The Good Farmer

Culture and Identity in Food and Agriculture

Rob J.F. Burton, Jérémie Forney, Paul Stock, Lee-Ann Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138727793
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351749749
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Ecologia

Developed by leading authors in the field, this book offers a cohesive and definitive theorisation of the concept of the 'good farmer', integrating historical analysis, critique of contemporary applications of good farming concepts, and new case studies, providing a springboard for future research.

The concept of the good farmer has emerged in recent years as part of a move away from attitude and economic-based understandings of farm decision-making towards a deeper understanding of culture and symbolism in agriculture. The Good Farmer shows why agricultural production is socially and culturally, as well as economically, important. It explores the history of the concept and its position in contemporary theory, as well as its use and meaning in a variety of different contexts, including landscape, environment, gender, society, and as a tool for resistance. By exploring the idea of the good farmer, it reveals the often-unforeseen assumptions implicit in food and agricultural policy that draw on culture, identity, and presumed notions of what is 'good'. The book concludes by considering the potential of the good farmer concept for addressing future, emerging issues in agriculture.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of food and agriculture and rural development, as well as professionals and policymakers involved in the food and agricultural industry.

1

THE ‘GOOD FARMER’

Cultural dimensions of farming and social change

Throughout the world, farmers gather in groups large and small to discuss the weather, crop prices, the government, and a host of other factors affecting their farms and daily lives. Around Formica or oak tables, leaning against a piece of old farm machinery, or wherever they happen to be, these same farmers share anecdotes, jokes, and apocryphal stories about what happened to the farmer down the road, whose crops are full of weeds, whose tramlines are crooked, who sold his/her sheep for the highest price, who bought a new tractor, and so on. Within these settings the topic invariably turns to who is a ‘good farmer’ – and who is not. In the daily lives of farmers, the act of calling someone a ‘good farmer’ is an acknowledgement of appreciation and status within the community. It is not a title given lightly. Rather it bestows on the individual recognition of the cultural competences that make a farmer worthy of being sought out by others for assistance – knowledge, skills, or material assistance – the provision of which, in turn, forms bonds of mutual obligation within farming communities. It is the centre of the farming culture. The concept of being a ‘good farmer’ is global, with a ‘good farmer’ being recognisable across different regions and over generations – providing the understandings of what it is to be a ‘good farmer’ are shared.

While rural social scientists and extension agents throughout the world speak in the language of this everyday usage of what and who is a good farmer, it is only within the past 15 years that social scientists have taken the concept of the ‘good farmer’ seriously as a category important in and of itself. Rob Burton’s article “Seeing Through the ‘Good Farmers’ Eyes: Towards Developing an Understanding of the Social Symbolic Value of ‘Productivist’ Behaviour”, published in Sociologia Ruralis in 2004, helped establish an intriguing and inviting space for reinvigorating a lapsed engagement for agri-food scholars. By following the lead of the farmers, rural social scientists have hit upon a cultural and political category important not only to the farmers themselves, but to extension agents, policy makers, environmental and development NGOs, non-farming neighbours, and increasingly, farmers with multiple, often contested perspectives on who is a good farmer. The ‘good farming’ literature has grown steadily in the past 15 years, signifying important changes both to the rural social sciences and agri-food studies as well as to the worlds of farming.

At the time Burton’s (2004) paper was published, agri-food studies and rural studies of farmers’ decision-making strategies were still strongly influenced by rational models of decision making, although a gradual move away from these models had been occurring. In particular, Wolpert (1964) had argued that farmers did not make decisions on the basis of economic rationality alone. They were not interested in maximising outcomes, only reaching a satisfactory solution. Later, Gasson (1973) contended that economically optimal outcomes were not reached because farmers’ decisions were not always driven by economic goals, but that sometimes farmers sought to optimise social, intrinsic, and/or expressive goals. The development of a reliably predictive attitude-behaviour model by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) saw the interest turn to attitudes to explain non-economically rational behaviour – enabling agricultural studies to identify what it was farmers were prioritising (e.g. Ilbery, 1983) – and, by the mid-1990s, the “behavioural approach” was being widely employed. This was outlined in Morris and Potter (1995) as being based

on the motives, values and attitudes that determine the decision-making processes of individual farmers.

(p. 55)

Of course, farmers were not able to simply do whatever they wanted. Rather, the decisions made were governed by structural factors that were seen to constrain, facilitate, and reflect the motivational preferences of the farmer or farm family.

