Locally grown seeds, natural fertilizer, and pranata mangsa: Women farmers practicing sustainable agriculture while contesting the Green Revolution in Indonesia

The Indonesian agrarian sector is a male dominated field where planting rice is centrally managed by the government. Like other Southeast Asian countries, the 1960s Green Revolution policy aimed to boost rice productivity by obligating farmers to buy and use imported seeds, use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to exterminate pests, and employ mechanistic farming. The results have been detrimental to the environment, contributed to farmers’ reliance on foreign suppliers of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides and have even led to rice export—the antithesis of the Green Revolution’s rhetoric itself. This article explores how women farmers contest the dominant discourse and policies on agriculture by practicing sustainable agriculture through using locally grown seeds, developing and using natural nutrients, and sustaining pranata mangsa as local knowledge for the agricultural calendar. Through a feminist participatory action research, we work together with Solidaritas Perempuan, a local women's organization, to document the practices of sustainable farming in rural Indonesia. By taking a feminist political ecology, we argue that these ethically informed agricultural practices challenge the dominant neoliberal-mechanistic approach to rice production and consumption, while identifying more sustainable agricultural practices.