University of Fribourg I Faculty of Science and Medicine
Department of Geosciences I Unit of Geography
Changing agriculture
Southland farmers’ struggles to reconcile neoliberal production demands with increasing environmental regulation
Master Thesis in Human Geography
Supervised by Prof Dr Olivier Graefe
By Anna Geiser (14-203-038) Bürglenstrasse 53 3006 Bern [email protected]
Fribourg, the 10th of February 2020
I dedicate this study to everyone who is dealing with the flooding of Southland right now.
Kia kaha.
I Abstract
Southland, New Zealand, farmers are stuck in between two opposing poles: They need to increase the profitability of their farming operations in a completely deregulated economy, while simultaneously dealing with the pressure from an increasing public awareness of how intensifying agricultural practices are harming the natural environment.
This study takes the perspective of Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ in order to research how farmers deal with this predicament. Based on interviews with ten farmers, it shows first that different types of motivation for farming in Southland exist: While for some, their paramount reason to farm is carrying on the family legacy, for others it is the ‘lifestyle’ of farming. And others yet, see farming as a way to make a lot of money.
But all of these farmers are at the mercy of the same paradoxes. Apart from the economy vs. ecology dilemma, they face the contradictory situation of orienting their values and motivations towards farming in view of their local community, but actually, they produce for anonymous consumers in far away overseas markets.
These fields of tension inform the farmers’ questioning of the legitimacy of the policy makers of the most recent agri-environmental plan introduced in Southland. Indeed, the plan fails to address farmers' concerns by restricting their ability to accumulate cultural capital through the demonstration of skilled farming. But farmers show great potential for the creation of social capital, because although they are competitors in the market, they are successfully unifying in catchment groups in order to critically engage with policy makers.
However, the paradoxes in the field of farming cannot be resolved from the level of the farmer alone. It is also required that their dilemmas are clearly recognised and addressed in the policies themselves.
Keywords: farmers, theory of practice, deregulated economy, agri-environmental policy- making, New Zealand
II Acknowledgements
This study has been a long time in the making and accordingly, there are many people I would like to thank for their support during this time.
I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof Dr Olivier Graefe, for his ability to concretise my thoughts and simultaneously unsettle any progress I had made by presenting a number of additional angles to look at my research problem. I have never read so much in my life, thank you for making this master’s thesis into a great learning experience.
I would like to thank my interview partners in Southland. Thank you for briefly welcoming a stranger into your life and letting me probe you with questions. Your openness has been the heart of this study.
I would like to thank my Kiwi mum and dad. Thank you for once again hosting me and loving me and most of all, thank you for your patience with my countless calls of distress, when my car had once again broken down in the middle of nowhere… Aroha nui!
I would like to thank my comrades-in-thesis-writing, Lea and Shqipe, for their unwavering belief that we would eventually finish our theses. And thank you for the innumerable discussions of just what Pierre Bourdieu was trying to say!
I would like to thank my friends – you know who you are! – who have never stopped asking how my thesis-writing was going, and gave me pep talks (and coffee!) when my replies were more apathetic rumblings than coherent answers.
I would like to thank my Mum and my brother for being my biggest cheerleaders and giving me feedback from the perspective of their respective fields of expertise, opening unexpected windows into my research problem. I will now officially stop bothering you with samples of ‘but do you understand what I’m trying to say here?’!
And finally, I would like to thank my Dad for being the most patient of them all, for letting me bounce many blurry ideas off you and showing me how to structure the jumble of thoughts in my brain. Thank you for demonstrating the potential of human geography; if I can only muster one percent of the excitement you hold for this career, I will be a very happy geographer!
III Table of contents
Abstract ...... II
Acknowledgements ...... III
List of figures ...... VI
1. Introduction ...... 1
2. Background – farming in Southland ...... 6 2.1 The colonisation of Murihiku ...... 8 2.2 The end of subsidies ...... 9 2.3 Playing catch up in a free market system ...... 12 2.4 The Dirty Dairying campaign – water issues ...... 14 2.5 Agri-environmental governance politics ...... 17
3. Changing agriculture – theoretical framework ...... 20 3.1 Ways of understanding agricultural change ...... 20 3.2 Why Bourdieu? ...... 23 3.3 Bourdieu’s key concepts ...... 25 3.3.1 Field ...... 25 3.3.2 Habitus ...... 27 3.3.3 Capital ...... 28 3.4 Critique of Bourdieu ...... 30 3.5 Applying Bourdieu to farming ...... 31 3.5.1 Field, habitus and capital in farming ...... 32 3.5.2 A Bourdieusian look at agri-environmental policy ...... 36
4. Research problem and questions revisited ...... 38
5. Methodology ...... 39 5.1 Data collection ...... 39 5.1.1 Secondary Data ...... 39 5.1.2 Primary Data ...... 42 5.2 Data analysis ...... 44 5.3 Positionality and limitations ...... 44
6. Understanding farmers’ predicament ...... 47 6.1 On the obscure illusio of farming in Southland ...... 47 6.1.1 The family farmer ...... 47 6.1.2 The lifestyle farmer ...... 50
IV 6.1.3 The investor farmer ...... 52 6.1.4 The illusio of Southland farmers ...... 56 6.2 The demands of a changing field ...... 58 6.2.1 How the farmers frame change ...... 59 6.2.2 Paradox 1: Economy vs. ecology and the farmer in-between ...... 61 6.2.3 Paradox 2: Local values vs. overseas markets ...... 66 6.2.4 Paradox 3: Alienation in neoliberalism vs. self-organising farming communities ... 71 6.2.5 Interim conclusion ...... 74 6.3 How farmers talk about the ‘Water and Land Plan’ ...... 75 6.3.1 Farmers discrediting policy makers ...... 76 6.3.2 Keeping an eye on things but leaving room for trust ...... 79 6.3.3 How to improve the plan ...... 80
7. Conclusion ...... 84
8. Bibliography ...... 90
9. Appendix ...... 97 9.1 Statement of independence ...... 97 9.2 Questions catalogues ...... 97 9.3 Interview coding ...... 99
V List of figures
Cover Photo: Southland from the car – near Athol, looking towards the Southern Alps. Source: own photo, 2011………………………………………..……………………………………cover
Figure 1: Southland in the context of New Zealand’s 16 political regions. Source: Wikimedia, 2005……………..…………………..………………………..………………………………p. 06
Figure 2: Overview of Southland with topographical elements and main towns. Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 11, own editing………………..……………..………………………….……p. 07
Figure 3: Figure 1: Stock units in Southland by stock type, 1860-2014. Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 6..…………..…………..…………..…………..…………..…………..……………p. 10
Figure 4: Export values from agricultural products in NZ$, March 2016. Source: NZIER, 2017, p. 11.…………..…….…..…………..….…………..…………..….…………..…………..…p. 11
Figure 5: Distribution of land area by land use and industry in Southland in 2015 Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 65…………..….………………..….……………..….……………….p. 11
Figure 6: Agricultural sector GDP per capita by region, March 2012. Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 21……..………….………………..….………………..….………………..….……p. 13
Figure 7: Surface water in Southland. Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 13……………...……p. 15
Figure 8: Dairy cows between a summer grazing paddock on the right and a winter grazing paddock on the left, year unknown. Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 108……..……..………..p. 16
VI 1. Introduction
Sun is coming up Farmers out the door They will go to milk the cows And start their daily chores Sun is going down Horse is in the stable All the fields are planted now Supper's on the table1
Something like this is how I imagined farming to be like for a long time. To me, farmers had this romantic lifestyle that included living with and from the land, simple but rewarding. It does not take much investigation to realise that farming is a bit more complicated than this primary school poem suggests and that the farmer does not really exist. Today, those practicing farming range from individual farmers to huge corporations. They are all subject to a complex web of market demands, government policies and public opinions – but at the basis they still produce much of the food in the world. Over time, farming practices had to accommodate and readjust to economic, political, technical and not least social changes, while also encountering a variety of ‘natural’ challenges (see Glover 2015). The industrialisation of agricultural production and the simultaneous globalisation of agricultural trade have resulted in a completely changed relationship of humans to agricultural practices and products (Wittman et al., 2010; Bernstein, 2014). The intensification of agricultural production processes also had significant consequences for the availability and condition of so called public and semi-public goods – such as biodiversity or water quality (Ayer, 1997). The delicate cycles of freshwater systems are especially vulnerable to the impacts of agricultural productions, since they interweave agricultural production areas and can be easily polluted by farm run-off such as fertiliser, effluent and sediment (Bates et al., 2008). In both public and scientific discussion, environmental degradation caused by agriculture has been cause for great concern since at least the 1960s, when Rachel Carson published her famous book ‘Silent Spring’ (see also Forney et al., 2018). Environmental degradation caused by agricultural practices is only set to increase, as climate variability intensifies with climate change and there seems to be no end in sight for the further intensification of agriculture. In turn, this environmentally precarious situation adds stress to the ways that farming can be done, both because public demands for the mitigation of
1 From Holzschuher, C. (1997). Thematic Unit Farm. Westminster: Teacher Created Resources Inc.: p.11
1 environmental degradation rise and because the degradation of the natural environment poses a threat to the productivity of farms and farmers’ livelihoods.
As a result, a need to somehow govern how agriculture is done, can be recognised. However, trying to regulate a system that is as complex as the farming industry is not an easy feat. In the end, the farmer is the most important decision maker in the agri-environmental governance chain; they are the ones implementing and ‘practicing’ any sort of governance strategy on farm (Blackstock et al., 2009). According to Wondolleck and Yaffee (2000), governance authorities try to influence the decision making process of farmers using different “institutional channels”: Legal instruments such as policy documents, the provision of advice, voluntary collective actions or economic rewards such as subsidies. While legal documents form the backbone of agri-environmental governance, they are not always easily implemented. For example, in my home country of Switzerland, farmers have a strong political lobby in political matters and can greatly influence new policy-making. Therefore, many argue that voluntary adoption of best management practices is the ideal case for agri-environmental governance (Blackstock et al., 2009). This too, is easier said than done. If farmers do not profit when they change their management practices, they are unlikely to change at all. In Switzerland, like many other countries, the adoption of best management practices is made attractive through the payment of subsidies. But as Schenk et al. (2007) have found in the case of Switzerland, subsidies do not really change farmers’ attitudes towards environmental mitigation. Farmers only adapt their farming system in order to receive these subsidies. As Schenk et al. (2007) put it, the reception of subsidies is more driven by economic benefits, and participation “does not mean [farmers] have necessarily changed their minds about the necessity of nature conservation measures” (p. 72). This goes to show that policy-makers intentions and farmers decision-making does not always match. While some might think that farming is just another way to make money, I go with Glover (2008), who argues that farming is also a highly emotional affair. This might explain to some extent why some farmers ‘cling’ to their way of life, even when it no longer makes sense in an economic way. Thinking only in economic terms, it is unlikely that policy makers will be able to influence farmers’ practice and decision-making in the long term. This observation provided a first gateway into my research: What are farmers considering when they make decisions on farming practices? As Glover and Reay (2015, p.28) put it:
“By gaining an appreciation of the factors that affect farming businesses success and the strategies available to farmers, policy makers could be better positioned to make informed decisions that lead to appropriate long term goals for particular geographic locations.”
To me, questions surrounding farming practices and especially farming’s public image when it comes to its negative environmental impacts are also a personal affair. Farming has long been part of my life-world: My paternal family in Switzerland has passed down a family farm for five
2 generations and has spread out onto other farms as well. My adopted family in New Zealand, which I acquired during a student exchange in high school, also has close ties to agriculture. I have noticed first hand the changes that farmers in these two countries had to adapt to. By the time a family farm is passed down to the next generation, the conditions surrounding agriculture, meaning both changing market operations, but also how farming is viewed by the wider society, will have completely changed (Glover, 2015).
In both countries, small family farms do not run at great profits and their survival is often less than guaranteed. Especially in Southland, the region of New Zealand where my Kiwi family resides, the pressures on farmers are immense. Here, 30% of the roughly 95’000 residents live in rural areas, while the national average in New Zealand is just 13% (Moran et al., 2017). There are almost 10’000 people employed in agriculture and another 14’000 in related processing and manufacturing industries (Moran et al., 2017). The region’s narrow-based economy is highly dependent on the primary sector, especially agriculture. Of 1.2 million hectares developed land in Southland, 87% are used agriculturally (Moran et al., 2017). As a young isolated nation at the commonly perceived “bottom” of the world, New Zealand had to make sure they stay relevant as an exporter of agricultural products, in order to keep their economy performing well. After some radical economic reforms, New Zealand farmers have been without subsidies since the 1980s. In order to turn around the creeping decline of the New Zealand economy, the central government put a lot of emphasis on the growth of agricultural export (Business NZ, 2007). As a result, the agricultural industry has intensified significantly, which in the case of Southland meant a complete restructuring of the farming landscape, as farmers aim to get maximum productivity and thus profitability out of their farms (Stewart et al., 2019). Simultaneously, farming’s negative impact on the natural environment of New Zealand has been discussed in public channels for many years. This public dissatisfaction finally resulted in the central government putting more and more pressure on regional governments to introduce stricter regulations on farming. The Southland regional council has therefore proposed a tough new agri-environmental governance policy called the Water and Land Plan, to be implemented in 2020 (Environment Southland, 2018). Both from my time spent in Southland and from early research into the topic, I gained the impression that farmers were not particularly favourable of this coming policy. The discussions around it seemed to reflect a greater problematic in the puzzle of farming in Southland. Farmers are caught between contradicting governmental policies: On the one hand there is the on-going intensification of agriculture in a deregulated economy, on the other hand there are increasing environmental mitigation demands from both the public and the government. This provides the second gateway question that led me into this research: Why would one even farm at all under these wearing conditions?
3 My aim in this study is to make explicit the social realities of farmers today, as they navigate the web of issues currently influencing their work. I do this by using Southland as a case study, because it provides the unique opportunity to study farming in a deregulated economy, a factor that significantly intensifies farmers’ predicament of having to farm both according to agri- environmental policies and by staying profitable. The case of Southland also presents topicality by currently going through the process of developing and implementing a new agri- environmental governance policy, provoking a range of responses from farmers. In this study I aim to show how farmers themselves understand the problems, why they take fault with the new policy plan that wants to change their practice regarding environmental issues, and how they propose to address these problems. In order to discuss this, I need to better understand farmers’ social realities and the pressures and fields of tension that influence their decision-making and farm management. This leads me to three culminating research questions:
1) What are the circumstances of farming in Southland today from the perspective of farmers?
2) How do farmers talk about the new ‘Land and Water 2020’ plan?
3) What can farmers’ take of the new plan – in light of the current circumstances of farming – reveal about fields of tension in farming in Southland today?
This research is relevant, because to change farming practices in the first place, it is imperative to realise that this can only be done by understanding farmers’ life-worlds. In order to investigate these social realities, I engage a qualitative research approach informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. This is a theoretical framework that enables me to look at the thinking and acting of farmers – that is on an individual level – and how this interlinks with the wider structural levels, such as the government's policy and the economy. More concretely, this theory concerns itself with the relationship between actors, as well as with the production and reproduction of social change, following the belief that actors at the individual level can in fact influence wider societal structures from the individual level (see Giddens, 1979 and Fligstein, 2001). Using Bourdieu’s terminology (which I detail later on), farmers’ responses are influenced by both habitus and field. According to Bourdieu, farmers are supposed to strive to be ‘good farmers’ in order to gain symbolic capital, meaning they have an inherent interest in the mitigation of environmental as well as governance problems (Haggerty et al., 2009). Because finally, “any attempts to influence or understand practice needs to understand the potential impacts of, and on, both cultural and social capital” (Blackstock et al., 2009, p.5635). In reference to the double innuendo in its title – ‘changing agriculture’ – this study looks at how agriculture in Southland is changing due to outside influences such as the deregulation, but also how there is potential for it to be actively changed by farmers into a direction that appears more hopeful to them.
4 The objective of this exploratory study is thus not so much to close a gap in the literature – it is already quite vast and is continuously built upon – but to provide a thick description of this very complex case study (see Geertz, 1973). This is done by an analysis of interviews conducted with farmers in the field from November 2018 to February 2019. I believe that this will contribute to a better understanding of farmers’ practices, which will ultimately allow for better action.
This study is structured like the following: In chapter 2 I discuss the case study background of farming in Southland in more detail, further filtering out its particularities. In chapter 3, I provide an overview of theoretical approaches to understanding change in agriculture and then present my reasons for choosing to work with Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, as well as a discussion of his most important ideas. This chapter concludes with a state of the art review of how Bourdieu has already been applied to the field of agricultural change. In chapter 4 I restate the problematic and research questions of this study in light of the insights from the previous two chapters. Chapter 5 follows this, detailing the methodologies used in this research. Finally, in chapter 6 I present an analysis of the empirical insights follows. The study closes with chapter 7 giving an in-depth conclusion, where the research questions are answered.
5 2. Background – farming in Southland
Southland is New Zealand’s southernmost political region (see figure 1). It extends over a total of 3.2 million hectares (just over one tenth of New Zealand’s land area), of which almost 60% is covered by native vegetation (meaning forest and alpine scrub) (Moran et al., 2017). Over 40% of this native vegetation is located in Fiordland – a conservation area on the west coast – and on Stewart Island off the southern border of mainland Southland (see figure 2; Moran et al., 2017).
Today, 30% of the roughly 95’000 people living in Southland (of which around 10% are Māori) live in rural areas, whereas the national average is 13% (Statistics New Zealand, 2017). There are almost 10’000 people employed in agriculture and another 14’000 in related Figure 1: Southland in the context of New processing and manufacturing industries (Moran Zealand’s 16 political regions Source: Wikimedia, 2005 et al., 2017). Of 1.2 million hectares developed land in Southland, 87% are used agriculturally (Moran et al., 2017).
Intensive agriculture is still increasing in Southland, especially in dairy farming (Stewart et al., 2019). This shows that Southland’s narrow-based economy is highly dependent on its agricultural sector and that urban centres exist primarily in order to service the rural areas surrounding them, but also that the rural areas are dependent on the urban centres (Moran et al., 2017). Politically, Southland is governed by the regional council, which is called Environment Southland, as well as three territorial authorities. Two of these, Gore District Council and Invercargill City Council, represent the two most densely populated urban areas – with almost 70’000 inhabitants between them – and the third, Southland District Council, represents the rest, making the district councils differ enormously in size (Moran et al., 2017).
6 Figure 2: Overview of Southland with topographical elements and main towns Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 11, own editing
7 Once again, farming in Southland presents a web where farmers are caught between an on- going intensification of agriculture in order to stay relevant on a globalised world market, and on the other hand are subject to increasing environmental mitigation demands from both the public and the government (Brown et al., 2019). This chapter will now elaborate these reasons in more detail. This chapter is structured in a more or less chronological way. The first part provides a short historical overview of how Southland became an important agricultural hub in New Zealand. The next part deals with the drastic restructuring of New Zealand’s economy in the 1980s. The consequences of this today are discussed in a next part. Then, a look at environmental problems caused by agricultural practices follows, also giving insight into the way these have been discussed in the wider public. An explanation of the policy-making processes of Southland concludes this chapter.
2.1 The colonisation of Murihiku
Southland, which is almost superimposable with Murihiku – the Māori name for the lower south of Te Wai Pounamu te Aotearoa/the South Island of New Zealand – was one of the earliest areas of New Zealand to be colonised by Pākehā/European colonisers. In the early 1800s Māori were already trading wheat, oats, maize and potatoes to the emerging colony of New South Wales across the Tasman Sea (Business NZ, 2007). The first Pākehā arrived in Southland in the late 18th century, Māori had arrived 600 years prior (Grant, 2015). Lured in by the lucrative whaling and sealing, as well as gold findings, more Pākehā settlers were soon populating the land. They depended on trade with Māori who were already farming the land in a self- sufficiency manner (Grant, 2015). However, starting around 1840, when they became more established, Pākehā soon joined in the agricultural business of pastoral farming. The climate was milder then where they had come from in Europe, meaning that grass grew all year round and animals could be left outside even in winter. As a result, Pākehā farms evolved from small places based on the need of self-sufficiency into bigger mixed-produce family farms that produced for the inland and overseas market. In addition, they were exporting oil and skins from the whales and seals they hunted (Business NZ, 2007). These developments dramatically changed Murihiku’s landscape as forests were cut down, rivers were straightened and swamps were dried up (Moran et al., 2017). Of about 270’000 hectares of swamps and wetland in pre- human times – making up almost half of Southland’s lowlands – only about 8’500 hectares are left today (Clarkson et al., 2011).
Apart from a short stint in gold rushes in the 1860s, farming built the foundation for New Zealand’s economic development (Business NZ, 2007). Agricultural products – predominantly wool, and when the first refrigerated steamship was developed meat and dairy – were exported
8 to Great Britain, which preferred goods from countries within the British Empire and the Commonwealth of Nations. Great economic development followed. From the 1930s onwards, New Zealand’s government encouraged the development of local manufacturing industries, with the goal to make New Zealand less dependent on imports. Both these industries and the agricultural sector were protected by national rules and regulations, which limited competition with what was being imported (Business NZ, 2007). Following WWII, prices for wool and meat rose steeply. This lead to many Southland farmers changing from dairy farming to sheep farming (Forney and Stock, 2013). The sheep farming sector was also heavily subsidised by the government (Grant, 2015), and became essential for the local economy (Forney and Stock, 2013). This economic development kept going until the 1970s.
When Great Britain joined what is now the European Union in 1973, they had to strictly limit how much they could import from New Zealand. Being almost the exclusive destination for New Zealand exports, the loss of Great Britain as a market meant a great loss in exports. Coupled with rising fuel prices and inflation, New Zealand went from being one of the richest OECD countries to being one of the poorest in just 30 years (Business NZ, 2007).
2.2 The end of subsidies
Seeing the threatening widening of the income gap between New Zealand and other OECD countries, in 1984, the fourth Labour government of New Zealand decided to completely deregulate the economy and end all agricultural subsidies. This also included the closing of the government-owned Rural Bank, which had been imperative in providing farmers with banking services (Forney and Stock, 2013). This change in agricultural policy was probably the most significant decision in New Zealand’s agricultural history and is largely responsible for the way the industry looks today. As MacLeod and Moller (2006) showed, New Zealand has undergone a climactic intensification since these reforms. As a result of the subsidy cut, the production of sheep products (meat and wool) declined, while dairy farming slowly rose again, towards its current dominant position in New Zealand’s agricultural market (Tall and Campbell, 2018). This shift emerged because subsidies had been paid mainly to the meat and wool sector and not so much the dairy sector, thus the subsidy cut affected the different industries very differently (Forney and Stock, 2013). Furthermore, international prices for milk and dairy products were rising steeply, whereas those for wool and meat were falling or remained stagnant (Grant, 2015). This, combined with the fact that land in Southland was cheap and the climate attractive for milk production, lead to what Forney and Stock (2013) call a “colonisation” of sheep farming by dairy farming. In the early 2000s an average Southland dairy herd was almost four times as big as before the boom (Grant, 2015). To illustrate, there were 70 million sheep in New
9 Zealand in 1982 and only 27 million in 2016 (Statistics New Zealand 2017, compare figure 3 for Southland). And while in 1990 there were roughly 38’000 dairy cows in Southland, in 2016 there were already close to 710’000 (Statistics New Zealand, 2017). The founding of Fonterra in 2001, a giant dairy cooperative, helped attract more farmers into conversion (Forney and Stock, 2013). Fonterra was created out of the merging of the New Zealand Dairy Board, which represented the marketing side of dairy business, with the two then biggest dairy processors (Tall and Campbell, 2018). According to Muirhead and Campbell (2012), Fonterra became the biggest dairy exporter in the world, producing over 90% of all dairy products in New Zealand (Tall and Campbell, 2018). However, Fonterra was not a “top-down” state implemented strategy, but a farmers’ cooperative initiative, making this a new form of agricultural productivism (Burton and Wilson, 2012). The Fonterra dairy factory in Edendale near Invercargill subsequently became one of the biggest dairy processing plants in the world. At the same time, other agricultural industry groups such as meat and wool did not manage to create an umbrella organisation, leaving them vulnerable to international price pressures (Le Heron, 2011).
Figure 3: Stock units* in Southland by stock type, 1860-2014 Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 6 *stock unit is a reference unit which makes it easier to compare livestock from various species, by using various coefficients, e.g. feed requirements
10
Figure 4: Export values from agricultural products in NZ$, March 2016 Source: NZIER, 2017, p. 11
Figure 5: Distribution of land area by land use and industry in Southland in 2015 Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 65
11 The large-scale conversion to dairying ultimately also posed a challenge to Southland’s previous identity as a sheep country (Forney and Stock, 2013). This also meant a restructuring of rural communities, as more people were coming in, attracted by cheap land prices, halting the previous threat of rural depopulation. Forney and Stock (2013) have found that most farmers converted to dairy because they wanted to safeguard their professional identity and ensure their farm’s succession. As a result, dairy became the most exported agricultural product and one of the most exported products overall (Business NZ, 2007). When comparing figures 4 and 5, it becomes apparent that while dairy farms are the biggest producers, they are not the ones taking up the most space. This hints to a high intensity of dairy farms.
2.3 Playing catch up in a free market system
The national economy of New Zealand has undoubtedly benefited from the expansion in dairy farming. However, the conversion into dairying demands great financial investments from farmers, because the infrastructure required for this kind of farming, as well as the required large size of a starting herd, is very expensive (Forney and Stock, 2013). Because of this, farmers had to learn to deal with banks and much of their day-to-day work became dominated by finances and juggling a business. Furthermore, because dairy farming is more laborious than sheep farming, farmers had to employ workers. With this, the farmers now became employers, doing less of the farm work themselves. As Forney and Stock (2013) put it, Southland farmers have turned from family farmers to farm entrepreneurs. These authors summarise that in Southland, “the boundaries between corporate and family farming are blurred and have no clear definition” (p.13). One illustration of this is sharemilking, a practice used in dairy farming particular to New Zealand. It describes a model, where typically young farmers who are just starting out have their own herds of cows and machinery and will lease someone else’s land. There is a clear contract between sharemilker and farm owner in terms of who owns which profits and who pays for what. Over time, sharemilkers are able to build up their equity, which eventually allows them to move to a bigger farm, until they have enough equity to buy their own farm (compare Gardner, 2011).
The national government established that New Zealand’s economy would need to grow much faster, if they were ever going to catch up with other OECD countries (Business NZ, 2007). They decided that the way to do this was to further improve New Zealand’s export performance. For farming, this meant that value from primary industry exports should double from $32 billion in 2012 to $64 billion by 2025, adding additional economic pressure on farmers (MBIE, 2015).
12 Today, Southland’s economy is far from stable. In the five years prior to 2018, it increased by 20.5%; an increase that was primarily due to intensification of agriculture. The regional GDP fluctuates a lot over the years, which is directly linked to falls and increases in agriculture: In 2016 it decreased 4%, in 2017 it increased 8.3% and in 2018 it increased again by 7.1%. The value of Southland’s GDP from the agricultural sector was 890 million New Zealand Dollars in 2017 (roughly equal to 580 million Swiss Francs, using 2019 conversion rates), making it the third biggest in New Zealand; this is equal to a GDP share of agriculture of something just over 20%, double that of most other New Zealand regions (Statistics New Zealand, 2017, compare figure 6, illustrating the difference of agricultural GDP per capita across regions).
Figure 6: Agricultural sector GDP per capita by region, March 2012 Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 21
The Market Economics (2013) report indicates that Southland’s economic nature is not going to change in the short to medium-term. Its reliance on agriculture also means that it is very vulnerable to outside forces, for example price fluctuations for agricultural products on the international market or exchange rate changes. And further, as Forney and Stock (2013) rightly ask, what happens when Fonterra goes out of business? Allison and Hobb (2004) express the
13 fear that Southland’s high dependence on dairy farming might make it a “lock-in trap” – like it has happened in some places in Australia – meaning that the capacity for future transformations of the economy becomes increasingly difficult. This means that the regional economy becomes very ‘stiff’ and will have to undergo “forced transformation”, whenever changes from the outside arrive, meaning almost no adaptation period (see Folke et al., 2010). Such forced transformation might also result in a higher strain on the environment (Forney and Stock, 2013).
The expansion of the commercialisation of farming in Southland has happened at a rapid pace and within one generation of farmers. Therefore, many of the farmers today are fully aware of the changes that have happened and can remember how it was ‘before’. The pressure on these farmers today is immense and often negatively affects their mental health.
2.4 The Dirty Dairying campaign – water issues
Southland is completely ‘nerved’ by tens of thousand of kilometres of streams and rivers and is home to many of the largest lakes in New Zealand (see figure 7). But, as I have already mentioned, many streams have been banked or straightened, swamps have been dried and forest has been cut in order to gain more developed land for agricultural use (Moran et al., 2017, p.10ff). However, wetlands play a vital cleansing role for water in an ecosystem and without them the nutrient and sediment loss happens much more quickly, as the water can flow more ‘freely’ (Moran et al., 2017). 62% of Southland’s mainland are drained by the catchments of just four rivers (Moran et al., 2017). On top of this, Southland’s groundwater aquifers are quite shallow, meaning that the water flowing in them is often less than 10 years old; water from these aquifers feeds almost half of all streams in Southland (Moran et al., 2017). In general, no place in Southland is far from freshwater.
Apart from requiring bigger financial investments and being more laborious, dairy farming is also proven to be more environmentally destructive than other forms of farming. The nutrient loss measured on the steadily intensified farms is increasingly high - especially on dairy farms - along with run-off and leaching of nitrogen, phosphorus, pathogens and sediments from farms into water streams. As a result, water quality and stream habitat quality has become a big issue in New Zealand in general and in Southland in particular (Moran et al., 2017; Tall and Campbell, 2018; Stewart et al., 2019).
14
Figure 7: Surface water in Southland Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 13
15 The visibility of New Zealand’s water quality issue, especially in intensively farmed areas, increased significantly in 2001, when ‘Fish and Game NZ’ launched what came to be known as the Dirty Dairying campaign. Fish and Game NZ is an NGO focused on the interests of fishers and hunters, working in close relationship with regional councils. The Dirty Dairying campaign was published in the form of ads in different newspapers and openly attacked dairy farmers as the culprits behind mucky streams. It was the first time that the two issues of water degradation and farming intensification (especially dairying) were linked in a public discussion (Blackett and Le Heron, 2008). As Tall and Campbell (2018) point out, this signified a deep ontological challenge, because up to now, these two areas of concern – farming and the degradation of freshwater quality – had been carefully kept apart in the public eye. The dirty dairying campaign also took issue with the farming practice of ‘winter grazing’. This describes the way that most dairy farmers in New Zealand winter their cows. During summer they plant a designated paddock with high yielding, high calorie crops such as swedes (see figure 8). In winter they let the cows graze on this paddock in strips, by fencing off the reserve for the next day. Because these crops are quite high calorie, a lot of cows can be kept on a smaller paddock then what would be needed with grass. This heavy weight, combined with the usual rain of Southland winters, often turns the already grazed off area of the paddock into a mud pit, and environmentalists have successfully circulated photos in the media of cows standing in mud up to their bellies and calves being born in this mud.
Figure 8: Dairy cows between a summer grazing paddock on the right and a winter grazing paddock on the left, year unknown Source: Moran et al., 2017, p. 108
16 The Dirty Dairying campaign went further than just labelling dairy farmers as the issue behind this environmental concern; it also blamed regional councils (for their functions see further below) for not taking their responsibilities vis-à-vis the Resource Management Act (see below) seriously.
Turning public attention towards the issue of agri-environmental governance, the Dirty Dairying campaign provided an excellent political opportunity to re-appropriate this issue. For example, it was necessary that an answer from the farmers’ side came quickly, as this would demonstrate an awareness of the problem but also ensure farmers did not have to burden this issue alone. One of the first to react was the newly founded dairy company ‘Fonterra’, which proposed five pathways towards the solution of ‘dirty dairying’ through a Dairying and Clean Streams Accord. The Ministry of Primary Industries was also involved in the development of the accord (Jay, 2006; Tall and Campbell, 2018). The accord focused on keeping cows out of water bodies by means of fencing, and the management of effluent runoff (Ministry for Primary Industries, 2013). The accord was eventually succeeded by the Sustainable Dairying: Water Accord, launched by Dairy NZ, the union of dairy farmers in New Zealand (DairyNZ, 2013). While it is debatable how accurate and actionable these accords are (see Jay, 2006), it was still a very successful way of turning an agri-environmental issue into a problem that can be managed and governed (see Tall and Campbell, 2018). However, these accords did not have the required effect to solve New Zealand’s freshwater crisis, creating a gap between the big issue and the solutions provided.
2.5 Agri-environmental governance politics
As a result of the changing perception of agriculture and its link to environmental problems in the public eye, New Zealand has undergone and is still going through a time of significant policy change. The main political document governing New Zealand’s environmental management is the so-called Resource Management Act of 1991. Its aim is to promote the sustainable use of natural resources. The Resource Management Act states that regional councils are responsible for establishing local policies, which, as Brown et al. (2019) state it, “stipulate that regional councils will engage with the public and stakeholders in setting environmental policy and will undertake environmental research and monitoring” (p.117). Regional councils are also in charge of managing natural resources under the Local Government Act of 2002.
When the Resource Management Act was introduced, New Zealand was hailed as an international leader in the promotion of sustainable development planning; however, less than a decade later it became evident that if anything, New Zealand was severely lagging behind
17 (Freeman, 2004). As the negative impacts of agriculture on the environment are mainly visible in the degeneration of water quality, in 2014 a new statement came out, which was amended in 2017: The National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. The purpose of this new guiding policy was to get regional councils to set ‘enforceable’ quality and quantity limits on freshwater. The Resource Management Act states that regional councils must implement national policy statements through a regional plan (Resource Management Act, 1991, section 67(3)).
Now, New Zealand’s unique position of being a big agricultural exporter but owning a completely deregulated economic system has led to interesting attempts to go about setting these quality and quantity limits (Tall and Campbell, 2018). Environment Southland, the regional council, which will have to implement these limits, has a so-called Progressive Implementation Programme, which shows how they will implement the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. Environment Southland is required to have set the limits by the end of 2025. In Southland, this regional plan is called the Water and Land Plan, a policy tool, which will become operative in 2020 and which will ultimately be amended in order to set the strict limits, which are not yet part of the plan (Environment Southland, 2018). This plan will serve as my example of a current situation to apply my research questions to. As the opening statement of the preamble of the draft version of the plan explains:
“This Plan forms part of a suite of planning instruments which manage Southland’s water and land resources. It provides a regulatory tool for a variety of issues relating to these resources, with particular emphasis on the management of activities that may adversely affect the quality of the region’s freshwater, much of which has deteriorated.” (p. 5)
In 2016 the public was notified of the proposed plan and people had the opportunity to hand in submissions on what they think should be changed with the plan. These submissions were heard by the council and the council ultimately decided how they would work these submissions into the plan. In April 2018, Environment Southland then presented a more final version of the plan. Those people who had made submissions now had the opportunity to appeal the council’s new version of the plan at the national Environment Court. Once these appeals have been worked out, the plan will become operative.
In order to find out how these limits might potentially impact the region and its economy, Environment Southland – in cooperation with industry representatives from dairy, meat and lamb, as well as with the Department of Conservation, the Ministry for the Environment, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Southland Chamber of Commerce and Te Ao Mārama (Southland’s Māori representation in environmental matters) – launched The Southland Economic Project in 2014, spearheaded by its own scientists, which published two reports, one on agriculture and forestry (Moran et al., 2017) and one on urban and industry (Moran et al.,
18 2018). The findings from these reports are now being used to compose a model of Southland’s economy, in order to better understand how this will be affected by the new limits.
Another important step towards the limit-setting is the so-called People, Water and Land Programme, an initiative by Environment Southland and Te Ao Mārama. This programme has three main areas of activity, also called ‘workstreams’ by the initiators: On the ground action, focussing on specific catchments in order to learn from these examples and share the learned information; direct engagement with the community of Southland and finding out about their values and objectives; and lastly the project set up a regional forum in 2018, which will advise Environment Southland on the “methods to achieve the communities’ aspirations and objectives for freshwater (including council limits)” (Environment Southland, 2018).
After presenting the background of my chosen case study, the next chapter will now introduce my theoretical framework to investigate this.
19 3. Changing agriculture – theoretical framework
This chapter provides an overview of the state of the arts in literature on how we can explain changes in agriculture in research. I first present the larger streams of thinking in this field and then explain why I chose to work with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. I attempt to use his concepts as operational theory, meaning that these concepts can be used as concrete tools to ‘draw out’ and actively detangle the problem at hand. After talking about Bourdieu’s concepts in general, I then shed light on some of the literature, which has engaged with Bourdieu’s approach in the context of agricultural issues and agri-environmental governance more particular.
3.1 Ways of understanding agricultural change
Social sciences are the systematic study of human society and social life. When looking at how social science researchers interpret change in agriculture, several distinct streams of understanding can be made out. These different approaches can be differentiated according to where they stand in the great debate of structure vs. agency – meaning whether they perceive social action and the formation of society to be purely the result of external structures or of agency internal to the involved actors (see Giddens, 1979). In the following I will present an overview of (1) mainstream economic understandings of agricultural change and how this is interpreted through approaches of neoclassical sociology, (2) (neo-)marxist understandings of agricultural change and lastly (3) ‘constructivist structuralism’ understandings of agricultural change, such as Bourdieu’s.
(1) Researchers working with a neoclassical economic interpretation system of society believe that humans always act rationally in order to maximise their own profit; the ‘model-human’ in this system is called homo oeconomicus (Colander, 2000). In the case of New Zealand, a lot of research after the rural downturn following the 1980s focussed on economic viability and productivity of farms (see Campbell and Wards, 1992, Cloke, 1996, Johnsen, 2003). However, in a mainstream economic paradigm it is presumed that people behave rationally under given constraints in an environment that offers them perfect information (Glover, 2015). In general, it is not really social change, which is researched under this paradigm, but human behaviour under given, ‘static’ conditions. The effect of changing conditions is thus outside the focus of this approach. Therefore, the figure of homo oeconomicus cannot be used to explain change. This is where neoclassical sociology comes in.
