Indonesian farmers are losing their ancient language of sustainable agriculture as industrial farming takes over

High in the misty highlands of Indonesia’s Flores Island, the Manggarai people are witnessing the disappearance of something precious: the words that have guided their sustainable farming practices for generations. As industrial monoculture farming replaces traditional agroforestry methods, an entire vocabulary describing how to farm in harmony with nature is vanishing along with the forests themselves.

For centuries, the Manggarai farmers have been masters of agroforestry—growing diverse crops at forest edges while preserving biodiversity. Their language reflected this deep ecological knowledge, with specific words describing everything from harvesting techniques to plant growth stages and sacred forest spaces. “It is encouraging to see how much of this traditional ecological knowledge still lives in community memory,” notes ethnolinguist Mel Engman from Queen’s University Belfast.

However, since 1960, monoculture farming has rapidly transformed the landscape. Traditional crops like sorghum and upland rice—which kept soils healthy and required minimal forest clearing—have been replaced by water-intensive paddy rice and plantation crops that demand flooded fields and heavy fertilizer use. As forests shrink to make way for these industrial farms, the specialized vocabulary that once guided sustainable agriculture is disappearing too.

Researchers from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency are now racing against time, working with the Ruteng Pu’u community to document 253 at-risk agroforestry terms. Their efforts highlight a critical truth: when we lose indigenous languages, we don’t just lose words—we lose centuries of accumulated wisdom about living sustainably on Earth.