Beginning in the 1990s agricultural studies pushed beyond the economic/attitudinal approaches and began looking at the notions of identity and culture as a potential factor in understanding farmer behaviour. To some extent this represented the continuation of a tradition of exploring role and identity emanating from gender studies – for example, the role of women as business managers (Hastings, 1988), the subordinate nature of women’s roles in agriculture (Stebbing, 1984; Gasson and Winter, 1992), the gendered division of labour roles and decision making (Sawer, 1973; Berlan Darqué, 1988; Whatmore, 1991), the role of drinking in establishing masculine rural identities (Campbell, 2000), and the construction of masculine farmer identities (Saugeres, 2002). However, despite the realisation of its importance to gendered behaviour in agriculture as early as the 1970s it was not until the turn of the century that researchers thought of applying these same concepts to what were still generally perceived as the ‘rational’, ‘economically oriented’ male decision makers managing farms.

Some mention had been made of the ‘good farmer’ in the 1990s. Fairweather and Keating (1994), for example, briefly observed the social importance of being recognised as a good farmer. Phillips and Gray (1995) in an Australian study examining sustainability in agriculture, observed that there were a number of competing definitions of what it meant to be a ‘good farmer’ within the farming community. They offer one of the earliest recognitions of the social importance of being a ‘good farmer’ as they note:

farmers are constantly engaged in strategic farm practice to gain the community recognition required to define their farming practice as ‘good farming’. The social relations of farming are thus both enabling and constraining to farming practice.

(p. 131)

Harrison et al. (1998) also noted how recognition as a ‘good farmer’ was important and identified distinctions between what farmers and non-farmers viewed as a ‘good famer’. Throughout the decade references to the ‘good farmer’ increasingly came to acknowledge the term as a cultural construct. Perhaps the first paper to outline this as part of a cohesive theory was Tsouvalis et al. (2000). In seeking to understand moral conflict between different knowledge-cultures (i.e. “socially negotiated structures of meaning that enable and constrain social actions”, p. 912), Tsouvalis and colleagues observed that the boundaries between cultures were determined by notions of what it meant to be a ‘good farmer’. Knowledges that fell outside cultural definitions of the ‘good farmer’ were contested on that basis, e.g.,

‘good’ farmers are supposed to know their land; ‘the public’ and ‘politicians’ don’t understand ‘us’; ‘scientists’ and ‘manufacturers’ should come and talk to ‘us’; ‘we’ know the land, ‘we’ve’ farmed for years.

(p. 922)

While Tsouvalis’ work addressed the introduction of precision farming, we argue it was the introduction of multifunctionality objectives to the Common Agricultural Policy in the 1980s and 1990s that provided the impetus for a new focus on culture and identity in farmer studies. Prior to this, farmers had been entreated to produce as much as possible as a post-war civic duty. However, with oversupply of food products and environmental degradation, policy makers – in Europe in particular – began an attempt to coax farmers away from ever-increasing production through the introduction of agri-environmental and diversification schemes.

Although some farmers took to these changes willingly, for others the resistance was considerable. New roles as conservation managers and providers of services to the public led many farmers to question the very essence of who they were. In the case of attempts to promote tree planting, in particular, the concern was frequently expressed that they were “farmers, not foresters” and “farmers farm” (Williams et al., 1994; Allison, 1996; Burton, 1998). Lowe and colleagues noted as early as 1999 that participation in agri-environmental schemes for a decade should have led to “discernible changes” in farming attitudes and culture (Lowe et al., 1999), but over a decade later there was still little evidence of a broad cultural shift. It was an attempt to understand the role of identity resistance to adopting the forestry and recreation provision roles promoted by the UK Community Forest scheme at Marston Vale, Bedfordshire, that led Burton (1998) to look at the importance of identity to farmer decision making and through this work the social symbolic importance of farming behaviours was first described in detail.