In neoclassical sociology, researchers concern themselves with the effects of this economy on society. While neoclassical economists only engage with one concept of economy – that of
20 capitalism – neoclassical sociologists engage with a multitude of concepts (Sica, 2017). Social researchers working from this perspective use subject-focused analyses, because they are also of the conviction that individuals act rationally, according to their own self-interest. The ways that the ‘subjects’ act changes according to their interaction – in the sense of ‘reaction’ – with other actors (Weber, 1947). Max Weber, an economic sociologist as such, believed that the purpose of sociology is to study society and behaviour within it, meaning that looking at interactions between individual actors was the core project of sociology and could explain why society developed the way it had. For example, in his oeuvre “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Weber analyses how modern market economy changed agriculture drastically (see Weber, 2009). He explains how different ideologies of individuals lead to domination of one social group over another. Here he uses the historical example of how urban financiers created monopolised credit markets, where farmers needed to participate in cash, despite being the ones who actually produced the food that the urban people needed. This meant that farmers’ production decisions were now based on needing to make a wage, rather than subsistence farming. This could plunge farmers into great financial debt, meaning that if they did not make enough money, they could starve while producing food for distant commodity markets. For Weber, this change from producing food for themselves to ‘producing money’ symbolised the beginning of the globalised economy (Waters, 2016).
Other authors who follow this subject-focused approach to analysing society use the concept of methodological individualism, e.g. in order to understand change in agriculture. This concept follows the belief that actions on a micro-social-level explain phenomenon at a macro-social- level (see for example Boudon, 1979 and Werlen, 1995). However, this view of social research is being criticised by the followers of the stream of understanding presented below, because this approach is ‘voluntarist’ in the sense that it counts on the individual to make and recreate the world, and does not pay respect to external constraints to the actions a person can take.
(2) While in mainstream economics and also in Weberian sociological interpretations thereof, actors create society, Marxist interpretations rather believe that it is external structures, which guide the forming of society. These ‘purist structuralists’ say that men can change the world through their actions, but they are not free in the choice of their actions (Marx, 1867). Rather, social researchers who follow a Marxist interpretation of society believe in a ‘confrontational’ sociology. To them, the struggle for power of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – of which only the second holds the control over the means for production – is paramount to their understanding of change (Marx, 1867). For example in terms of change in agriculture, Karl Marx himself believed that in a capitalist system, family farms born out of feudalism would eventually succumb to big capitalist farms and disappear because of the constraints placed on them by a capitalist economy (Kautsky, 1899). In a new interpretation of Marxism, so-called
21 neo-Marxist scholars – such as Karl Kautsky, Alexander Chayanov (1966) or in newer times Terry Marsden and Sarah Whatmore in the area of agricultural change – believe that Marx analysis was too structural and that attention needed to be paid to the strategies engaged by farmers themselves (see for example Munton and Marsden, 1991). These neo-Marxists therefore believe that family farms will not disappear entirely in a capitalist system. There is still a large-scale industrialisation of agriculture, creating more big farms, but it does not eliminate small farms completely because small farmers develop strategies to survive (Kautsky, 1899). According to Marsden et al. (1996), paying respect to the different strategies employed by farmers makes it possible to identify a pattern of uneven development by looking at the local specificities that are influenced by the wider social structures. In sum, according to neo-Marxist interpretations of change in agriculture, power struggles are still at the basis of how society comes about. Different from earlier Marxists however, they do not necessarily only see two classes but look at society in a more differentiated and less orthodox way, paying respect to the complexity of social relations.
To reflect on these first two approaches to understanding agricultural change, I take the example of the field of farming in Southland, where farmers are trapped between contradicting pressures: Having to mitigate the environmental degradation caused by their farms and simultaneously increasing the productivity of their farms. From the perspective of the first, neoclassical stream of understanding, each farmer is perceived as her or his own boss, resulting in the belief that they change their farming landscape purely because of their own interests, free of any constraints or social forces (see Mooney, 1988). Seen from the perspective of the second, neo- Marxist stream of understanding, this changing landscape is the result of bigger trends in society. Scholars in this stream show that for example demographic or economic forces influence landscape changes. But, contrary to the Weberian stream of understanding, they do not really look at how farmers themselves figure into these forces: how they interpret, reflect and react – maybe even resist – to these forces on an individual level (Glenna, 1996, Ward and Munton, 1992). Because it is my aim in this study to investigate how farmers operate at an individual level while being influenced by greater societal trends, I now present a third way of studying agricultural change, which is trying to resolve the either/or problem of the structure vs. agency debate.
(3) This third stream of understanding concerns itself with the connections of individuals as actors to the social structures around them (Fligstein, 2001). Representatives of this school of thought in the social sciences are for example authors like Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Fligstein and Anthony Giddens, among others. They were not content with purely structural theories or purely agency based approaches, instead focusing on the relationship between actors and structural social change and the reproduction thereof, with the goal to theorise more towards the
22 believe that individuals as actors can in fact influence a situation (see for example Giddens, 1984 and Fligstein 2001). As Fligstein (2001) puts it, this discussion has emphasised “the important role that real people play in the reproduction of social life” (p.105). Decisions and their resulting actions are influenced by “ideas and practices negotiated by the social groups in which they are necessarily embedded” (Blackstock et al., 2009, p.5634). As a result, they have been trying to understand “the interrelationship between structural opportunities and constraint and the actors will and ability to control their own choices” (Bjørkhaug, 2012, p. 301). This is why this approach to understanding change is also called constructivist structuralism. Both a greater knowledge and a greater acknowledgment of the ‘socialness’ of agriculture and decision-making and the role of societal culture in this, are thus key to understanding how change can be implemented (McCarthy, 2005).
3.2 Why Bourdieu?
Bourdieu presented his own theoretical concepts as tools for empirical research, which would enable researchers to ask new questions of an “empirical reality” (Suckert, 2017). By using Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I try to shed a light on the social realities of farmers in Southland and on the factors that influence farmers’ take of the new agri-environmental policy. While other authors of the constructivist structuralism stream of understanding could be similarly suited to this study, Bourdieu’s focus on conflicts and power function – meaning the ability of an individual actor to advance their own interests – makes him ideal for this study (see Siisiäinen, 2000).
Pierre Bourdieu’s ambitious project of a theory of practice, developed out of his wish to overcome the divide of structuralism and constructivism, which he perceived as hindering the advancement of social science (Mahar et al., 1990). In his work, Bourdieu tried to find a middle ground between the two opposing viewpoints, where he could bring the best of both together – accounting for both structure and agency – in order to make a more accurate “model” of social life. This followed the underlying belief that there are both structures and constructions in social life, but that they do not oppose each other. Bourdieu’s central point is to see external structures as something that is constructed by the agency of individuals, but which then restricts the ways in which these agents can act (Jenkins, 1992). Unlike Marx, Bourdieu does not believe in pre- determined external structures, which influence the way society comes about and acts. But he also disagrees with Weber, who counts on the ability of the individual to make and recreate the world, and pays no respect to external constraints limiting a person’s possible actions. Or in Bourdieu’s own – rather complicated – language:
23 “If the world of action is nothing other than this universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness which creates it and hence totally devoid of objectivity, if it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because the subject chooses to revolt, then emotions, passions and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience.” (Bourdieu, 1977, p.74)
Bourdieu does not deny that there is ‘something’ that leads humans to act in certain directions, and he labels this ‘something’ as the logic of practice (Jenkins, 1992). People’s lives and interactions in society can be called a practice, in which they act according to the possibilities they have, and these possibilities come about because of their past and present situation (Jenkins, 1992). In order to operationalise this theory of practice for empirical research, Bourdieu introduced the notions of habitus, field and capital. In the following sub-chapters, I will further elaborate on these terms, but first I state more explicitly why I use Bourdieu in this study. I consider the use of Bourdieu’s concepts promising for three main reasons:
(1) Precisely because he tries to bridge the structure vs. agency gap: I am convinced that social action is not shaped by structures outside an actor’s influence alone. Structuralism is the “death of agents” and I believe it is central to pay respect to the fact that individual farmers can have an influence on ‘the system’ (Mahar et al., 1990). As Fligstein (2001) puts it: “Social life revolves around getting collective action, and this requires that participants in that action be induced to cooperate” (p.106). This cooperation presupposes the individual ability of an actor to choose or act depending on a situation. However, on the other hand I find it inconclusive to think that actors can always choose and act completely free of any outside influences. Thus, Bourdieu offers a theory that tries to pay respect to both of these aspects.
(2) Bourdieu offers the possibility to research an issue at the level of the individual. This is important because it enables me to look at the life-worlds of individual farmers. Using interviews, I am thus able to analyse this issue thoroughly, even though the scope of this research does not allow for a very high number of interviews. I believe in this case it makes more sense to look at small portions of social reality and try and gain insight into bigger issues through thick description, rather than wanting to generalise over a whole area based on a larger but less detailed sample (see Geertz, 1973). Furthermore, by working with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I do not have to treat the different areas or aspects of a Southland farmers’ life separately, but can keep for example their family life and business life together. This is also important because farmers are not one homogenous group of actors. There are many differences between how they operate their farms based on family history, motivations for farming and so on. On top of this, the farmer is often not one clear figure on a farm, but a net of different
24 people (e.g. at household level) who might act out through one main figure but who all influence what is being done and in what way. Or to state Bourdieu’s goal in his own words:
“The object of social science is a reality that encompasses all the individual and collective struggles aimed at conserving or transforming reality, in particular those that seek to impose the legitimate definition of reality, whose specifically symbolic efficacy can help to conserve or subvert the established order, that is to say, reality.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.141)
(3) Lastly, Bourdieu has made his methods self-reflexive, or as Mahar et al. (1990) put it: “[this] is a conception of sociology which recognises that it is itself constituted of cultural practices within a social field” (p.195). This means that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of a theoretical framework is built to be adjustable depending on the case study at hand. In my understanding this gives it the ability to be applied in virtually any situation. It is not a fixed and rigid concept that is imposed on a situation, on the contrary, it is made in the situation and only by actually using Bourdieu’s ‘ready-to-use’ conceptual tools, the theoretical framework is constituted:
“There is no doubt a theory in [Bourdieu’s] work, or, better, a set of thinking tools visible through the results they yield, but it is not built as such […] It is a temporary construct which takes shape for and by empirical work.” (Wacquant, 1989, p.50)
I will now present the concepts of field, habitus and capital in more detail, before applying them to agricultural practice.
3.3 Bourdieu’s key concepts
According to Abrahams et al. (2016), Bourdieu’s theory of practice can be summed up with the following formula (p.3):
PRACTICE = [ (HABITUS) (CAPITAL) ] + FIELD
This means that “the practice of an individual or social group is thus to be analysed as the result of the interaction of habitus and field” (Mahar et al., 1990, p.15). While the field describes a construction external to the individual actor, the habitus is internal to every agent. In simple terms, capital is what flows between these two corresponding concepts.
3.3.1 Field
Perhaps the most fundamental concept in Bourdieu’s theory of practice is that of the field. The field represents:
25 “a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation […] in the structure of the distribution of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions […]” (Wacquant, 1989, p.39).
With his concept of field, Bourdieu wants to show that practices are made in (unequal) relation to one another, and that they are not a ‘given’ (Bourdieu, 1986). In his article on the French author Gustave Flaubert, Bourdieu compares ‘the field’ to a game and describes a game to be about struggling for a common goal: To win the game (Bourdieu and Parkhurst Ferguson, 1988). The players of the game have unequal amounts of trump cards, which then define the players’ position in the game (or field) and their likeliness for success or failure. In Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, these trump cards are the different types of capital that a player has and the set of trump cards on the player’s hand is the habitus, meaning what makes up the player in a social context (Bourdieu, 1986; Mahar et al., 1990).
Independent of one’s trump cards, everyone must abide by the same rules of the game. The game and thus the field over which these rules have effect, is only empirically identifiable: “[…] every field constitutes a potentially open space of play whose boundaries are dynamic borders, which are the site of struggles within the field itself” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.104). The field is ever evolving, but it is also “characterised by a patterned set of practices, in which competent action conforms to set rules” (Glover, 2008, p.3). Each player brings their own composition of different types of capital and thus habitus to the fields. In the fields, there is a struggle for recognition, which is played out through the accumulation of certain forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1984). The ‘players’ with the most relevant capital get to set the rules of the game. This means that the possession of the right types of capital gives the holder of this capital power and thus the ability to influence the rules of the game (Glover, 2015, p.147). The rules can then be changed so that another type of capital is more relevant, strategically undermining the type of capital that opponents own more of. While actors in the field might have their individual agendas and strategies, they can only realise them by playing by and thus reproducing the rules (Bourdieu, 1986). The field is thus held together by a struggle over power, position and legitimate authority (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
According to Bourdieu society is made up of many different, overlapping fields, meaning that what happens in one field in terms of power relations can influence actor’s position in another field. The fields design and ‘contents’ are not predetermined but can only be made explicit through empirical research (see Mahar et al., 1990).
26 3.3.2 Habitus
“The habitus is a system of durable, transposable dispositions which functions as the generative basis of structured, objectively unified practices” (Bourdieu, 1979, p.vii). Habitus is Bourdieu’s way to theorise how human action works. It is in fact the bridge between structuralist and subject-focused accounts of society. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) put it, habitus is:
“The generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations […] a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks” (p.18).
Bourdieu (1998) describes the habitus further as “a socialised body, a structured body, a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world – a field – and which structures the perception of that world as well as action within that world” (p.81). Thus, the habitus describes how an individual talks, thinks, feels, perceives, evaluates things and so on.
The habitus is conditioned through an individual’s history and social circumstances, it is acquired from childhood and “it underlies and conditions all subsequent learning and social experience” (Jenkins, 1992, p.79). It is an individual’s experiences rather than explicit teaching which form the habitus, and it ‘works’ without the individual having to consciously think of it. The habitus is “the site of the internalisation of reality and the externalisation of internality” (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1997, p.205). While the individual ‘uses’ the habitus, it is constantly produced and reproduced. The habitus is influenced by someone’s “own knowledge and understanding of the world, which makes a separate contribution to the reality of that world” (Mahar et al., 1990, p.11). This means that in Bourdieu’s understanding, an individual has constitutive power through their actions and their actions are not just a reaction or reflection of ‘reality’. This reproduction and the ‘effects’ of the habitus in general are dependent on the field in which the habitus is located in. If the same habitus is employed in a different field, very different practices might emerge (Jenkins, 1992). To sum this up in Bourdieu’s own words:
“The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will. Orienting practices practically, they embed what some would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body – ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking – and engage the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world, those which most directly express the division of labour […] or the division of the work of domination.” (Bourdieu, 1984, p.466)
27 How does habitus handle change? The habitus is very durable and adapts only slowly, even when major upsets occur. However, this does not mean that habitus is fixed and unchanging, it changes, when the dispositions that form it change. And the dispositions change when the individual’s position in the field changes (see Mahar et al., 1990). But there are certain restrictions on how the dispositions can change. The first restriction is again the habitus. If we take for example two generations, then the new generation tends to act in the same way as the older generation because they share similar values due to a similar upbringing, meaning they have a similar habitus, and are thus disposed to do so. However, “in a situation of relatively rapid change, the objective conditions of the material and social environment will not be the same for the new generation” (Mahar et al., 1990, p.12). While Bourdieu explains habitus to be constantly trying to be in line with objective conditions, this is a biased process, because “the perception of objective conditions is itself engendered and filtered through the habitus” (Mahar et al. 1990, p.12). So the objective conditions structure the socialisation of the habitus and in turn create practice.
3.3.3 Capital
To recap, a field is an ‘arena’ of different forces and struggles competing for a commonly agreed upon stake, by trying to reach a better position of legitimate authority. This common purpose behind struggling for this stake Bourdieu calls the illusio (Bourdieu, 1990). The illusio of a field can be found by looking at how capital is flowing in the field. In a common understanding, the only relevant capital, which might advance someone’s particular goal, is of financial nature. However, Bourdieu opposes this view by broadening the meaning of capital. He says that we should not only invest into our economic capital, but also into other forms of capital. According to Bourdieu (1977), the term capital should be applied “to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation” (p.178). According to Bourdieu, these can take the shape of economic capital, social capital, cultural capital or ultimately symbolic capital.
In Bourdieu’s understanding, economic capital describes the amount of material assets one owns and that one can decide over in the struggles that take place in a field. These assets include money and other material assets and resources, such as land (Smart, 1993).
Cultural capital can exist in three ways: it can be institutionalised, it can be objectified and it can be embodied (Bourdieu, 1986).
• Institutionalised cultural capital can for example exist in the form of qualifications or awards one has received for relevant activities. These ‘certifications of cultural competence’ are important because they are socially agreed to be comparable across a spectrum of agents in a field (Burton et al., 2005).
28 • Objectified cultural capital refers to the value of goods of ‘high social status’ (de Krom, 2017). Here it is important to note that the cultural capital does not stem from the object or good itself but depends on its “use in accordance with a specific purpose”, which in turn is developed through the embodied cultural capital of the agent (Burton et al., 2008, p.19). A simple example of this is memorabilia we bring home from travelling.
• Embodied cultural capital is present “in durable mental and bodily dispositions and skills” (de Krom, 2017, p.354). Burton et al. (2008) call this “cultural capital in its fundamental state”, because it relies on self-improvement of an actor and is not transferred as quickly as say economic capital such as money. This means that embodied cultural capital significantly influences the habitus. The ‘sending and receiving’ of embodied cultural capital is rarely ever obvious, certainly not in the way that economic capital is obvious, which highlights its importance in the accumulation of symbolic capital. Examples of embodied capital are skills we gain from hobbies, such as being able to play an instrument well.
It is also important to note that cultural capital is not always the same but changes with the field. Actors in the field have “interactively developed, and come to embody similar categories of perception and appreciation” (Bourdieu, 1998, as cited in de Krom, 2017, p.354). When actors in a field have agreed upon similar dispositions, the cultural capital that actors strive to receive by way of displaying their cultural accreditations can be recognised by others and subsequently change into social capital, which provides the actor with a higher social status (Bourdieu, 1984).
The social capital describes “the long standing social relationships and networks that individuals have created, both personal and business connections, including individual and community (group) based network” (Glover, 2008, p.3). Social capital can be rephrased as “the norms and networks that enable people to act collectively” (Woolcock and Narayan, 2000, p.226).
Sometimes, economic or social or cultural capital can create more of one another. For example when an individual’s cultural competency gains them new social connections, cultural capital creates social capital. The totality of these capital accumulations and gains, meaning all of the different types of capital an individual holds, is called symbolic capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1997). Because the symbolic capital is the result of the accumulation of the other three capitals, it can therefore exist in all three forms (economic, social, cultural) and all the combinations thereof. It is in a sense the translation or conversion of the economic, cultural and social capital of a person into their totality. Or in Bourdieu’s (1977) own words: “Symbolic capital is the prestige and renown attached to a family and a name”, meaning one’s identity and social position or status in the field (p.179). In order for this to happen, agents with a certain habitus need to be able to appreciate and subsequently share the same symbolic significance in a field
29 (Burton et al., 2008). In Bourdieu’s (1998) words: “for a symbolic exchange to function, the two parties must have identical categories of perception and appreciation” (p.100). Symbolic power can explain why there are certain practices in societies which are no longer questioned: “It is symbolic power that helps actors to overcome the discrepancies between their belief and what challenges their beliefs, thereby maintaining the status quo.” (Mahar et al., 1990, p.40). In general, the creation and exchanges of different types of capital in the field can be a result of power struggles in the field. The acquisition of symbolic capital – meaning to gain more of the types of capital most relevant in the field – is paramount to the domination of these power struggles:
“[…] it is in this form that the different forms of capital are perceived and recognised as legitimate. To be seen as a person or class of status and prestige, is to be accepted as legitimate and sometimes as a legitimate authority. Such a position carries with it the power to name, the power to represent common sense and above all the power to create the ‘official version of the social world’.” (Mahar et al., 1990, p.13)
To sum up Bourdieu’s conceptualisations, the field can only exist, when there is a struggle for power or for a dominant position, defined by the illusio. The power struggles in the field are ‘directed’ by the acquisition of different types of capital. The relevance of each capital in the power struggle is defined by the field and the illusio. The habitus of an individual actor in the field defines how much of which type of capital they can gain. This creates power relations rooted in a material base, delimiting the field (Mahar et al., 1990).
3.4 Critique of Bourdieu
In the previous part I have portrayed my expectations towards Bourdieu’s conceptualisation. Before applying it to my area of research, I look at what others have said about this conceptualisation from a critical point of view. This critique starts from discussions of particular issues and then moves to a more general challenging of Bourdieu’s approach.
Bourdieu has been criticised to make rather tautological statements, meaning he pseudo- explains situations and obscures the ‘true’ going-ons between struggling groups. Bourdieu’s explanations sometimes seem to be going in circles. For example when he says that capital is something that people value and therefore struggle for and then he says that struggle is that which people engage in to gain more capital (The Friday Morning Group, 1990).
With this also comes the fundamental question of whether Bourdieu’s methods make sense in term of scale and level at which they operate. For one, does it make sense to look at external structures and internal agency on the same level (see Elster, 1983)? There also seem to be some ambiguous terms in Bourdieu’s work. What exactly is power? And where do the state and
30 politics feature into this? Bourdieu is often accused of political agnosticism, meaning he was politically informed but appeared to be indifferent and non-committal towards the contemporary political parties and groups of his time. While he was certainly progressive in his perception of the political world, he did not clearly side with one of the political opponents (The Friday Morning Group, 1990).
Some criticise that Bourdieu’s theory fails to be a theory of social transformation and can only really capture social reproduction (see Jenkins, 1992). As Di Maggio (1979) puts it: “Bourdieu’s is a world not of revolutions, or even of social change, but of endless transformations” (p.1470). Underlying this is the question whether habitus can only explain slow day-to-day transformations and fails to explain faster ruptures in social change. However, in later publications Bourdieu seems to override this as a misconception by giving more weight to the idea that the habitus generates practice and thus does have transformative power (see Mahar et al., 1990).
Lastly, the criticism has been brought up that Bourdieu’s language is too complicated for other people to have access to his meanings. Bourdieu seems to have dismissed this quite quickly by saying that he is trying to reproduce practice, which is itself a highly complex matter and that his teachings should be engaged with more intimately by students in order for them to make sense of them (Mahar et al., 1990). However, I am not sure that this is helpful to his cause and it can even come across as elitist – which is probably furthest from his goal.
In sum, I take from this discussion that Bourdieu’s conceptualisations have been broadly discussed in the literature and that one of the main points of criticism towards him concerns the vagueness and sometimes obscurity of the terms he uses; they require clear definition in order to be operationalisable. In the following part I therefore take up this critique, by trying to substantiate and make the concepts of field, habitus and different types of capital clearer. I do this by reviewing existing literature to see how these concepts were operationalised for their application in research on farming.
3.5 Applying Bourdieu to farming
Many scholars have been using Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his concepts of field, habitus and different types of capital to investigate change in agriculture. In the following, I present a literature review of selected works that focus on agricultural change and subsequent agri- environmental policy attempts that I have found to be relevant to my case. This literature review is in no way exhaustive.
31 I first present how the concepts of field, habitus and the different types of capital have been used in studies on agricultural change and finally I summarise these findings by looking at what other authors have found when investigating agri-environmental governance policy through a Bourdieusian lens.
3.5.1 Field, habitus and capital in farming
This section serves to concretise the meaning of field, habitus and different types of capital with regard to the topic of my study.
Field
In the agricultural sector, the field can be seen to be the totality of social relations that make it possible to farm (see Glenna 1996). Here it is important to note that farmers obviously cannot be considered to be one homogenous group the globe over. Rather, even within one community, there are several different “agri-cultures”, which each have their own understanding of what (good) farming looks like (Burton and Wilson, 2006). In addition, farmers do not operate in isolation from the rest of ‘social reality’ or ‘society’. On the contrary, they are connected and heavily dependent on other actors in other positions within the field. Therefore, the relations between these different actors and positions are the field of farming.
In her example of the UK, Glover (2008) identifies the dairy farming industry to be the field – a “crucial mediating context” (p.61). Glover identifies politicians to be the main rule makers of the game by employing strategies such as quotas and policies. By engaging these rules, politicians structure the dairy industry, for example by directing price mechanisms, how much is to be produced or how the farming sector is to respond to environmental legislation. Based on Flint and Rowlands (2003), she goes on to say that since the acquisition of the different types of capital gives rise to power (see also Bourdieu, 1984), this is also the basis for governmental power, resulting in the fact that the government can control every type of capital: “cultural capital (through the education system); social capital in terms of its highly sophisticated networks; and economic capital as a result of the huge revenues it receives from transactions in the field” (p.63). It is the government’s inherent aim to control the accumulation of these different types of capital, because this means that they stay the most powerful and can keep controlling and making the rules of the game.
In their example of the agroforestry industry in Missouri, USA, Raedeke et al. (2003) describe the field to be the combination of economic relations, family relations and rental relations. By economic relations they understand the relationships farmers have with non-farm actors that buy or sell products and/or services from the farmer. This can also be expressed as an exchange of economic capital in the field, where the farmers can react according to their position in their
32 field. Family relations describe the influence that members of past, present and future generations have on farmers’ decision-making. Here, both the exchange of cultural capital in terms of what is seen as “good farming” and of economic capital in terms of providing for the family’s needs are important. Rental relations describes a particularity of Raedeke et al.’s case study, where the opinion of potential future landlords also influences on-farm decision making.
Habitus
In the field of farming, the habitus describes the farmers’ ‘internal framing’ towards the field, the explanation of their ‘taken-for-granted’ agreements on farming within the farming community (see Liepins, 2000). For example studies from the UK (Burgess et al., 2000; Burton, 2004) and from Germany (Stoll-Kleemann, 2001) show that farming groups “develop their own experience-based rules behind agricultural practices, and that these specific, locally understood practices contribute to the local construction of the mythical ‘good farmer’” (as cited in Burton et al., 2008, p.20).
The habitus of farmers can be discovered through the language that farmers use to discuss the field of farming and how this is different from the language other actors in the field use (see Raedke et al., 2003). While farmers’ dispositions differ according to the capitals a farmer can generate, the habitus – meaning the totality of these dispositions – is influenced by what type of farm the farmer works. This means for example that the heritage of farming skills passed down on a family farm influence the current farmer’s decision-making (Burton et al., 2008).
Symbolic capital
In sum, farmers who farm with more skill generate more symbolic capital, which in turn leads them to hold a better position in the field, but only when the farming group share a common and specific understanding of the required skills (Burton et al., 2008). Tsouvalis et al. (2000) name the systems through which farmers “relate to, make sense of, and socially construct their environment and identities” as knowledge cultures (p.913). Knowledge cultures are constantly reworked in order to form “identical categories of perception and appreciation”, the basis for the exchange of symbolic capital according to Bourdieu (1998, p.100).
Economic capital
Economic capital is arguably perceived to be the most important capital for farmers, because they need to be able to cover production costs and provide an income, in order to be able to change their operation or invest (Glover, 2008). Therefore, a farmer that can generate economic capital and thus sustain his operation is seen as a good farmer (Burton et al., 2008, Siebert et al., 2006). It is therefore not surprising that economic motivation plays a key role in the adoption of agri-environmental schemes (Siebert et al., 2006). Pretty et al. (2000) state that as long as
33 farmers provide for the general public (be it products or immaterial things such as cultural landscape), they should be compensated for their possible financial loss through an exchange of economic capital between the state and the farmers. This is especially relevant when farmers change their practices to adopt best management practices in order to fulfil environmental standards (see Burton et al., 2008).
However, Siebert et al. (2006) also found that “financial compensation and incentives function as a necessary, though clearly not sufficient, condition” (p.334), saying that more attention needs to be paid to social expectations and norms, when coming up with a sustainable policy. This has also been shown in other studies, which say that farmers do not only lose financial income when they adapt their practices, but they lose non-financial capital as well (Burton, 2004, Yarwood and Evans, 2006). If farmers are only compensated financially, without the possibility to generate more or new types of other capital, farmers might still land a loss (Shucksmith, 1993). This means that other types of capital need to be considered when trying to change the practice of farmers through financial compensation.
Social capital
Social capital in farming refers to farmers’ ability to utilise their social networks in order to advance a solution to a problem in a changing field (Hansen and Moxness Jervell, 2014). Farmers can make use of their social networks by mobilising them in order to organise the farming community and confront an issue as a group. Accordingly, farmers’ social capital differs by how well they can mobilise people and access certain groups and participate in the use of group resources such as information and cooperation (de Krom, 2017). In formalised community groups, social capital tends to be higher overall, which lowers the transaction costs of working together, making it easier to collaborate (Pretty, 2003). Members of such groups are more confident to invest in certain activities, knowing that the other members will do the same. Pretty (2003) sees three types of social capital in such groups: bonding describes the ability to link people with similar goals and build local groups, bridging describes the ability of such a group to make connections to those with differing views and linking describes the group’s ability to engage with external agencies and in that way either benefit from outside resources or influence policy making. At the same time, being a member of a formalised community group also makes it less likely for a member to privately act in ways, which endanger the collective goals of the group, for example resource degradation. However, as Ostrom (1990) shows, community groups need the support of higher authorities, for example by gaining legal entitlement of land and connected resources, as well as by protecting them from global market pressures.
34 In general, farmers who have higher social capital are said to be more willing to take on agricultural change, because their high social capital makes them more aware of what is going on, e.g. of agri-environmental schemes before they become a reality, and also reduces transaction costs (Mathijs, 2003; Jones et al., 2009; de Krom, 2017). As a result, resource management policies have increasingly tried to engage with local formalised community groups by utilising strategies such as participatory approaches to policy making (Pretty, 2003).
Cultural capital
Institutionalised cultural capital exists in the agricultural sector in the form of institutionalised ‘qualification agencies’ such as breeding societies, which have the defining power over which breeds are to be recognised as the best qualified. These institutions can then acknowledge this by giving farmers special certifications (see Holloway, 2005 and Yarwood and Evans, 2006).
Objectified cultural capital in farming is mainly available in the form of symbols of production, because high production is still seen as the goal of agricultural practices by many farmers (see Burton et al., 2008). Rogers (1983) gives the example of huge grain silos in the USA, Burton (2004) says that livestock of a high quality can be this form of capital and Holloway (2004) says that modern machinery in general qualifies.
Embodied cultural capital represents a recognisable display of a farmer’s skills to perform farming activities well (Burton et al., 2008). In order for the skills to be recognisable, a farming community needs to agree on “identical categories of perception and appreciation” for transferring embodied cultural capital (Burton et al., 2008, p.20). The embodied skill needs to be recognisable by other farmers and can then be rewarded with social capital. In order for a skill to be recognised by other farmers, it must be possible to differentiate between poor and good performance of the skill. As a result, the farm landscape is the most important representation of a farmer’s embodied cultural capital, it is a “display of the farmer’s knowledge, values and work ethic” (Rogge et al., 2007, p.55; van den Berg et al., 1998, Brush et al., 2000, Burton, 2004, Yarwood and Evans, 2006, de Krom, 2017). According to their categories of perception and appreciation, a farmer reads the landscape different from someone who is not familiar with the field (Burton, 2004, Yarwood and Evans, 2006). Burton et al. (2008) give the example of straight lines after ploughing, which symbolise good motoric skills. It is very important that the skill is visible to other farmers but also to the general public, for example if the ploughing lines are close to a road where the general public can pass by, in order to generate more capital (see Burton, 2004). From the landscape it is therefore easy to read the level of skill a farmer has, this “informs the farmer’s social status amongst peers and the desirability of including the farmer in agricultural social networks” (de Krom, 2017, p.354).
35 In industrialised countries (such as New Zealand), farmers seem to accredit higher cultural capital to those farmers whose farming landscape shows features of intensive agriculture, like for example the silos or the use of machinery in the ploughing example above (van den Berg et al, 1998, Brush et al., 2000, Forney, 2016). A farm that looks ‘tidy’ is a symbol of intensive, productivist agriculture, leading to higher economic outputs for the farmer, which in turn leads to higher cultural capital (Burton and Wilson, 2012, Sutherland, 2013, de Krom, 2017). In Forney’s (2016) study of Switzerland, farmers have even resisted to change to organic farming at a large scale because they refuse to be seen as just the “country’s gardener” (p.2). It is therefore a problem when new agri-environmental policy schemes lead to outputs, which make a farm look “messy” (Burton et al., 2008).
3.5.2 A Bourdieusian look at agri-environmental policy
While the previous section has touched on the topic of agri-environmental policy through a Bourdieusian lens, this section serves to look at this in more depth, which will be helpful in order to reply to my research questions.
In order for farmers to be able to implement agri-environmental policy productively, the farmers and the policy makers need to agree on what the problem to be addressed by the policy actually is (Blackstock et al., 2009). In my case study for example, farmers and policy makers need to agree first of all that the environment needs protection, because it is being compromised – amongst other things – by agricultural activities and second of all, farmers and policy makers both need to have an interest in making sure that farmers can still make a livelihood. Translated into Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, this means that “understanding how agri-environmental schemes interact with the contemporary beliefs of the farming culture therefore becomes a matter of exploring how the adoption of new practices alters the nature of capital generation within the farming field” (Burton et al., 2008, p.20).
This is important when bringing in new policy or even voluntary regimes, because as Deuffic and Candau (2006) realise in the context of voluntary agri-environmental schemes in France: “there is no reward for doing anything more than the minimum necessary to qualify for the subsidies” (p.574). Farmers might even be subject to peer pressure not to go further than what the agri-environmental scheme prescribes, as doing otherwise might result in a loss of cultural and social capital and no additional gain of economic capital (de Krom, 2017; see also Deuffic and Candau’s (2006). It is an issue that once agri-environmental policy is implemented, its ‘effect’ becomes static and the farmer is no longer able to display skills and knowledge of the craft of farming, like they were in the setting-up phase (Burton et al., 2008). This is also different from normal farm work, where farmers can observe each other’s skills anew every year, when the new crops grow in the spring or when livestock brings in high returns (Burton et
36 al., 2008). Doing farming the ‘traditional’ way – meaning the way it has been done so far, and which has been agreed upon by the farming community – is a strong factor in defining the identity of a farming group and differentiating them from other social groups (Burton, 2004).
In order for agri-environmental policy to succeed, it needs to create a ‘space’ where the habitus of farmers can be changed. This can be done by implementing rules in a way that allows for farmers to demonstrate their skilled practice, or in other words, their cultural capital (Burton et al., 2008). When the farmers can thus create cultural capital in this new context of the policy, they can adapt their habitus too. Having an ‘adapted’ habitus is also economically important to farmers, because being able to respond to rapid changes in the industry (for example disease or new incoming technology) is imperative to decide between success and failure (Tsouvalis et al., 2000). When agri-environmental schemes do not leave space for this ‘identity-enhancing’ process, it becomes more difficult to differentiate farmers from other social groups (Burton et al., 2008).
How can such a ‘space’ for the adaptation of the habitus be achieved? Glover (2015) suggest that “farmers need to have more influence over the rules of the game if they are to be protected from unintended consequences for their social and cultural heritage as well as high levels of stress” (p.152). She furthermore says that if farmers are supposed to engage in agri- environmental schemes, then these schemes need to pay respect to where farmers’ practices are coming from. If the current practices are abandoned, the farmers run the risk of losing their social and cultural heritage as well as the value that the general public places on the current farming landscape. At the same time, farmers cannot stay too ‘old-fashioned’ either, because this will potentially make them be left behind; farming practices need to be innovated in order to meet contemporary challenges. Glover (2015) finally demands of future policy a “judicious blend of traditional values and modern business practices” (p.152).
This chapter served to present the theoretical framework I use in my research. I will now restate the research problem and research questions in light of this.
37 4. Research problem and questions revisited
This chapter serves as a transition between the literature review of my case study area and my chosen theoretical framework, and my own analytical research. As I have stated in a general way at the outset, in this study I want to approach the topic of agricultural change through a social science perspective. To do this, I have chosen the case study of Southland, because it provides the unique opportunity to research a concrete and on-going process of change. While agriculture as an industry is constantly changing and adapting to new demands and according to new findings, the case of Southland presents a case of exceptional change. This process of change is triggered by a rapid deregulation of the economic system in which the agricultural industry is embedded. Change is further provoked by changing public awareness of farming and its effects on the natural environment and by new policy coming in,. In this changing agriculture, Southland farmers are caught between contradictory poles: They are simultaneously urged to produce more and become more ‘environmentally friendly’. These struggles are what constitutes the field of farming in Southland.
I approach this endeavour by first asking: What are the circumstances of farming in Southland today from the perspective of farmers? By researching this question I can uncover the particularities of the farming situation in Southland: What are farmers motivations to farm and to continue to farm in this changing field and what are the challenges they encounter while doing so? Through Bourdieu’s concepts I can investigate this and look at how this influences farmers’ ability to (re-)act and struggle in a changing field. I can then try to identify the illusio – the commonly agreed upon purpose – of farming in Southland. When the circumstances of farming in Southland have been made more clear, I then ask How do farmers talk about the new ‘Land and Water 2020’ plan? By posing this question I can further research the illusio, habitus and different types of capital involved in farming in Southland in a concrete situation. The findings from this can concretise what the issues and fields of tension and struggles in Southland are today. This leads to my third research question: What can farmers’ take of the new plan – in light of the current circumstances of farming – reveal about fields of tension in farming in Southland today? I use this question in order to compare the results found from the first two questions. Through investigating this questions using Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, I hope to be able to explain how some of these tensions or areas of struggle for farmers came to be.
By uncovering what is ‘behind’ the field of farming Southland in a Bourdieusian understanding, I want to first contribute to a thick description of what it is like to farm in a completely deregulated economy today and second present these results in order to make it possible to ameliorate processes that can improve farmers’ position in the field in the future.
38 5. Methodology
In this chapter I present the methodological ways in which I conduct this study. I use a qualitative research approach, because it was my goal to explore the complexity of individual positions and opinions, thus a quantitative generalisation would not have made sense (Cloke et al., 2004, Flick, 2009). The study follows a case study approach, making an in-depth, multi- faceted analysis of the problem at hand possible. It is not my goal to come up with a generalising type of explanation, but to do a detailed interpretation of the issue at hand. Such a thick description of the situation opens an empirical window into this complex field:
“Believing […] that man is an animal suspended in the webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz, 1973, p.5).
In the following I first present my methods for data collection, then for the analysis and lastly I reflect on my own position as a researcher and other possible limitations to this study.
5.1 Data collection
The data collection for this study was done in two main blocks. The first block contained the gathering of secondary data, both in the form of a literature collection in order to make a literature review and by conducting expert interviews. The second block consisted of the gathering of primary data, my own empirical data, through semi-structured farmer interviews and observations in the field. In order to do this data collection, I spent four months (November 2018 – February 2019) in Southland.
5.1.1 Secondary Data
Secondary data includes on the one hand the literature review, which aims to give an up to date overlook of the current relevant literature. On the other hand, a number of expert interviews were conducted and used to explore the thematic background and to investigate and collect contextual information (see Flick, 2009).
Literature review
The gathering of literature included the selection of documents related to firstly the global issue of farming in a changing environment, secondly to the case study of New Zealand and Southland in particular, thirdly to agri-environmental policy making and lastly to Bourdieu and
39 the application of his theory to agriculture. An overview of the literature can be found in the bibliography.
Expert interviews
I am classing these interviews as secondary data, because due to the limited scope of this thesis, I could not investigate them to the same extent as the farmer interviews. The expert interviews I present in the following were therefore used to access and clarify the field and to structure the way I approached the research problem – both in the field and from a theoretical point of view – but they do not serve as empirical data as such. I chose to do expert interviews because I entered the field without too much on-the-ground-knowledge of the situation. By interviewing people with specific capacities as experts or representatives of a group, I could gain an overview of the current situation and structure my next steps from there. These interviews were different from the farmer interviews, because here it was not the person that was of specific interest, but their “technical process oriented and interpretive knowledge referring to their specific professional sphere of activity” (Bogner et al., 2002, p.46).
Most experts were chosen through snowballing, meaning once I had acquired the first contact, I asked them for further contacts and so on. The first contact was chosen through random sampling, where I met someone who knew someone with expert knowledge in this area and who also had a network of further contacts. However, the snowballing process was not completely random. Rather, I asked for contacts of people in specific professional fields or from specific institutions, which I wanted to have represented in my study. In order to fulfil this, I also directly contacted some people. Unfortunately, not all my desired areas could be covered. In general it proved easier to be referred by someone who the contact already knew, rather than randomly applying for an interview.
I wanted to conduct interviews with experts from different stakeholder groups, whose significance to the research problem I had identified through the literature review. Later, I added some areas, whose importance was made apparent through the interviews I had already conducted. The sampling size was given by the already mentioned restrictions, as well as limited time. Because I had initially planned to use these interviews as empirical data, the style of the interviews varies quite a bit. While for some I was able to follow a catalogue of questions (see appendix) and do a semi-structured type interview, for others the setting was not ideal for this type of interview. The reason for this was that some of the experts had only little time and scheduled me in for example during lunch and the interview became more narrative and informal. Where possible I recorded the interview and later transcribed it, where this was not appropriate or not allowed I took some notes during the interview and after the interview was over I sat down and wrote down everything I remembered. In one case the interview had to be
40 cancelled, but the person agreed to answer a few questions by e-mail. The following table gives an overview of the eight experts I interviewed in the end.
Institution Profession
Environment Southland Scientist
Environment Southland Policy Planner
Te Ao Mārama Inc. Principal Iwi advisor for ‘People, Water and Land’
Fish and Game NZ Scientist, regional manager
Land and Water Science Ltd. Independent Scientist
Beef + Lamb New Zealand Ltd. Extension Manager
Ballance Science Extension Nutrient Dynamics Specialist
Fonterra Sustainability Team
Environment Southland is the Regional Council of Southland, a local governing body, responsible for policy making.
Te Ao Mārama Inc. is the Ngāi Tahu ki Murihiku (the local Māori iwi/tribe) Resource Management Consultancy. They are responsible for consultation processes that concern iwi and the local councils, namely Environment Southland, Invercargill City Council, Southland District Council and Gore District Council.
Fish and Game NZ is the representation of all regional and the national Fish and Game councils. They represent the interests of anglers and hunters throughout the country (with a few exceptions). They can be compared to a regional council, but they have fewer functions. The councillors are elected by license-holders, it is thus a “user-pays, user-says” type model. The Fish and Game regional councils employ their own managers and staff.
Land and Water Science Ltd. is an independent research-based environmental consultancy in Invercargill, whose areas of expertise include: Hydrological process and soil characterisation, hydro-chemical analyses, greenhouse gas emission measurements and estimates and continuous monitoring of contaminated sites.
Beef + Lamb New Zealand Ltd. represents sheep and beef farmers in regional and national matters. It is farmer-owned and is financed by a fee that farmers have to pay to be a member. They invest this fee in programmes to help improve the beef and lamb industries.
41 Ballance is one of several farmer-owned fertiliser manufacturers in New Zealand. They do fertiliser production, supply, sale and advice and consultancy on nutrient services. They sell to farmers and industries.
Fonterra is New Zealand’s biggest dairy exporter. They are responsible for 25% of all of New Zealand’s global exports. They are farmer-owned.
I would have liked to, but did not manage, to conduct an interview with a local representative from the Department of Conservation, with a representative from DairyNZ and with a representative of a leading bank.
5.1.2 Primary Data
The main method to collect primary data was semi-structured interviews with Southland farmers. These were complemented with periods of observation on site.
Semi-structured farmer interviews
My aim in this study is to make explicit the social realities of farmers in Southland as they navigate the web of issues currently influencing their work. Glover (2015) calls this social reality the “life-worlds” of farmers. She says (p. 135): “Farmers, like everyone else, construct narratives (or stories) through which they make sense of events and experiences for themselves, as well as for others. Narratives are not easily quantified as they contain references, meanings, symbols and so on.” In order to capture or collect these narratives, I conducted semi-structured interviews. I appreciate the interactive character of semi-structured interviews, where the interviewee can lead the interview in the direction that interests them most, thus revealing what is important to them (see Cloke et al., 2004). I structured the interviews inspired by Flick (2009, p.152-158) and started with open questions, followed by more hypotheses-driven questions, complementing with confrontational questions where necessary (see the question catalogue in the appendix). While I do not present a hypothesis in this study, the ‘hypotheses-driven questions’ enabled me to follow up on suspicions, which developed during my fieldwork.
For the sampling I decided not to try and create a representation of Southland’s demographic, as getting the right contacts to do this was too difficult and I could not identify a real benefit to this method for my particular study. I did however pay attention to include farmers from different farming types in my sample. Initially I also tried to get a variety of ages and genders, however, it proved quite difficult to find contacts for young farmers as well as women identifying as the ‘primary farmer’. In most cases, a couple ran the farm, where the husband identified as ‘the farmer’ and the wife identified as ‘the farmer’s wife’. In the end I followed the snowballing principle, using different starting points – people I already knew with connections to farmers – and getting referred around. One interview was with two farmers simultaneously over lunch,
42 this was the only case where I did not record the interview. In all other cases I was able to record the interviews.
I interviewed nine men and one woman, however, in several cases, the farmers’ wives were also present and added to the interview. The interviews were all conducted on-farm and varied in length from about 30-90 minutes, averaging around 60 minutes. The farms were located all around Southland, about 15-120 minutes from Invercargill by car. The following table provides an overview of the interview partners, the type of farming and the farm size, in order to illustrate the vast differences between Southland farms. The farm size numbers are rounded and for some farms only number of livestock or size of the land is known.
ID Farming type Farm size
1 dairy 170 ha, 500 cows
2 dairy 330 cows
3 dairy 1’000 cows
4 dairy (EU organic) 200 ha, 300 cows
5 sheep, dairy support 450 ha, 150 cows
6 sheep, beef 230 ha
7 sheep, beef (in high country) 900 ha, 4’000 sheep, 250 cows
8 dairy (farm owner with sharemilkers) 430 cows
9 sheep, beef, deer, dairy, cropping 7’000 ha (spread over 5 properties)
10 deer, sheep 800 deer, 550 sheep
I then transcribed all the recorded interviews into written form. I transcribed every word, but did not note things such as pauses, unless they influenced the content of what was said as well. The first interviews were transcribed by hand, later I used the online software Temi, an automatic transcription service (https://www.temi.com).
Observations
On most of the farms my interview partners gave me a guided tour. This made it possible to see the farmers’ work and life environment and contextualise the interview. On one dairy farm, one sheep farm and one mixed farm I was also able to actively help with farm chores, which further facilitated my ‘experiencing’ of the farmers’ position in the field. In sum, these observations
43 complimented the interviews and have also influenced certain passages of the interviews, as I now had a more vivid picture of what was described orally.
5.2 Data analysis
In order to code the transcribed interviews I used content analysis, where I used a set of coding categories I developed based on my insights from the literature review and the expert interviews. I also used theoretic coding, where I used the transcripts themselves to develop coding categories (see Flick, 2009).
I partially follow Mayring's (2015) approach to content analysis. However, Mayring’s proceeding seems to want to be as strict as more quantitative approaches, which I believe qualitative data from semi-structured interviews is unsuitable for. This might not uncover underlying meanings and go into enough depth (see Flick, 2009). Mayring’s approach is also very time intensive and therefore not really suited for the amount of data in my timeframe. I therefore employ Legewie's (1994) method of global analysis to then make it easier to use Mayring. Legewie (1994) suggests how to reduce the material in order to understand it better. I roughly followed the following steps (as cited in Flick, 2009, p.328-330):
1) While reading the text, note keywords on the side, thus making a structuring of the text.
2) Refine this structure by noting the most important concepts or statements, note down ideas.
3) Make an index of this structure for each interview. (This was an automatic step for me, as I used the software ‘NVivo’ for the coding.)
4) Check what is left out.
5) Finally note down keywords, which can serve as codes.
In general I coded some parts of the interviews in more detail, while other passages, which seemed less relevant, were coded more generally. For an illustration of the coding nodes, see the appendix.
5.3 Positionality and limitations
In this chapter I present aspects of this study, which were either more difficult to resolve than anticipated or otherwise provided challenges. These ‘hurdles’ were present during all stages of the research, namely the data collection and interpretation, as well as limitations due to my own person.
44 Interviews build the main body of data of this study. Reflecting on the process of gathering these interviews, there were several problematic points: When I entered the field I did not really know any farmers. So in order to gain access to some, I used two contacts that I already knew. It could be said that this lead to a biased sampling, as my two contacts had already made a pre- selection of whom I was talking too. Also, I realised that (logically) the farmers that were willing to talk to me were to different degrees of the same opinion, meaning they were maybe more ‘progressive’ than other farmers who had never reflected on their ‘position’ before. Setting up interviews took time, both in terms of getting the contact and then in terms of the interview partners being able to take time out of their busy lives in order to talk to me. If I had been able to talk to more people from different areas of farming and with different “proximities” to the issues discussed in this study, this could have influenced my results. The small sample size of this study might also be a shortcoming, however I feel that it was impossible to analyse more data within the limited scope of this thesis. All in all, this feels like a good compromise. Furthermore, as Patton (1990) explains, not all interview partners are able to co-create the interview to the same extent. This was the case for me, resulting in the fact that not all interviews in the end covered all the same areas, which made analysing the interviews more difficult.
When transcribing my interviews from spoken to written form, I made the mistake of severely underestimated the time this would take. Only very late in my research process – and after painstakingly transcribing hours of interviews by ear – did I finally find software that was able to somewhat accurately transcribe the New Zealand accent. I truly wish I had not wasted so much time on this, as this delay really took the wind out of the sails of this study for a while.
In terms of analysing the data, while I tried to reflect on the codes I used, it is important to note that these categories do not exist per se but are a product of my own biased view of the problem.
Finally, it is important to reflect on one’s own position as a researcher in the field, because as Geertz (1973) puts it: “that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (p.9). Even though it is usually our goal as social science researchers to provide a somewhat neutral picture of a particular situation, our own person heavily influences the conclusions we draw. While Rose (1997) is of the opinion that we are unable to ever completely deconstruct our own position, in the following I try to begin this process.
Going into the field I did not feel like too much of an outsider. Southland felt familiar in terms of customs, as I had been there before and farming per se was quite familiar to me. In saying this, I was still a foreigner and definitely not a farmer, trying to investigate an area from the ‘outside’, creating an artificial hierarchy of observer and observed. My biggest constraint in
45 relevance to this was the fact that for a long time I could not get over ‘wearing my Swiss glasses’. By this I mean that I had strong images in my head of how agriculture was supposed to look like, which were heavily informed by Swiss farming practices, as I had followed them quite intensively right before conducting this study. When I found differences to the ‘Swiss way of farming’, I first thought of them as mistakes. It took me a while, and I think most of this process was done in the writing process of this thesis, to unravel this Swiss image and come to the conclusion, that agriculture that was done differently from the ‘Swiss way’ was not just wrong.
For example, Swiss livestock farmers have to always provide shelter and their animals and livestock is wintered in stables or at least with access to it. At first, I took the fact that this is not the case in Southland to mean that farmers did not care as much about their animals. When I finally brought myself to reflect on this alleged moral of mine, I realised that I could not really detect a difference between how Swiss farmers talked about their animals and how Southland farmers did. In the end, both were concerned for the animals’ well-being, while at the same time not being fatuous to the fact that livestock is not the same as pets. There were other instances like this, where I had a strong sense of how farming was done ‘right’, which I could somewhat relativise during the conducting of this study. This also included simple misconceptions on my behalf, like when I did not understand why Southland farmers would not do more direct marketing of what they produced, like it was increasingly the case in Switzerland. A farmer had to actively point out to me that Switzerland was just under seven times smaller than New Zealand, but with a population twice as high, making for completely different conditions towards direct marketing. Lastly, it took me a while to stop reflecting on the ‘legitimacy’ of culture in farming; growing up with Swiss agriculture, I did not see this in the mega big farming operations in Southland, automatically disqualifying them from having culture in the same way that the ancient practices of Swiss alpine farming did, for example.
While in hindsight, most of my prejudice and bias towards in farming might seem ridiculous, I do think that this mind-set limited my advancement in this research, at least in the beginning stages. I could also sense that some interview-partners picked up on this and started to teach me about the differences between our two countries, rather than reporting from an unbiased position. On the other hand, having this “outsider status” might have also helped me enter the field in a way, because I was not seen as a representative of any sort of New Zealand industry trying to “better” farmers.
Finally, while there is much to be said about the genderedness of the farming industry in general (see Whatmore, 1991), I cannot say that I felt I was being treated different for being a woman. In terms of language I did not really feel restricted, in any case, interview partners did not seem to adapt their way of speaking when they heard my accent.
46 6. Understanding farmers’ predicament
In this chapter I present my empirical results and discuss them in light of Bourdieu’s theory and my research problem. The chapter is split into four parts. In the first part I explore the illusio of farmers in Southland. I do this by identifying different distinct types of farmers and looking at why they are farming in Southland and not somewhere else. In the second part I analyse how farmers talk about change and identify three paradoxes of farming in Southland. This way I can determine what different types of capital look like to farmers and how they are distributed. With this, I can make the habitus of farmers in Southland more explicit. In the third part I discuss farmers’ perception of the incoming Water and Land Plan. Here I explain how farmers respond in general, how they think the plan will impact them, what their opinion of the policy making process is and how they finally suggest to improve the plan and the policy making process. Finally, in the fourth part I present a summary of the results and analyses.
6.1 On the obscure illusio of farming in Southland
In this first part I look at the motivations of the farmers I interviewed. Why are they farmers? What do they believe to be the ‘purpose’ of farming in Southland, the illusio? By trying to find the answers to these questions, I hope to uncover farmers’ reasons behind why they operate their farms the way they do and what this means for how they react to change. This part is divided into four sections. In the first three sections I differentiate between three ‘types’ of farmers that I could identify in Southland in terms of farming motivations. In a fourth section, I analyse what these results mean for the illusio of the field of farming in Southland.
6.1.1 The family farmer
None of the farmers I interviewed was a first generation farmer. While they all had slightly different paths to ending up were they are today, they all share the ‘heritage’ of carrying on the family tradition of farming. Most of the farmers I interviewed actually took over the exact farm that their parents had already worked on. This leads to the assumption that carrying on the tradition of farming as a family tradition can be a motivator for farming. One farmer’s reply when asked whether keeping his parents’ legacy going was important for him was:
„Yeah I think so, yeah definitely. Well and truly. [My parents have] spent their entire lives growing this, not that I feel obliged that I should, but there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of time and a lot of money gone into it to get it this far. Why should we just walk away from that? And no matter what business it was, I guarantee if they were selling cars or anything, like if they’ve spent so much time and money to get a business to where it is, it would be silly just to walk away from it I think.” (Farmer 1)
47 By making the comparison to another trade, this farmer makes obvious that taking over the family farm is maybe less about the profession of farming itself, and more about keeping the family tradition of doing the same trade for generations going. Despite his comment to the contrary, a sense of obligation can be seen in this phrasing. He does not want to behave unreasonably towards his parents by abandoning something that they have invested time and money in. In this sense, taking over the family farm is also a business decision. This leads me to the hypothesis that farming as a profession was not necessarily a ‘well-reflected’ choice for all farmers. Most of the farmers I talked to confirmed this suspicion. For many taking over the family business seemed to be a mix of ‘just the way it was’ and rational business, as these two quotes illustrate:
“I was born and bred as a farmer. So my dad was a farmer, my granddad was, my uncles, so I sort of just went into farming” (Farmer 3).
“Well, this was where I grew up. So this is my parents’ farm as such, but then both my parents passed away when I was quite young. I was 15 and 19, and I didn’t have older siblings, so I didn't really have a choice. So I either had to buy two thirds of the farm or not. So yeah, that was basically the reality of it.” (Farmer 2)
This sense of ‘it’s a family obligation’ also became apparent when I asked farmer 9 whether he could imagine doing something other than farming:
“Most mornings (laughs). […] Um, but exiting farming and going and doing some completely different, not really. Not really. I mean we're sort of in it for the long haul, you know, it's a family thing.” (Farmer 9)
For him, this went down to the level of genetics, saying that the motivation for farming was something he was born with because of all the previous generations who had farmed too.
“So it's a family farming business. Two generations involved at the moment, I’m the youngest of our generation of our family and my elder brother is involved and he has three sons that are also involved in the farm. So my father, grandfather and great grandfather were all farmers. […] So farming’s in my blood I suppose.” (Farmer 9)
When reflecting this apparent ‘no choice’ nature of taking over the family farm, some farmers expressed regret at not having made a more conscious choice of their career path.
“Well you've got aspirations when you’re a kid, like to be an air force pilot and all this type of thing, but when it sort of came down to it, this is what I was best at and what I enjoyed.” (Farmer 5)
“I didn't really want to face going back to school, but I really should have probably gone, cause I was quite an academic anyway. And so I went onto the farm, well, I guess it's just what you did. […] So the shorter answer is, yes I've always been farming, I've always
48 enjoyed the practical side of farming. But, possibly if I'd been born in this time with academia a little bit more taken seriously...” (Farmer 3)
“Well, I suppose when you look back at life, you think you could've done something else. I really enjoy farming and that, but I didn't go to university, so I probably should have gone there, but that's history as they say.” (Farmer 10)
The farmer that decides to take over the family farm mainly in order to carry on a tradition and less explicitly for the actual profession of farming, builds my first analytical category of farming motivations in Southland. I dub this the family farmer type.
Interestingly, while carrying on the farming tradition was an important motivation for the family farmer, none of the farmers of this type that I interviewed seemed to think that their children also had to carry on farming.
“You see a lot of family farms don't sort of carry on, because people haven't got that interest that their parents had. And sometimes their parents didn’t necessarily have the interest either, they were just there by default. It was sort of like, well that's the thing you did, you just carried on. And it wasn't necessarily the best vocation for them. People have more choices now I suppose. Because you've got to really be into farming and animals and everything that goes with it, to be a successful farmer. If you're just there because of your dad, because you think you must do it, you're not necessarily going to be the best at it.” (Farmer 10)
This farmer’s reflection on why the expectation towards the next generation are different, hints at a sense of regret of having ‘had’ to go into farming and how in today’s changing times, this was not enough of a motivation to be successful in the farming business. This is important to note when it comes to analysing how the family farmer type can react to tensions and change in the field of farming in Southland. If passing your farm on is not important to you, you might ‘cling’ less to this way of life, and are therefore able to change to another career more easily. One farmer however, realised that this lack of succession will lead to other problems as well:
“There’s so many farmers – whether you take dairy, sheep, beef, whatever you like – that are in their late sixties, that are ready to move off their farm. There’s a whole 25 year gap where there’s no one there. [Kids don’t want to take over their parents farm] because they've seen the parents go through extreme hard times…because with farming […] if you get really good prices for your product, then you'll always be battling the weather. You know, you have an extreme drought or extreme wet and cold or you might have a really good season, but then the price would be low. You're always trying to pick yourself up off the carpet again a little bit.” (Farmer 2)
The lack of farm successor will leave a lot of farms up for sale, where other farmers can buy up the land. This is especially relevant in regard to the third type of farmer motivation I identify
49 (see chapter 6.1.3). The lack of farm succession can lead to an increase in really big farms, owned by rich corporations, because they are the only ones who can actually afford to buy land anymore.
Other farmers also shared the mind-set of not having to pass your farm on to your own children. Instead, they had innovative ideas in how they could secure their farm’s succession:
“So I don't really feel that I have to pass [the farm] on. And I can see the business structures of farms will change a bit going forward, because of the amount of equity tied up in farms now. So, looking forward, the likes of [our young farm manager] can maybe buy into the equity, which would suit us, then we could just phase our way out [of the farm business].“ (Farmer 3)
“[My husband] and I, we have a philosophy about trying to help young people go farming, especially those that don't have family farms. […] So we see it as… it's just helping giving someone else the same opportunities we had.” (Farmer 8)
In sum, for many of the farmers I interviewed, carrying on the family legacy of farming and simultaneously making a good business decision, was an important motivation for why they are farmers in Southland today. I want to note here that this type of motivation – that is not directly linked to farming as a profession – does not mean that the family farmer type necessarily enjoys farming less than other ‘types’ of farmers. The fact that family farm succession seems to be less important now than it was a generation ago, suggests that the family farmer type will become increasingly less decisive in the field of farming in Southland.
6.1.2 The lifestyle farmer
Those farmers I interviewed, who seemed to have been more deliberate about going into farming, had often spent some time overseas and it was there that they realised that farming was what they wanted to do:
“I spent two and a half years in the UK. […] I've got a bit of life experience over there and saw what it was like out of New Zealand and that was sort of like, well there's no better place to live than New Zealand and so forth.” (Farmer 5)
“And then we travelled overseas in the late seventies. And while we were overseas, [my husband] decided he wanted to come back to New Zealand and go farming.” (Farmer 8)
Farmer 4 moved to Southland from Switzerland, where he and his wife had grown up farming. They were looking to start a farm in a different country, where land was vaster and cheaper. Farmer 3 was originally from the North Island. His father had to sell the family farm, so farmer 3 had to find other ways to be able to afford a farm, if he wanted to continue farming. He went into sharemilking, until he had enough equity to buy a farm in Southland. While their particular reason for choosing Southland to farm might be of a more financial nature, their decision to
50 become a farmer appears to have been a more conscious choice than for the family farmer type. They had seen something in farming – and in particular in farming in Southland – that had made them decide to take it up over other careers. So what do the farmers actually like about farming? What was the factor that made them decide to go into this profession instead of doing something else? Their answers to this were at the same time quite diverse but also similar in essence: The ‘lifestyle’ of a farmer was important to them. ‘Lifestyle’ describes the way in which farmers frame their day-to-day life and how this significantly differs from other profession in their eyes. This different ‘way of life’ included factors such as being your own boss, producing something from bare soil, working outdoors every day, looking after animals and having a very diverse job. The following quotes illustrate these notions:
„I think farmers farm for many different reasons. But we see ourselves as genuine farmers. In other words, there's nothing else we'd want to be.” (Farmer 8)
“So I started farming really because I liked the lifestyle of it. I didn't really think of it as a business then.” (Farmer 3)
„Well, what I used to like about it was for the love of the animals and the love of the land and caring for them, working outdoors. Being my own boss, the flexibility, you know, so I could arrange my own day, things like that.“ (Farmer 2)
“Well I'm my own boss. You're asset rich, our land is worth a lot of money, but of course you have also got a lot of debt, which you inherit with farming. But it's a lifestyle really and working with animals and my dogs I enjoy, and you’ve got something different to do everyday as well, like one day you're driving a tractor the next day you're drenching lambs and you are outdoors even though it’s hosing down and all that. I couldn’t be an office person.” (Farmer 5)
From this last quote it is also visible that the economic capital that comes with being a farmer, both in terms of having a lot of it in the form of land and owing a lot of it with family debt, plays a significant role in the lifestyle farmer type of motivation. But in general the idea of being this ‘creator’ of agricultural products seemed to dominate the notion of great economic capital. One farmer mentioned that for him the thought of producing food for other people was an important motivator:
„It’s what I know, it's what I enjoy. But as a farmer I think, doing what I enjoy, providing food for the country and overseas is a reasonably good way of spending your time. So that's what drives me.“ (Farmer 6)
This picture also places the lifestyle farmer type in a hierarchical position in regard to the non- farming part of society in their imagination. Being the producer – the provider – puts the farmer in an arguably more important position in society than those who work in professions that do not directly produce the consumable goods necessary to human life. Some farmers confirmed
51 this perception when they talked about their relationship with the natural environment and the role it played in farming:
“So for me, biodiversity is quite important. So I like the ability for a lot of species to survive in what I've created. My Garden of Eden.” (Farmer 3)
Literarily speaking, it is deities that create a Garden of Eden in the way that seems the most perfect to them. A Garden of Eden also provides a safe place for many species to thrive in. The farmer thus becomes a protector and nurturer of the natural environment. Most farmers agreed that the land they were farming on was important to them, because they had been looking after it and were producing from it. They seemed to have a deep sense of ownership of their land.
“I basically have developed [this farm] over my lifetime […]. Yeah I'm basically here because I've developed it out of swamp and scrub here and I have added to the original property a couple of times.” (Farmer 6)
In sum, the lifestyle farmer type can be ascribed a sense of being part of ‘something bigger’, as taking on an important role in society. For these farmers the reason behind why they farm seems to be obvious and self-explanatory. For them, there is no better and also to some extant no job more important in society. This farming motivation type, more so than the family farmer type, also has great potential to create a sense of community among farmers.
6.1.3 The investor farmer
As some of the reasoning behind the farming motivations of the farmers of the previous two types has already hinted at, there appears to exist another reasoning still behind why people become farmers in Southland. The following quote stems from a farmer for whom farming was not his first choice. After growing up on a farm, he had trained and worked as a mechanic, but when the opportunity came up to invest in a farm as an asset with a friend, he took it.
“The farm needed a lot of work, [my friend] said after like six months it was way too much work and we needed to sell it. […] So I was like, yeah well this is a bit of a waste, what do I do. So I rang mum and dad and talked to them. And they said they would invest money in that farm, but only if I was gonna farm it. […] I had a little think about it and then I thought, well if they’re willing to invest money into it, we should have a go at it. And when I met some of the people that have been dairy farming, they seemed pretty simple sort of people at times (laughs), so I thought if they can do it surely I can do it.” (Farmer 1)
This statement illustrates the third type of motivation for farming in Southland: That of seeing farming as an investment business, where one can potentially make a lot of money. I call this type the investor farmer; while a big part of the farms operated with this motivation are actually corporate farms, the other part are ‘just’ small-scale family farmers with monetary ambitions so to say. The reasons for why they want to make a lot of economic capital are diverse. In the
52 changing field of farming in Southland, with increasing pressures from all sides, for some this provides a new opportunity to pass on something to their children.
“Now we got neighbours they want a farm for every child, whether the child is going farming or not. I've never quite really understood that, but what a lot of it is, is so that when the parents die, each child has a farm that they can sell, even if they're not farming it. […] Like when we bought a farm back in the mid 1980s, you had to have 50% of the cost of the farm in cash to buy one. You don't need that these days. You know, you can go leverage with your mom and dad. And this is how a lot of these families around here are being able to bond multiple farms. They buy this farm, it was worth say $100, but then when they went to buy the next one, which could be 10, 15 years later, that farm back there could be worth $500, prices have just shot up compared to what we paid for them. So suddenly they've got $400 of leveraging they can use on that farm to buy this one. […] but they haven't become what we call totally corporate, they’re still farmers at heart, you know.” (Farmer 8)
The second part of this quote shows that the coming about of the investor farmer type is a direct result of the deregulation in the 1980s. Without this total neoliberalisation of the market, land prices would have probably never developed this way. As a result, farming could now be seen as something lucrative, as an ‘easy way’ of making money. Whereas before the 1980s, there was little potential for farmers to get rich in this way. For farmers who were about to pass on their farm at this time, this opened up a new opportunity to pass on more economic capital than they had owned so far.
“My parents just shifted here. They were basically on the point of retirement and it was a business decision for them to shift […] to an area where the land is cheaper. Okay, so they were on the point of retirement and that allowed them to get some capital and give me a start and have a farm.” (Farmer 6)
While this trend was to some extent visible all over New Zealand, Southland forms a special case, because here, land prices were the cheapest and the potential for the development of lucrative dairy farms was huge.
“In the mid 90s when we started farming here, there was only a handful of dairy farms here. If I’d drive past a farm when I was 8 years old with mum and dad I could tell you who’s farm it was. Like you knew the few people that were farming. There were not many farms down here at all. All the farming came in the mid 90s, because [people] had seen the opportunity to grow larger farms down here. […] And it was probably banks and accountants that said, well do I want to keep milking 150 cows over there? If I want to grow in the industry and that, maybe I should look at selling that little farm and coming here.” (Farmer 1)
53 This quote seems to suggest that for this type of investor farmer, the motivation shared by lifestyle farmers – creating something from the land – becomes less important. The farmers I interviewed self-identified less as this type of farmer than they referred to it as a motivator in other farmers. There was also clear reference made to the fact that a lot of these investor type farmers were not originally from Southland, but had come in from other areas of New Zealand. Farmer 8 and her husband for example, were originally dairy farmers in the North Island:
“Southland's a good place to farm. Like that's why we bought a place. […] Um, land was a lot cheaper in Southland then, it was just about the cheapest land you could buy in the country. And then about two years later it started increasing in price. So we just got fortunate that we bought when we did.” (Farmer 8)
While this trend of people coming to Southland to invest in farming definitely changed the demographic of the region a lot, seeing farming as a financial investment opportunity, also changed farmers’ relationship with the land and the place where they were farming in a more fundamental way:
“You are very much associated with the land and the place. […] Now that I've been [in Southland] for quite a period of time, it's kind of weird, ‘cause I don't really feel like I'm from here, but I don't feel like I belong there either. […] I have a strong sense of values, but it's not like it's tied back to a place; I love where I am, what I do and I love this place, but it's not like I have to defend it. It's not intergenerational. It's not something that we've been doing for ten generations or six generations. It's very much like I have developed it. But you know, I'm going to turn back to dust one day. So it doesn't really matter anymore. So where prior to that, I'd probably say that there was a real strong sense of ownership, and family identity to that ownership, which definitely isn't as strong now.” (Farmer 3)
This was certainly stronger in farmers that moved to Southland from other places, but there were also a lot of established Southland farmers who became investor type farmers.
“It’s been sheep farmers that have seen the money in it and have converted [to dairy farming]. Um, they'd been very rich farmers, as in they've been able to carry on with sheep [after the subsidies cut] and now they've come into the dairy sector and there's been some dynamics of those people being in the mix, which has created a really interesting dynamics to the way that things are being done down here in Southland.” (Farmer 3)
This indicates that people who had proficiency in one area – e.g. sheep farmers – suddenly changed to a different area that was more lucrative – e.g. dairy farming. While some farming skills might be transferable from one type of farming to another, the particularities of the different farming types require quite a lot of experience and expertise. This suggests that when people changed farming types for monetary reasons – even when they had to do so in order to survive – they could potentially farm the land in an environmentally harmful way, because they
54 lack knowledge to do it sustainably and have their priorities sorted in a way that puts financial gain at the top. There was also a new opportunity to gamble with land prices and making great financial gains by simply selling your farm at the right time.
“So if for example, a 200 hectare farm was sold close to Invercargill somewhere and was suitable for dairying, it was converted in the last 25 years. Any land that has changed hands that’s been suitable for dairying has been converted to dairying. And the guy who sold the 200 hectares, he's seen an opportunity to either increase the size of his farm or decreases debt by selling or exiting farming altogether. So he would move to an area of lesser value and buy a farm twice the size […]. Then the guy that he bought from […] he is doing the same thing […] and so all of a sudden the land values increase exponentially for no real reason or not related to what the farm can generate, but how much money the people have got. So all of a sudden we're going in a situation where land was selling for a value that far exceeded its earning potential.” (Farmer 9)
While this setting up of farms on land that does not necessarily posses the intended earning potential might have rather bleak consequences for the integrity of the natural environment, it also shows that a big issue in this type of investing in land is the role of corporate farms. Being newly exposed to the world market without any governmental ‘filter’ after the deregulation, foreign investors soon sensed a new investment opportunity.
“The ironic thing was that people that hit the wall [after the subsidies cut], a lot of their farms might be bought out by corporates. […] But when you look at the outfits like that, they're not borrowing the money, they're just doing the short-term burn for a year, they bring in someone else's cash. And so when they buy a farm, they buy the farm cashed up, you might say.” (Farmer 10)
“And there was a lot of money, European money, a lot of foreign money came in and they put together syndicates and bought farms and they went really well. And the company who set them up had a managerial role. […] when dairying became less popular and profitable in 2014, those investors decided, hang on a minute, there's gotta be somewhere else. So the same companies set up businesses in kiwifruit and now hops. So, you know, the focus changes very quickly unless you have a long-term view and you have a passion, you have a stake in the business. I mean, it's just purely an investment proposition. A lot of that money came from German superannuation funds and European superannuation funds.” (Farmer 9)
The mobility of these corporate farms – meaning that they can just up and move when the operation becomes less interesting financially – presents a great threat to the integrity of the environment where the farm is located. While a lifestyle farmer and even a small-scale investor farmer will (in theory) rationally realise the need for the protection of the environment as a means of self-preservation of their livelihoods, a corporate investor farm is not restricted by
55 this. They can simply squeeze out their land for all its worth and move to another place when it becomes less productive, or ‘update’ the soil with expensive fertiliser etc.
So in sum, there seem to be two quite differing variations of the investor farmer in terms of how they can react to change. While the small-scale investor farmer might loose an entire livelihood when the investments are not made sustainably, a corporate investor farmer has enough back-up economic capital to simply abandon the project. While investor farmers put financial gain atop every other motivation, the reasons for why they do this can also differ. Sure, some investor farmers might just be ‘money-grubbers’, but others might put high value in making succession of their farm financially interesting or see investing in this way as a sustainable way to make sure they are able to farm long into a constantly changing future.
6.1.4 The illusio of Southland farmers
So far, my attempt to understand why farmers in Southland are engaged in farming has led me to identify three different types of farmers. These are categories, which do not exist as such ‘in reality’. They represent ‘ideal types’, a way to try and understand the different motivations people have for farming in Southland. In ‘reality’ most farmers will belong to two or even all three of these types, they are not mutually exclusive. For example, most of the farmers I interviewed are farming in Southland because this is where the generation before them farmed. For those who moved here from somewhere else, cheap land prices and the availability of bigger properties seems to be the main reason for moving to Southland. While this first group of farmers could be labelled as the family farmer type and the second as the investor farmer type, they can potentially both also share an aspect of the lifestyle farmer type, meaning they farm because they see ‘something bigger’ than themselves in this profession.
According to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, understanding people’s motivations leads to understanding what they see as the purpose – or illusio – of ‘playing the game’. It is important to deal with this definition of a shared illusio, because as Blackstock et al. (2009) have stated, for farmers to accept e.g. agri-environmental policy, they need to share a common understanding of what the issue at stake is. In this study, the game is ‘farming (and surviving) in Southland’. In the following I recap what discerns these three different types of farmers and how they can react to change in order to analyse the illusio of Southland farmers.
(1) The family farmer: These are those who farm in order to carry on a family tradition – it is just ‘how it has always been’. Their decision to farm is maybe less reflected than that of farmers of the other types and has less to do with the actual practice of farming and more with carrying on a legacy. However, this does not mean that they should be taken any less seriously as farmers or seen as less legitimate. In terms of how they are able to react to change, it can be said that this depends on the ‘strength’ of their believe in having to carry on this family legacy.
56 While some farmers will be more okay with letting go of a farming life, when it becomes too stressful to ‘reasonably’ hold on to it, other farmers will prioritise this legacy over everything else, making them more ‘rigid’. Such a farmer can potentially become quite self-destructive, while trying to save the farm. In terms of environmental degradation caused by farming, the family farmer type should rationally have a self-interest in preserving the natural environment, as this will ensure their livelihood. However, people are rarely ‘rational’ and acting ‘rational’ is also tied to having the possibility to do so. A family farmer that is struggling financially might have a more short-term outlook of his farming practices, where environmental protection becomes less of a priority than financial productivity.
(2) The lifestyle farmer: These are farmers who farm for those ‘romantic motives’ that have long dominated my view of farming. They like the way of life of farming, because they can directly see how other people rely on and directly benefit from them. When financially possible, they have a close relationship with the environment and recognise that they need to look after it and work with it rather than against it, if they want to continue what they do. Their appreciation for working outdoors and with nature and animals also gives them more inherent motives for protecting the environment. In terms of their ability to react to change, this type of farmer in theory has the highest motivation to stay in farming; it is what they enjoy more than all other professions. This means that their adaptation to change needs to take shape in the adaptation of their farming practices, as they are unlikely to ‘abandon’ their farm. The potential of this motivation for farming to unify farmers is great. As communities, farmers are better able to react to change, as they can share around resources. However, the ‘idealistic’ touch of this farming motivation, especially the angle of ‘being more important’ than other parts of society that do not produce the consumables necessary for human life, also makes this farmer type more vulnerable to more subtle changes in society. E.g. they might suffer more from a declining position of the public image of farming than other types of farmers (see Hughey et al., 2016).
(3) The investor farmer: These are those farmers who see farming as an opportunity to make a lot of money. They can be ‘normal people’ in the sense that they are family farmers looking to gain a higher standard of living both for themselves and for their children. There is however also a different type of farmer in this category: The corporate farm. These are run by people with a lot of ‘free money’ that they can invest into anything that will generate them more money. More often than not, these people do not have a history of family farming and the environment does not really mean much to them. After all, their money means that they can always improve their current land or move somewhere else. So in terms of how they are able to react to change, these two sub-types of the investor farmer differ greatly. The small-scale investor farmer is highly dependent on the investments they made working out, otherwise they will lose a lot of economic capital quick, basically ending their operation. The corporate
57 investor farmer however has so much economic capital accumulated, that their mobility brings them great security in times of change.
These three types of farmers also reflect different illusio in the field of farming in Southland. Their purpose for farming and the way they practice it varies greatly. The family farmer sees passing on the farm and carrying on the legacy of farming as their highest goal. The lifestyle farmer sees being able to live the farming lifestyle as their highest goal. The investor farmer sees making money as their highest goal. In other words, it is difficult to identify a common illusio for farmers in Southland. What they share, though – the corporate farm excluded - and what then can be described as a shared illusio, is a sense of wanting to be able to continue farming despite changing circumstances. The fact that their illusio is somewhat obscure and not consistent as such has an effect on how farmers can act in a situation of change and also on how or whether they can improve their position in the field.
