Understanding farming through relational farming approaches: The use of a health-nutrition-ecology nexus for enquiry into small-farming households’ resilience

In times of exacerbating agro-food crises, understanding farming through its constituting interrelated factors is a key element of crisis mitigation. The mostly linear approaches such as represented in the current agricultural discourses and by the agricultural sciences fall short in explaining the real-life complexities and overlapping crises experienced by small-scale farmers. Based on my recent qualitative fieldwork in Thailand, this paper aims to picture the complexities within which households' farming practices operate, and how these arise from a web of socio-cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. By pleading for relational approaches to farming such as those acknowledging its immanent human-ecology interaction, this paper suggests a novel "health-nutrition-ecology" nexus to guide enquiry into the intimate relations between ecology, livelihoods, and health and well-being. It is employed to gain understanding of small-farming households' situations, deep-rooted causes of these, and their resilience in facing crises. The paper further pleads for a shift in existing technocratic agricultural discourses towards their inclusiveness of real-world narratives by small-scale farmers. These narratives can deliver insights for policies that aim at actual transformations of crisis-prone agro-food systems and could benefit both farmer livelihoods and farm ecologies.