Farming God’s Way: Cultivation and religious practice in contemporary South Africa
The FarGo project—“Farming God’s Way": Cultivation and religious practice in contemporary South Africa—investigates the interplay between religion and farming among Christians in South Africa. The purpose is to explore how faith-based agriculture today is promoted, enacted and practiced in relation to growing environmental challenges and climate change.
The project is a qualitative case-study of an emerging faith-based approach to farming called “Farming God’s Way”. Evangelical/Charismatic Christians today promote the Farming God’s Way-model as a sustainable economic, social and ecological solution, not only to food shortage and local poverty, but also to growing perils of a changing global climate. The model combines a close reading of the bible with management skills and agricultural technology; including no-till farming, crop rotation, and mulching (referred to as ‘God’s blanket’) and reflects a space where humans’ relationships to nature, and the divine today are renegotiated and put into practice.
Against emerging challenges of food production, the aim is to analyze how relationships to land, soil and plants are enacted, shaped and embodied in acts that cultivate Christian farmers. By looking at the interconnectedness between acts of farming and religious practice, the project draws on ethnographic inquiry to document the impact of and relations between, religious attitudes, materiality and environmental concerns in South Africa.
Approaching faith-based farming as a material site where religion takes place, theoretically means analyzing Christian modes of farming beyond its functional dimension (i.e. producing food and improving standards of living), as acts that creates spiritual meaning in what often is seen as mundane actions of weeding, planting and harvesting. Paying attention to such spiritual/material mediations open up for also assessing how cultivation practices influences Christian farmers’ positions, in relation to social, gendered and environmental dimensions in the local context of South Africa.
The project will run from August 2019 - February 2023.
- Article in Globalnyt: Er ”landbrug på Guds måde” en bæredygtig løsning på Sydafrikas fødevaremangel?
- Blog post: ‘Restoring divine soil: A case of biblical farming’
- Blog Post: ‘Branding, labeling and (re)storing - Conservative Christian food activism in South Africa’
- Article in TEOL-nyt: "Farming God's way" - klimatsmart och hållbart jordbruk i Sydafrika?
Resources
“Farming God’s Way” has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843798.
Researchers:
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hans Olsson | Marie Curie Fellow | +45 35 33 03 36 | hol@teol.ku.dk |
| Karen Lauterbach (supervisor) | Associate Professor | +45 35 32 36 16 | kjl@teol.ku.dk |
| Andreas Bandak (advisor) | Associate Professor | +45 51 30 25 14 | bandak@hum.ku.dk |
Contact
Hans Göran Olsson
Marie Curie Fellow
hol@teol.ku.dk
Phone: +45 35 33 03 36
Green Religious Activism in Africa
Seminar at CAS 16 Feb 2023
Funded by
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement.