What the efficiency-obsessed development experts didn’t appreciate was how fragile their consolidation strategy would make life for the peasant farmers. Instead of being ignorant, the peasants understood a spooky wisdom, insights gained over many lifetimes of trial and error experimentation. The farmers who didn’t scatter their plots died. Those who didn’t have enough plots also died. The farmers who survived had lots of scattered plots, a strategy for survival they passed on as traditional wisdom.