In this part I have explored farmers motivations behind what they are doing. In the next part I investigate how they are reacting to outside restrictions towards what they are doing.
6.2 The demands of a changing field
In this chapter I look at how farmers perceive the changing field of farming in Southland. By analysing how they talk about different changes and what their perspectives on the future are, I can locate farmers’ values and attitudes, which are an important indicator of the farmers’ habitus according to Bourdieu. The habitus is formed through values and attitudes, which are translated into different types of capital in Bourdieu’s conceptualisation. Habitus is a result of the farmer’s socialisation, e.g. in terms of upbringing, and it is coproduced by what the values and attitudes one holds encounter, e.g. in terms of the environmental or economic situation. By making these values and attitudes explicit and translating them into Bourdieu’s types of capital and thus describing habitus, I can find out more about farmers’ position in the field. I can also begin to identify how habitus, symbolic capital and position in the field have come to be the way that they are now and what they might have formerly been. The change in these concepts is a major contributor towards analysing the current ‘crisis’ and presents a possible outlook into the future.
This part is split into five sections. In the first section I analyse how farmers frame change. In the following three sections I identify three paradoxes in the field of farming in Southland. By paradox I understand what Barel (1979) described to be a situation, a behaviour (or in a Bourdieusian understanding a practice), a strategy or an attitude, whose two poles are contradictory in the sense that they are mutually exclusive. These paradoxes are to a large extent what is holding the field of farming in Southland together. If one pole is chosen, then this
58 automatically leads to the choice of the opposite pole too. In the fifth section finally I provide an interim conclusion, which summarises this part.
6.2.1 How the farmers frame change
In order for this chapter to offer a valid analysis, it requires that farmers perceive the field of farming in Southland to be changing. I have found this to be the case for all my interviewees. However, the ways in which they described this change and how they encounter it, differed greatly between the different farmers. Interestingly, some farmers were very conscious of how they were framing change and challenges to farming in their interviews with me – to me an indicator that they have already had to reflect on what this change means to them. As a result, there were farmers defining change as a good thing and others that were condemning it.
Those that were seeing something positive in change highlighted the added ‘challenge’ to farming and how this kept things fresh and interesting. They seemed to endorse the quality of farming as being a very diverse and current professional field, like the following farmer described it:
“To me anyway that's what makes farming just that much more interesting. Yeah, because of the challenges that are in front of us now. And so what I'm finding right now is farming has never been more challenging but I don't mean that in a bad way.” (Farmer 6)
He expressed his opinion on change to be that of added excitement, he also followed by saying that farming today was more difficult than he had ever experienced it. While all the farmers voiced similar opinion towards the current situation of farming being more challenging than previous times, the statement by this farmer is especially interesting because he was the oldest farmer I interviewed and had already owned his current farm when the deregulation happened in the 1980s. So according to him all the difficulties and trouble following the 1980s was easier to handle than the change that is happening now. Another farmer expressed this as well. She stressed the speed at which things were changing now to be different:
“I mean farming's always changing. There's always some new rules being thrown at you. I think at the moment it's probably the pace of change, the speed at which change is happening. […] My dad […] when he was farming, they were using horses and when he died we were using GPS steered tractors. So in his lifetime there had been massive change in agriculture. So there's always been change. It's how you handle it.” (Farmer 8)
Her statement on how farming practices had changed dramatically in just one single lifetime hints towards the problem of farmers today encountering a completely different field of farming compared to what it was like some 50 years ago. The farmer that needs to know a great deal about horses and the farmland in order to work it with horses and the farmer who needs to have
59 IT knowledge in order to operate their GPS steered tractor must have very different habitus, as well as a symbolic capital that has a very different composition.
So in general, a lot of the farmers tried to take the changing situation of farming positively and proactively seek something good out of this difficult situation, as can be seen in this farmer’s statement:
“Probably one thing I've found is language is actually really important. So you can see things as problems or you can see them as challenges. And so I tend to always go, okay, what's the challenge in this? What are we trying to achieve? What are the drivers behind why you're doing what you're doing?” (Farmer 3)
In this quote it becomes obvious that farmers’ motivations and reasons for doing what they are doing are really important to them in order to keep going in difficult times.
However, not all farmers saw change as something exciting, some also seemed tired of the constant change of direction in the farming industry of Southland, especially when they had been in the business for a long time already.
“The longer you’re in something, the harder it is to have change, innit. Yeah, when you’re in something for so long, change is hard.” (Farmer 2)
Another farmer made a similar observation about this change not being entirely favourable, especially when it came to the speed of it all. He then went on and made an interesting observation about how for change to work in a sustainable manner, it needed to address different societal dimension:
“I mean nobody's against change and you know, I don't have a problem with that, but it's the timeframes. […] And one of the things I learned was that, you know, any change has to be like a stepping stool, there’s three parts to it and ways it has work. It has to work from an environmental aspect, it has to work from a social aspect and it has to work from an economic perspective as well. And if one of those doesn't fit, then the system is wrong. So it has to work for the farmers socially and economically as well as environmentally and in order for it to work economically, you need to leave it to them for adaption and to prove itself. That’s my take-home.” (Farmer 10)
This is quite an interesting observation in the context of farming in Southland, because it addresses the paradox that farmers are facing of economic and environmental perspectives working against each other (more on this in the next part). His comment to the effect of ‘the system is wrong’ when such a paradox exists, is quite telling of the whole situation. His advice to leave things to farmers themselves for adaption and to prove it is foretelling of what an improved situation might look like.
60 In general, the changing situation of farming in Southland seems to be plagued by several paradox situations like the economic and environmental interests going head-to-head in their attention seeking from farmers. In the following sections I will highlight these paradoxes and what they tell about farmers’ attitudes and values.
6.2.2 Paradox 1: Economy vs. ecology and the farmer in-between
In this chapter I discuss the main frame of this study – that is how farmers are trapped between having to produce in a deregulated system for a global market, while at the same time being subject to increasing agri-environmental regulation. Here I discuss farmers’ attitudes towards the fact of having had to change the way they farm from more ‘traditional’ family farm to more business oriented family farm as a result of the deregulation. I further discuss their attitude towards the natural environment. This also allows for the discussion of what they think about the new policy coming in.
All of the farmers agreed that financial and economic pressure on their farms had become intense and had also affected where farmers place themselves in society. Many farmers felt they were fleeced by the rest of the players of the economic cycle of agriculture, as this exchange illustrates:
“Author: What would you say is the biggest pressure on you or on your farm at the moment?
Farmer 5: Oh definitely financial
Author: Do you mean just staying in business?
Farmer 5: Oh yes, like I said before, us as farmers are sort of at the bottom of the food chain, everybody sends us a bill for everything they do whereas we can't send anyone else a bill.”
When talking to farmers about how their industry had become more business oriented (see also Forney, 2016), most of them immediately made reference to the cut of subsidies in the 1980s and how reacting to this had been very difficult and essentially was the main reason for intensification and industrialisation in agriculture. While only two of the farmers I interviewed had already owned a farm then, all the other farmers had experienced how their parents reacted in this tough time. For many farmers, the only way they could stay in business was through pluriactivity. This meant that either they had an on-farm income that was not affected by the deregulation – such as profits from a quarry in one farmer’s family’s case and being the district’s school milk deliverer in another farmer’s case – or that someone went to create an off- farm income, like the farmer’s wife in this case:
61 “So what happened when the subsidies were cut in this area is a lot of farmers came under intense pressure. A lot of their wives went back to work. My wife went back to [work] and that allowed us to basically continue through the downturn relatively unaffected in the respect that as a farmer I have never ever farmed at a loss, I've always broken even. But you know in those bad years that can entirely be laid at my wife's door who went back [to work] and we just cut costs and changed things.” (Farmer 6)
So farmers who were able to adapt and change operations more flexibly had a greater chance of ‘surviving’ the deregulation relatively unharmed. However, regardless of whether they made it through in the end or not, the deregulation took an enormous emotional toll on a lot of farmers, something which is still reflected and paid tribute to in how farmers work today. Farmers seem to be aware that such drastic changes in the farming industry were a reality that could in the extreme case also be repeated. However, not all about the deregulation period is seen negatively, some farmers also reflected on the economic possibilities this deregulation signified:
“I do remember [the time of the subsidies cut] and it was very very tough on a lot of people and a lot of people went broke after the subsidies came off. I remember it vividly, actually it's about the only time I’ve seen my father cry. It was just a huge pressure, a lot of people just had to walk off the land and it just wasn't very nice. But in hindsight now it was probably one of the best things that's ever happened to us. Because, the rest of the world and all the rest of the farmers in the world, are all pretty much reliant on subsidies, whereas we are stand-alone. Our business is self-supporting now. We’re not having hand-outs from the government and things like that.” (Farmer 5)
It can be seen that this farmer is now framing the deregulation as something positive, which is making New Zealand farmers have an advancement over other farmers. This was also the reasoning behind the deregulation from the government side at the time. Several other farmers were also saying that the deregulation has given them a competitive advantage on the world market. However, having this competitive advantage also meant that farmers had to learn a whole new skillset in respect to how they could reach new economic capital, now that subsidies were out of the picture. The way to do this was to turn to banks. Farmers started taking on huge loans in order to stay competitive, either by investing in infrastructure, buying more land or by converting the farm to a dairy operation. According to the farmers, the cheap land prices in Southland made investing in farming sound like an easy decision. However, they also reflected that many farmers are still not really set up with the set of skills necessary for dealing with banks, as this farmer explains:
“People have borrowed a lot of money, […] the problem was that if people got high debt levels and that, they got really competitive interest rates. It's all right. But if something changes, if those debt levels, their interest rates double or something, it makes a hell of a difference to how they survive. And I think a bit of the problem was, historically people
62 always used to have loans that they were paying off principal and interest at the same time. With most farm loans now, people just pay off principal when they feel like it. […] Like yeah I'll just pay the interest and then I'll sell the farm in 20 years time. It will be worth more than when I borrowed the money. But if you're in a situation, which we're sort of nearly at now, where the prices are pretty flattened, and that's not the case, and then the banks put pressure on and they said, well, we really want you to get your debt levels down, we want you to start paying some principal off, that suddenly changes people's cash flow. And so I think some people got to come to the realisation that they've got to try to do a bit more principal repayments or the bank will start telling them that they should, because they're too exposed, they'd like to get their principal down.” (Farmer 10)
This farmer further reflected on how lacking the skills to deal with banks, or maybe also having ‘tasted blood’ of the lucrativeness of the agricultural industry and now wanting more, was increasing banks’ possibility to exert influence over farmers and over what they were producing. When asked whether banks had a lot to say in the farming business in Southland, he replied:
“Oh, huge amount. Well they drive it really, like they drive what you farm in a sense because they decide like something's really viable and so they'll just check the money out for people to go through it. And if you want to borrow for something else, and they don't think it's so good, they won't lend you the money […] and that's what really drove dairying because [banks] decided it was the thing. […] And a lot of budgets were just done, like on a bit of paper practically, like big amounts for farms, you're talking five to seven million [dollars]. […] I say [banks are] the invisible ones, cause they're just behind the scenes, they drive everything. And as they say, banks give you an umbrella and when it rains, they want it back. […] And like a friend of mine was in banking after he left university and then he went away overseas for years and he'd come back and he was so shocked, because the sort of loans we shovelled out to farms, they used to give to companies in cities, and when they did, the companies, they had to have stringent budgets on cash flows and everything, it was all really nailed down and farmers are getting these on just pretty basic sort of budgets of hope.” (Farmer 10)
According to the farmers I interviewed, some farmers in Southland were able to acquire huge amounts of land and build state-of-the-art infrastructure on it. But in reality it was all debt- financed, limiting famers’ choices if they were not in accordance with what the banks wanted; something that was known by other farmers. So, reading this situation through Bourdieu’s approach, while it might appear like those farmers with bigger farms, bigger herds and newer infrastructure would posses a bigger economic capital, actually, having bigger assets does not translate into having bigger economic capital. And while there was now in total more economic capital around, this also means that more economic capital could be lost.
63 In terms of new skills that the farmers needed to acquire in order to deal with these new challenges, there was also an added amount of bureaucracy that needed to be done. Some farmers were continuously streamlining the way they dealt with the bureaucracy and business side of farming in general, which was taking up a huge chunk of their time. Farmers who did not have as many employees on the other hand were increasingly frustrated with the amount of paperwork they had to do. These business dealings were also digitalising farming more and more. One farmer reflected on his process of dealing with all of this added paperwork:
“I think there's a lot more things you've got to get your head around and you've got to be able to operate in that space pretty quickly. But we've got smarter on doing it. Giving an example, you know, GSTs2 are something we do here in New Zealand, it used to take me two days to do GST. I can do to the same amount of coding and GST work and do it faster and pay it quicker, probably in half a day now and it's all electronic. But working out systems is quite challenging. You know, there's a new thing that comes out, like health and safety, and then it seems to be mounds of apps and other things that come out with it and it’s trying to work out what's fit for purpose. That's actually where I spend a lot of time, you go down a path and then you think, oh no, this is not where I want to be. Then you've got to back it all up and go in another way. So, but that's all learning. So yes, there is more office work, but […] one of the strategies that I wanted to put in was that I had the flexibility not to be necessarily on the farm to do the office work. So, we sort of put some money into a caravan so that we could be away and I could be doing office work remotely. So, you know, is it a drudgery? Depends where you make your office (laughs). So, I can actually be anywhere in New Zealand or in the world now, half a day and I'll have all the business done and I can do that anywhere, any place, any time.” (Farmer 3)
So while this farmer’s way of dealing with the business side of farming might be an extreme, it does illustrate how this ‘commercialisation’ of farms has further removed the farmer from the ‘traditional’, ‘romantic’ image of farming. These types of intensified, often digitalised, farms can be operated from far away, without the farmer having to be physically present. This is an illustration of how the neoliberal regime of agricultural practice in New Zealand has been so internalised by farmers that they employ this business-management logic in all they do for their farm. This way of thinking about farming is quite probably very different from the discourse around farming prior to the deregulation some 40 years ago. The farmers’ economic capital has become a lot more important in comparison to other types of capital.
This whole intensification both in terms of how farms operate and how they invest economic capital has obviously also affected the natural environment that these farms are located in. All the farmers recognised the need for a healthy natural environment, because this essentially
2 Goods and service tax; business owners can claim it back on things they buy and add it to things they sell. For the New Zealand specifics see: https://www.business.govt.nz/tax-and-accounting/basic-tax-types/gst/ (last visited 30th January 2020).
64 formed their livelihood. However, to what degree the natural environment was suffering because of farming and what should be done about it, was seen differently. All but one farmer accepted that the state of the natural environment was far worse now than before the intensification. The farmer that did not agree with this view necessarily said that there was a potential for the environment – and he referred especially to landscape – to look worse, but that this was not the current state yet, exactly because it was in farmers’ self-interest to look after the environment. However, all the other farmers agreed that there was a significant issue here and that this was at least in part due to the intensification of agriculture.
“I probably do get a little bit frustrated by the industrialisation of farming and the way that we've manipulated landscapes to fulfil a need. […] like pumping a lot of water into places that are desserts, it's just ludicrous. And especially when you're taking them from one catchment to another catchment, the effects of that are just huge. So I think it's more the way we try and manipulate things that's created a lot more challenges.” (Farmer 3)
Indeed, most saw the main problem to be the exploding dairy industry, because of the huge amount of nitrogen this type of farming puts out. But farmers also criticised the ways that farming was done in Southland more general, especially when it came to fertilizer use and the practice of winter cropping.
“Obviously dairy gets a lot of the blame, which is unfair, we've all got issues. There's the amount of nitrogen that's being put on, plus the amount of winter cropping, which releases huge amounts of nitrogen through the bare soil in the wintertime.” (Farmer 10)
Another issue that was identified to be putting pressure on the environment was the high amount of stock farmers had. Farmer 7 expressed his dislike for the fact that many sheep farmers had converted their farms to dairy, because of the fact that banks had come in with a lot of money that they needed to invest somewhere. This also meant that dairy operations were built on land that was not necessarily suitable for it, leading to amplified environmental degradation.
So there is the accepted recognition that farming is doing damage to the natural environment and farmers are mostly in agreement that something needed to be done about this. Some farmers were already implementing some conservation efforts on farm, for example by classifying some area of their farm as Q2E reserves, a type of nationally recognised conservation area, that could not be turned back into farmland. Q2E is a trust that you could gift land to and they would help you cover fencing costs and give you advice on how to look after that land.
“[The financial help is] not why you do it, because that's nothing usually. And they will give you advice about how to look after things. So we've got five hectares here. Um, and this bit of bush in here, apparently it's the best remaining piece of bush like this left in this area. So to the local people it's very special and they were quite concerned apparently, we
65 found out later on from them, that being North Islanders, we wouldn't value what we've got here. This is a flax wetland. […] Um, yeah, so they were really concerned that we would drain all of this and that we would chop this down being North Islanders. And they were quite chuffed when we didn’t.” (Farmer 8)
However, not all farmers could afford to fence off land that was still suited for farming. In general, the cost of implementing environmental mitigation efforts seemed to be a big problem. So while farmers might want to do something, they cannot afford to lose that amount of land or invest in the environment instead of new infrastructure. One farmer pointed out the flaw in thinking this way:
“Cost shouldn’t outweigh the environmental, but it can at the moment, because there’s no one that’s telling you can’t do it the way you’re doing it. Which is the cheapest way possible. And that’s a big thing. Same with the fertiliser, people are saying hey I wanna put it on in just one application, only pay to put it on once. No one’s telling me off otherwise, so I’m gonna do it that way.” (Farmer 1)
So here I finally identify the first paradox of the field of farming in Southland: farmers are simultaneously encouraged to produce more and contribute to the goal of growing New Zealand’s export, and asked to comply to increasing environmental standards.
6.2.3 Paradox 2: Local values vs. overseas markets
In order to investigate the farmers’ position in the field through analysing their values and perceptions, it is interesting to look at where farmers place themselves in society. What became apparent in the interviews is that farmers struggle a lot with how they are perceived by their fellow non-farming citizens. They perceived an increased awareness from the greater public towards how they are farming and what their farming is looking like to the outside. Most of the farmers explicitly linked this increase in awareness back to the deregulation and conversion to dairy and the subsequent dirty dairying campaign. They were also saying that consumers were becoming more demanding of products they wanted to buy. Added to this came the fact that – as farmers perceived it – more and more people were going vegan and not consuming the products that they were producing anymore.
“I think a lot of people are more discerning in what they eat, they want to be healthy themselves and they want to know a whole lot of stuff about what they eat. So that is going to change or is changing now, so it's not going to go back. So as far as farming goes, if you want to sell cheap food to people that don't care what they eat, well you won't make much money. So if you want to make more money, sell more expensive food.” (Farmer 10)
Some farmers, such as farmer 10, observed that while consumers were becoming more picky in terms of what they would buy, there was also the potential to use this increased willingness to
66 spend more money on food and sell higher quality products at a higher price. However, this public demand was not only perceived to bring potentially higher prices to farmers. Many farmers said they noticed an increasing urban-rural disconnect, meaning that people who did not grow up with farming did not really know what went on on farms anymore. The farmers identified this not as a completely new phenomenon, but as one that was getting ‘worse’ faster. It is important to note here that farmers were mostly talking about local New Zealand consumers when they were talking about the rural-urban disconnect, as it was those people who were putting the most pressure on the farmers’ image.
