Paper to the Conference Rural History 2010 in Brighton/GB, September 13-16, 2010
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Postal address: A-3109 St. Pölten (Austria), Kulturbezirk 4 Phone: +43-2742-9005-12987 | Fax: +43-2742-9005-16275 Web: www.ruralhistory.at | Email: [email protected] Exploring Farming Styles: Analysis of Farm Records in Two Austrian Regions, 1945–1980s* Paper to the conference Rural History 2010 in Brighton/GB, September 13-16, 2010 Rita Garstenauer, Sophie Kickinger & Ernst Langthaler I. Introduction If we were to assess agricultural development in twentieth century Europe, the label ‘revolution’ comes into mind. In terms of production and productivity growth as well as institutional change, the post-1945 (or, perhaps, post-1939)1 decades experienced a truly ‘agricultural revolution’ as part of the agrarian transformation in the past two centuries fostering the industrialisation of * This article is based on the research project P20922-G15 financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Further information is available on the project website at http://www.univie.ac.at/ruralhistory/farmingstyles.htm. We would like to thank our colleague Ulrich Schwarz for the technical and intellectual support he has provided to this paper. 1 Tough this paper’s focus is on the postwar decades, we regard the wartime years as the initial phase (Sattelzeit) of the ‘agricultural revolution’ in twentieth century Austria, as has been revealed recently by a regional study on Lower Austria: Ernst Langthaler, Schlachtfelder. Ländliches Wirtschaften im Reichsgau Niederdonau 1938–1945, 2 vols., habilitation thesis at the University of Vienna, Vienna 2009 (publication scheduled for 2011). For Great Britain a ‘state-led agricultural revolution’ in the Second World War has been outlined by Brian Short / Charles Watkins / John Martin (eds.), The Front Line of Freedom. British Farming in the Second World War, Exeter 2007. For a comparative perspective on both accounts see Ernst Langthaler, English and Austrian Farming in the Second World War: Revolution or What Else?, in: Peter Moser / Tony Varley (eds.), Integration through Subordination. Agriculture and the Rural Population in European Industrial Societies, Turnhout 2010 (forthcoming). society by provision of labour, food and capital.2 Rural history has recently made progress in studying agricultural development in the twentieth century; however, macro-level approaches prevail due to the international and global scope of these studies.3 Local and regional studies on this topic are mostly confined to disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and ecology.4 In this article, we aim to complement the prevailing perspective by a micro-level approach to the postwar ‘agricultural revolution’, thereby illuminating under-investigated aspects of this ‘large issue’ in ‘small places’.5 Above all, we focus on the diversity of postwar agricultural development, i.e. the various ways farming actors experienced, interpreted and acted upon the natural and societal structures of their rural lifeworlds, thereby reproducing and/or transforming the local, regional and supra-regional agrosystems they were embedded in.6 If the post-1945 decades, as has been pointed out, ‘can be characterized as an agricultural revolution, then farmers were the revolutionaries’7. Accordingly, we attempt to ‘follow the actors’8 on their more or less ‘revolutionary’ pathways through time and space. 2 From a political-economic perspective see C. Peter Timmer, A World Without Agriculture. The Structural Transformation in Historical Perspective, Washington 2009, 1-12. 3 See, at the European level, Pedro Lains / Vicente Pinilla (eds.), Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe Since 1870, London / New York 2009, and, at the global level, Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World. An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000, Princeton / Oxford 2005. See also the twelve-volume book series Rural History in Europe being published since 2008 and a reader on rural change in Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s currently edited by Paul Brassley, Leen van Molle and Yves Segers. For a global overview see Ernst Langthaler, Landwirtschaft vor und in der Globalisierung, in: Reinhard Sieder / idem (eds.), Globalgeschichte 1800–2010, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2010, 135-169. 4 We can only give a few ‘best practice’ examples of recent monographs: From an anthropological perspective see Jane Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990, Chapel Hill 1994; from a sociological perspective see Christa Müller, Von der lokalen Ökonomie zum globalisierten Dorf. Bäuerliche Überlebensstrategien zwischen Weltmarktintegration und Regionalisierung, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1998; from an ecological perspective see Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains. Agriculture and Environment, Texas 2005; and – as an exception to the rule – from a historical perspective: Joseph L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt. Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945- 1972, DeKalb, IL 2009. For a rather journalistic, but nevertheless empirically grounded ‘thick description’ of a Dutch village in the second half of the twentieth century see Geert Mak, An Island in Time: The Biography of a Village, London 2010 (forthcoming). 5 This micro-historical ‘credo’ is inspired by Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, London 1973, 22: ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbourhoods …); they study in villages.’ 6 As a programmatic outline of our actor-centred approach to rural history see Ernst Langthaler, Agrarsysteme ohne Akteure? Sozialökonomische und sozialökologische Modelle in der Agrargeschichte, in: Andreas Dix / idem (eds.), Grüne Revolutionen. Agrarsysteme und Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raumes 3), Innsbruck et al. 2006, 216-238. 7 Anderson, Industrializing, 193. 2 For actor-centred approaches like this one, the concepts regularly applied by students of agricultural development are of limited value, regardless of a few exceptions.9 Established approaches evolving from agricultural economics, e.g. the ‘induced innovation’ model,10 or rural sociology, e.g. the ‘diffusion of innovations’ model,11 tend to conceptualise rural actors in a rather simplistic way: as ‘rational’ allocators of production factors according to given endowments of land and labour or as ‘early’ or ‘late adopters’ of technological innovations. Though factor allocation, adoption of innovations and similar decision-making are central to agricultural development, these models underplay the complexity of farming systems. Therefore, in this article we follow the more holistic approach of farming styles which has evolved from actor- network theory12 as well as the empirically evident diversity of farming.13 Accordingly, farming styles are internally coherent and externally distinctive ‘modes of ordering’14 of farming systems.15 They comprise symbolic, social and material elements: at the symbolic level, formal and informal rules (instructions, ideals, customs etc.) about how farming is (not) to be done; at the social level, more or less hierarchical relations between farming actors and others (members of cooperatives, extension officers, upstream and downstream industries etc.); at the material level, a broad range of resources (land, labour, knowledge etc.) applied to agroecosystems. These elements are being interconnected in different ways – even in similar structural settings – through the practice of farming, thereby creating a variety of farming styles as ‘socio-technical networks’.16 In this paper, we focus on the material level, i.e. the resources (in orthodox terms: ‘production factors’) applied 8 This principle of actor-network theory is outlined by Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor- Network-Theory, Oxford 2005, 11 f. 9 One exception to this rule is: Frank Ellis, Peasant Economics. Farm Households and Agrarian Development, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1993, who differentiates varieties of peasant farming with aid of neo-classical concepts. 10 See Yujiro Hayami / Vernon Ruttan, Agricultural Development. An International Perspective, 2nd ed., Baltimore / London 1985. 11 See Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed., New York et al. 2003. 12 See Latour, Reassembling, 247-262. 13 See Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Rural Sociology and the New Agrarian Question. A Perspective from the Netherlands, in: Sociologia Ruralis 33 (1993), 240-260. 14 On the distinction between (static) ‘order’ and (dynamic) ‘ordering’ see John Law, Organizing Modernity, Oxford / Cambridge 1994. 15 For an introduction to farming systems research see John S. Caldwell, Farming Systems, in: Charles J. Arntzen / Ellen M. Ritter (eds.), Encyclopedia of Agricultural Science, vol. 2, San Diego et al. 1994, 129-138. 16 For a theoretical outline and an empirical application of the farming styles concept see Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, The Virtual Farmer. Past, Present and Future of the Dutch Peasantry, Assen 2003, 101-141. For a critical assessment see Frank Vanclay et al., The Social and Intellectual Construction of Farming Styles: Testing Dutch Ideas in Australian Agriculture, in: Sociologia Ruralis 46 (2006), 61-82. 3 to agroecosystems. However, our investigation is closely connected with a parallel study focusing on the symbolic level, i.e. the discourses mediated by the agrarian press.17 Moreover, both papers are complemented by a subsequent study covering also the social level, e.g. the lifeworlds of interviewees working and living in farming systems in our regions of reference. By integration of the findings of