how skills shape sustainability in Southeastern
European agriculture, focusing on North Macedonia and Greece. Drawing on
Science and Technology Studies, and specifically the concepts of in-difference
and tinkering, we analyse three ethnographic episodes – ploughing, spraying, and
hoeing – to show how farmers enact multiple versions of environmental, social,
and economic sustainability. Beyond demonstrating multiplicity, our findings
reveal that skill itself functions as a central coordinating mechanism, mediating
between inherited knowledge, technoscientific guidance, social expectations, and
labour organisation. Yet this coordination is not seamless: in making different
sustainability demands workable in practice, certain forms of labour, knowledge,
and responsibility are set apart and set aside. By focusing on the practices through
which skill coordinates these demands, our approach reveals dynamics that remain
hidden when policy focuses mostly on measurable outcomes, providing a basis for
more socially just and inclusive sustainability interventions.