One of the challenges of constructing agricultural systems that aim to be sustainable, is the usage of scientific knowledge adapted to the peculiar social situation. For this purpose it is necessary to consider the knowledge that farmers accumulated over time and space. In the case of the soil resources, a modest amount of the local knowledge is considered in classrooms and in soil research. This is a constraint to the application of technologies based on local scientific knowledge involving traditional farmer groups, mainly because of the lack of adaptation to the needs they are aware of. The objective of this study is to show a new methodology that integrates the pedologists' and local farmers' knowledge. The traditional local hierarchy of environments in the Cerrado region was used as a tool to understand how this relationship can be constructed. The study was developed based on environmental and social parameters in the Água Boa 2 community, in Rio Pardo de Minas, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It was possible to analyze the local terminology in a field survey and to describe the environments, to classify the land types, and to establish active dialogues about the Cerrado and its soils.
Ethnopedology; local knowledge; scientific knowledge; soil mapping
