Here's a brief summary timeline of the movement towards agroecology. Agroecological farming is probably as old as farming itself, Western science has only recently begun to examine it. This timeline covers early agronomic and ethnographic studies on what would become agroecology to its scholarship, social movements, and institutional acceptance of today.
I recently had an opportunity to do some research on agroecology in Southern Mexico for my Political Ecologies of Food and Agriculture course and came across The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands by Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh. The book was published in 2015 and I was disappointed it wasn’t on my radar sooner. Ford and Nigh provide an extensively research foundation for the book. In my opinion, it could easily be considered one of the seminal works on indigenous Mayan agricultural systems. The book examines the milpa system, an agricultural framework that has been used in Central America for (as the title states) millennia. The co-authors of the book have spent nearly the entirety of their careers studying the milpa system alongside the descendants of the ancient Maya. Ronald and Nigh dive deep into written and oral histories to catalog the evolution of the milpa and the its various contexts throughout time. From its heyd...

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