The initial study was an application to 60 farmers of a quantitative survey based on the identity theory of Sheldon Stryker (1994) – itself a ‘social structuralist’ interpretation of Mead’s (1934) symbolic interactionist perspective (see Chapter 4). During the conducting of the survey the theme of the ‘good farmer’ emerged repeatedly as farmers sought to explain why it was that forestry was not farming. This led to follow-up series of 13 qualitative re-interviews conducted to specifically address the issue of the ‘good farmer’ by asking questions such as: When does a farmer adopting new roles cease to be a farmer? When can a newcomer to farming be considered a proper farmer? What symbolises belonging to the farming community? Can a woodland be viewed as a crop? How are symbols of good farming transferred along the roadsides? (see Burton, 1998). The publishing of the core of this PhD thesis in 2004 in the “good farmer” paper was at the forefront of a wider cultural turn that occurred in both English (e.g. Cloke, 1997) and non-English (e.g. Billaud, 1991; Droz and Miéville-Ott, 2001; Mallein and Cautrès, 1993; Sylvestre, 2002) rural studies in the 1980s and 1990s – and thus was well-positioned to become an important text.

Figure 1.1 shows the citations of the paper year on year up to the end of 2019 and illustrates how the paper has gradually been established as a seminal text amongst international researchers, with over 60 citations of the work in 2018 alone – 14 years after the publishing of the original paper.

FIGURE 1.1 Citations of the ‘good farmer’ paper (Burton, 2004) by year according to Scopus

We argue that this growth in usage reflects the quality of the concept and its increasing relevance for the challenges faced by today’s farmers. It is interesting to observe where the ‘good farmer’ has been applied. For the most part citations appear in social science publications related to rural and agricultural issues, often addressing the complex relations between farmers and environmental management. These papers refer to the paper in a very general and succinct way – citing it in order to mention the identity dimension of farming rather than engaging with development of the concept itself. Further, they often highlight only one aspect of the ‘good farmer’ approach. For example, some point to the social pressures exerted on individual behaviours (Chan et al., 2017; Isgren, 2016) while others mention the tension with government action and policies (Caputo and Butler, 2017; Collins et al., 2016; Hansson et al., 2012).

A further group of papers reference Burton (2004) to confirm presumptions about farmers’ identities or relations to the environment. These authors again do not engage with wider theorisation of farming cultures, but rather refer (often only briefly) to the paper as a proof of the existence of a farming culture. Sometimes, these patterns are applied to farmers as a very general and uniform category across time and space, generations, and geographies. Burton (2004) also represents a significant reference illustrating the strength of productionist behaviour in Western farming (how it has become part of the culture – McGranahan, 2014; Van der Wal et al., 2014), its relation to the valuation of tidy landscapes and crops (Cardoso et al., 2016; Pouta et al., 2014; Tautges et al., 2016), and farm succession (Brown, et al., 2014). While the paper certainly illustrates the importance of production behaviours for defining the farmer identity, production roles were the only aspect of farming the paper addressed – thus it should not be used as an illustration that production is the only thing that matters to farmers.

In addition to the social science papers, we found a significant number of references by researchers from other disciplines (around 44 papers in Scopus prior to late-2019), generally again related to environmental issues in farming. A first group of papers engage seriously with the ‘good farmer’ approach and seem to integrate part of the more theoretical developments and sometimes later publications, although never in great depth. This is understandable as they are not primarily addressing social science issues. The ‘good farmer’ approach appears here as a way to question rational choice theorisations of farmers’ behaviours (Jakobsen, 2017; Kristensen and Jakobsen, 2011a, 2011b), to include in the analysis the impact of the social and cultural context (Lankester, 2013; White and Selfa, 2013; Barnes et al., 2015), and to demonstrate the concept of social control, notably through the idea of “roadside farming” (Sandberg and Jakobsson, 2018; Seabrook et al., 2008).

What drew us to writing this book is that, while there is now an abundance of literature looking at or using the concept of the good farmer, there has been little attempt to develop some of the key concepts. Two omissions stand out. First, most of Burton’s work has focused on understanding the symbolic importance of the practice of farming (in particular, raising crops) – rather than other non-production roles associated with being seen as a good farmer. As a result, the concept as Burton outlines it is restricted to a relatively small (albeit significant) aspect of the construction of ‘good farmer’ identities. Second, neither Burton (2004) nor any of his later...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The ‘good farmer’: cultural dimensions of farming and social change
• 2 The origins of the ‘good farmer’
• 3 How symbols of ‘good farming’ develop: the historical development of ‘tidy farming’
• 4 Theorising the ‘good farmer’: from common sense category to analytical construct
• 5 Morality and the ‘good farmer’
• 6 The gendered ‘good farmer’
• 7 The ‘good farmer’ in communities of practice
• 8 Future challenges for the ‘good farmer’
• Index