“Is it the majority of New Zealand public consumers wanting farmers to produce healthy nutritional food in an environmentally sustainable manner? Well that in a nutshell is a challenge.” (Farmer 6)
Interestingly, when I asked the farmers how their worry about the local consumer mixed with the fact that basically all of their produce – especially on dairy farms – was exported overseas, most farmers could not really answer the question. I was expecting them to say something along the lines of “farming has changed/is not farming anymore” because they were not producing for their ‘neighbours’ as such, but for far away people they would never meet. However, this sort of ‘putting effort into export’ was perceived to be very normal and not just a necessary evil. Also, while most farmers stressed that it was important to them to know where their food was coming from and that they were more connected to their food than “urban people”, they simultaneously also stressed the achievements they had made in increasing exports. The following quote is an example of a farmer talking about how urban people do not know how food is produced anymore:
“As a farmer I think it's a real worry worldwide where food is going and where it's coming from. Look at synthetic meat! […] if you put a piece of synthetic meat on my table, I would never eat it for one million dollars. I just think it's so wrong. Um, and I think the world is getting sicker as a place because of the amount of processed food we eat.” (Farmer 2)
When I asked him what this meant in terms of him sending his milk to Fonterra who would then make it into highly processed and ‘enhanced’ milk produced to be exported overseas, he could not answer.
“Farmer 2: So, that to me as a farmer, that's a real worry. You know, people's perceptions, you think milk comes from a bottle? It doesn't come from a bottle! They have no concept. […] I just try to go back to what it used to be, it’s very difficult.
Author: So how does that sort of figure in with your dairy products that you produce being exported? That sort of, if I can say that, it like feeds into that whole disconnection, no?
Farmer 2: No, no, I'm not sure. Sorry. I don't know how to answer that. I'm sorry. Yeah.”
67 This is the second paradox I identified: While the farmers took pride in working in a profession that was ‘feeding people’ and were very aware of how their fellow New Zealanders perception of food was changing, they simultaneously also took pride in the fact, or at least found it normal, that they were exporting so much.
This paradoxical situation is also difficult to place in terms of different types of capital. Technically, producing for a local market and ‘connecting people with their food’ enhances a farmer’s social capital because they are able to make connections with the public and therefore make the public more aware of how farming is done. However, what if this is only a sentiment that farmers carry towards their farming practices and not a ‘reality’? When the farmers talked to me they were conveying an image of farming to me that was very much based on farmers essentially being the ‘providers’ of society or of ‘feeding the world’. But this mixed with them talking about how their farms were mostly only producing one type of product which in most cases was sold and exported overseas. So by exporting their farming products farmers were losing the opportunity to garner social capital within their community. One could say that farmers were only exporting so much because in this new neoliberal situation they had to, in order to stay profitable. While this is certainly true, curiously farmers were also proud of how much they were exporting and how well they were improving the amount that is exported. So now there was a new situation where farmers could “collect” different types of capital when they were successfully getting their products exported. This capital can be expressed as economic capital, meaning that farmers with more financial assets or bigger or more efficient herds – created by being a clever producer for overseas market demands – were more highly regarded in the farming community.
“Those subsidies came off and the farmers thought well shit we better make these animals produce otherwise we're going to go down the gurgler. So the average lambing percent went from about 80% to 130% or so. And the carcass weights, like we've got about 30 million sheep in New Zealand or something like that, there used to be 75 million or something like that, but we are exporting the same amount of meat still from that less animals, you see. So the genetics and breeding has improved a lot, and the lambs we are producing, instead of being like 14 kgs carcass weight they are up to like 18, 19, 20 kgs per carcass. So it's made it so much more efficient.” (Farmer 5)
As this quote shows, some of this can also be expressed as cultural capital. Farmers who knew which breeds of lambs or cows to choose and how to improve their productivity or who knew what type of grass to sow and when to fertilise were to some extent also highly regarded by their farming community. I say to some extent, because there was also those farmers within the community who were starting to swing towards seeing highly productive farms as a problem in terms of environmental degradation, when these farms were not complying well with environmental standards. But still, productive farms were seen as having high cultural capital,
68 especially when other farmers knew what was coming out of them. This is true for animal breeds and carcass weights but especially also for how the paddocks looked. As I have presented in chapter 3.3.3, the way a farming landscape looks holds value in terms of embodied cultural capital, because this way farmers can read from the landscape whether a farmer is skilled or not (see Rogge et al., 2007, de Krom, 2017 and Burton et al., 2018). One particular case where this was expressed was in how farmers manage fertilisation of their land. In Southland, the native grass, meaning the grass that grows ‘naturally’ after deforestation, may be used for sheep or deer, but is not suitable for dairy cows. So being able to choose the right grass for the right place and combining this with the right amount of fertiliser is a highly valued skill in Southland. There is also a big business for representatives from different fertiliser companies or for farm managers who basically take this responsibility away from the farmer. It was expressed that having the skills of being to able to look at your land and assess what was needed to improve it, would also be an advantage in dealing with new policy. Those who had completely outsourced this were now lacking this skill and would have to catch up to those who already knew where they could implement policy.
To come back to the perceived increase in the urban/rural divide, this was something that farmers perceived to be changing the field of farming, because the public was demanding farmers to be subject to stricter rules. However, there were some farmers who were already aware of the fact that the way farmers presented their farms sometimes did not make a good impression on non-farmers who did not know the circumstances of a specific situation. One farmer talked specifically about the practice of leaving dead farm animals on the side of the (public) road for pick up:
“Five years ago, when you had an animal die, you had the choice to bury it on your farm. […] But then [this practices changed and] they had collection trucks that would come collect them from the farm. So the policy was, you’d leave [the dead animals] on the side of the road so the truck could pick them up from the side of the road. Terrible look! Like who came up with that idea to put the dead animals out on the roadside for the truck to pick up? And that system was used for a number of years until they said 'doesn’t look good'. So now you should keep the animals in your gate and the trucks have to come in and pick them up. It’s just little things like that that farmers are slowly starting to get better at.” (Farmer 1)
Another practice that farmers were starting to realise did not look good to a non-farmer was winter grazing, as one farmer put it:
“Some farmers are stupid to put it on us, I tell people, when you look at your farm, you've gotta say what do people see looking in from the outside when they drive down the road? And if they see animals that they think are standing in too much mud, why do you got them beside the road? You’ve got to use your head a bit about what you do and things like that.” (Farmer 10)
69 This awareness of farmers of who the ‘anti-farmers’ were and how they could remedy their relationship with them, also reflects in the following quote:
“Most of the people who are anti-farming, they’ve never been on a dairy farm. They don't really know what they're talking about. So it's up to us to open up. […] And it's about breaking down those barriers. The lobby groups are quite powerful here, but it’s actually when you start talking to ordinary New Zealanders, and ask them ‘are you concerned about the water quality?’ and then you get them on the farm they say no. You know, because they have seen what we’re doing.” (Farmer 8)
To conclude on this paradox of the local vs. the overseas market, the farming system in New Zealand does not allow for farmers to only provide for the local market. There are proportionately too many farms and not enough residents for this to work, which also made the deregulation of the economy that much more attractive. So while farmers might still have inherited a habitus that is to some extent similar to say a Swiss farmer whose farming motivation is to ‘provide their neighbours with food’, from a generation that was still more closely connected to their emigrant forefathers from Europe, the Southland farmers farming reality is very different looking. As I have illustrated in chapter 2, New Zealand is portrayed to be dependent on a strong export sector, most of which is currently agricultural products. While some farmers’ habitus – especially those with an investor type motivation – has caught up with this situation and they have started to invest in their economic skills, other farmers still need to catch up. In the end, there is a shift in values going on. What do farmers base their values on when they’re producing for an overseas market but telling me how important the local consumers are? Maybe some of the answer can be found in this observation:
“And we also talk about how you know consumers and people of the community wanting better, well farmers are part of that, they’re part of the community as well. So they form the communities too. So in some ways, you know it's not, this seems to be a very much an us and them kind of camp where in actual fact we're all in the one, we've all got the same problem.” (Farmer 9)
As farmers have changed from family farmers ‘living with and from the soil’ into more business like farmers, their position in the community has changed as well. Where before – and to some extent still now – they saw themselves as part maybe of the rural community, but as external or different from the urban community, they are now a part of the whole ‘system’. So farmers’ position in the field has changed from that of a ‘special status’ and a somewhat influential situation – at least in terms of the food chain – to that of ‘just another worker’.
So to summarise my findings on this paradox, farmers are communicating the kind of ‘romantic’ image of farming, which has long shaped my perception of farming too. They appreciate their profession for its direct experience of producing something from nothing,
70 meaning crops etc. from the soil. Farmers take pride in a sense of providing for the local New Zealand community. However, in fact they are producing for an overseas market, for people they will probably never meet and for products – especially in dairy – that are far removed from the ‘from the soil’ image and are rather high-tech products. In saying that, farmers also seem to take pride in being able to produce more and more that can get exported, they are proud of the ‘Kiwi ingenuity’. So for many farmers there are the social and cultural motivations or values of living in a community, but also an attitude of being apt businesspeople who can deal with a global market.
What is also interesting to note here is the fact that the environmental (and maybe also social) damage that is being done in New Zealand from farming, does not get charged against the export products’ location. Basically, New Zealanders have to pay for damage that is created in order to benefit other countries. The local community only gets the benefits from having a stronger export economy. They do not really benefit from locally produced agricultural products or from carefully manicured landscapes, such as would be the case in Switzerland. Interestingly, having such a big percentage of agricultural products exported is not a new phenomenon, as I explained earlier in this study, yet this image of ‘serving’ the community still developed.
6.2.4 Paradox 3: Alienation in neoliberalism vs. self-organising farming communities
After having looked at this paradox in both attitude towards farming and the scale – local vs. overseas – where this attitude shows to advantage, there was one more odd situation that became apparent. Technically, in a perfectly deregulated neoliberal market, all farmers are in direct competition with each other and there can be no real feeling of community in the sense of farmers helping each other out. And indeed, some farmers have complained that as a result of the deregulation and the changing field of farming, the ‘sense of community’ of the Southland farming community has changed. Little townships have been abandoned and farmers have perceived a move from the rural countryside to more urban areas. Others commented on the many new farmers that had come into Southland to buy cheap land and start a new farming operation here.
“So we don't know many of our neighbours. I mean, I couldn't tell you who lives in the next house. […] Yeah, very transit you know, they come and go all the time and you get to know someone and then they are going again.” (Farmer 2’s wife)
This whole ‘transitness’ of the farming community also led to less exchange between farmers, when it comes to sharing chores:
“And farmers worked together when they did hay or tailing lambs, you know, they were all sort of working together, there’s none of that now.” (Farmer 2)
71 This changing make up of the Southland demographic certainly adds a layer of challenge to farming in Southland, but what is really interesting, is the fact that when Southland farmers were attacked from the ‘outside’ during the dirty dairying campaign, they were still able to successfully rally together. When the dirty dairying campaign (see chapter 2) had brought massive attention to how dairy farming was destroying the environment and waterways in particular, the media singled out one particular estuary in Southland, where these negative effects were apparently particularly well visible. In order to look like they had the situation under control, Environment Southland decided to take a strong line in dealing with these dairy farmers. But they had underestimated the ability of the farming community to organise themselves:
“So what we had was a situation where politicians were turning up from all over New Zealand, paddling around the lagoon, saying what a dirty shithole it was and it was gonna flip tomorrow and the dirty bloody farmers were at fault, but not to worry Environment Southland is going to sort this pack of dirty buggers out. […] Which because of the change in land use and everything was a community of a lot of virtual strangers to me but I'd never seen so many stressed out [farmers] in my life. So I did a little bit of research as I was prone to do, when I came up with a three point plan of how we as a community should fight back on this issue. I've never been against environmental protection and looking after the place. What I was against was the fashion at the time of picking on a defenceless little community […]. And then we had a community meeting on the issue. So I looked at my three-point plan and I came up with an eleven-minute presentation of what we should be doing. And that'll do because hardly anyone will turn up. Well, turned out there were over 85 people there. […] And I was aware that under government legislation, when a community unifies like that, Environment Southland have to negotiate with them. So that stopped them dead in their tracks and then they came and started negotiating and talking.” (Farmer 6)
The farmers I interviewed told me of many such cases, which were started by maybe a single farmer who was able to bond a community. They were then able to link to the official authorities and start to negotiate on how to move forward. The way that farmers were talking about other farmers who had these sorts of skills and were able to mobilise whole communities, suggests that those farmers can be ascribed high social capital according to Bourdieu.
As I have described in chapter 3.5.1, Pretty (2003) identifies three ways in which people can garner social capital: By successfully bonding with people with similar goals, by bridging to people with different or opposing goals and by linking to external agencies and benefitting from external resources. So in regard to how farmers can deal with new policy in terms of their social capital, it became clear that those farmers who were more isolated and keeping to themselves did not have the ability to ‘counter’ the attack of public awareness. Those farmers who had the
72 skills to mobilise, to build some form of resistance through bonding, bridging and linking, were much better equipped to deal with change such as incoming policy. By organising their communities, they were demonstrating that they were already aware of the problems that the policy will try to manage.
So despite all the neoliberal factors that are dividing farming communities, there also still seems to be a commonly agreed upon sense of community existing. There was one very interesting statement made by a farmer: Farmers in Southland do not really realise that their jobs, their profession, their life-worlds even, has a culture. This farmer once expressed this at a meeting on policy making, when the person holding a presentation said that they needed to respect the culture of the area, referring to the Māori heritage.
“I said, there’s more than one culture isn't there? Rural communities have a culture and farming has a culture. So you can't just talk about one culture, without considering the other one. I said it to make a point, because what I think was happening and what is happening is, people forget the traditions and you know, in Switzerland you'd know your farming is very traditional and that's culture isn't it? You know what you value. Out here, New Zealand doesn't have that. And the few traditions we do have, they seem very keen on dismantling. So, I'm a very strong believer that we've got to keep some of our traditions, otherwise we're gonna end up completely industrialised. (Farmer 8)
Other farmers, who mentioned that the urban/rural divide was really an artificial construction, also reflected this realisation that farming in Southland – the way it was done today – had its own identity and culture.
“And we also talk about how you know consumers and people of the community wanting better, well farmers are part of that, they’re part of the community as well. So they form the communities too. So in some ways this seems to be very much an us and them kind of camp where in actual fact we're all in the one, we've all got the same problem.” (Farmer 9)
When looking at what the other farmers I interviewed would identify as ‘traditional farming’ in the sense of a farming type with high cultural value, it becomes apparent that this differs from what I would define in this way in Switzerland. In Switzerland more old-fashioned, ‘back to the roots’ small-scale farming that looks after the cultural landscape is commonly seen as most ‘valuable’. In Southland, farmers that are successful in generating a lot of income through constant optimisation of production and that were highly efficient, were seen as ‘traditional’ in that sense. One farmer pointed out that after all, the automatic rotating dairy shed – which had revolutionised dairy farming around the world – was invented in New Zealand. Efficiency was a big deal also in terms of optimising animal breeds so that they would for example give more milk, lamb more often or have higher carcass weight. This means that what farmers see as ‘the culture of farming’ in Southland, is a farm that is able to produce at a win on the world market.
73 This high standing of ‘modernised farming’ is also reflected in terms of what Bourdieu dubs institutionalised cultural capital. In terms of institutionalised cultural capital, it is interesting to note that none of the farmers I interviewed (in the age range from about 45-75) have done any agricultural degrees prior to farming. However, some of them have done further qualified training when they had already been in the farming business for some time. There was an agreement that going to university and getting degrees was much more accepted today and some expressed the thought that the coming farming generation was almost over qualified. Some also expressed regret that they didn’t go to university. Many of the farmers I interviewed agreed that nowadays, in order to be able to deal with all the changes that are going on, people with a formal education in agriculture were at an advantage.
So to sum up this third paradox, while it would appear that in a neoliberal free market system farmers would be at a disadvantage in the competitive market, when they bond together as a community, Southland farmers still managed to do this. While this ‘unifying’ had less to do with advancing their financial situation and more with appearing as of one mind in front of a ‘common enemy’, this ability to see strength in community will ultimately benefit all aspects of farming. By realising their ‘worth’ as a farming community and of the culture that is inherent to this, farmers demonstrate awareness of their cultural capital, strengthening their position in the field and in society.
6.2.5 Interim conclusion
In this chapter I presented three paradoxical situations that I identified while looking at how Southland farmers talk about change. I have also reflected on how they frame change and realised that very different attitudes exist in this regard. While some farmers are tired of having to constantly adapt their farming operations according to the changing field, others see an exciting challenge in this, or at least they try to take it that way. When looking at this through a Bourdieusian lens, it can be said that those who try to frame change positively are more likely to succeed to a position of more influence in the field, by owning the right kind of capital, namely social and cultural capital.
The first paradox I identified concerned the opposing pressures on farmers to improve their ‘care’ for the environment, while at the same time increasing their farm’s profits, in order to increase agricultural exports. Looking back at Barel’s (1979) definition of paradox as a situation where, when one ‘pole’ of the situation is engaged, the other ‘pole’ – which is supposed to be the contrary to the first pole – is automatically also engaged. This is exactly what is happening here from the perspective of the farmer. There seems to exist no way in which the mitigation of environmental damage can be achieved without compromising the very high increases in profitability that are expected of them. And contrary, by adapting their farming practices in
74 order to achieve this increase in profitability, it appears impossible to also make their environmental footprint smaller. This paradox is the underlying problem of why the field of farming in Southland in Bourdieu’s understanding exists the way that it does.
The second paradox identified the contradiction of farmers framing their values towards farming according to a standard that was very much focused on a local level, while in actual fact they had long been producing the raw materials for ‘high-tech’ agricultural products for a far away overseas market. To me, this results in extreme tensions for the farmers’ habitus. While their habitus is framed in a way that makes it possible to deal with the pressures of the local, their farming operations simultaneously have to be geared towards overseas markets. In a sense this is again a reflection of the first paradox, farmers have to produce according to the high economic demands of overseas markets, while those overseas consumers do not have to pay for the environmental damages this causes at the local level – but the farmers do. In another sense, this ‘dispersing’ of the farmers’ habitus also means that they can never fully focus on one situation and are thus always ‘weaker’ than those who can focus on just here or there.
The third paradoxical situation I identified is maybe less ‘strong’ than the other two when it comes to Barel’s (1979) definition, it is more of a strong contradiction. The fact that Southland farmers – regardless of whether they had been here for generations or only after the deregulation – can successfully rally behind a common cause when they are attacked from the ‘outside’. This demonstrates that while they seem to have completely internalised the neoliberal body of thought and that this has permeated all of their on-farm decisions, there is still a sense of ‘farmer identity’ present, which appears to be stronger than gaining economic capital.
In sum, the field of farming in Southland is being held together by a number of paradoxical tensions, some of which farmers are apparently able to navigate, while others make it impossible to farm in a sensible way. Having reflected on these circumstances of farming in Southland, I will now present farmers’ take of the new Water and Land 2020 plan in order to discuss these limitations as adapted to a concrete case.
6.3 How farmers talk about the ‘Water and Land Plan’
In the previous sections, I described the motives of the farmers, and the challenges they face in the present time. This chapter now looks at how farmers – against this backdrop – perceive the new agri-environmental policy that is coming in. The chapter is divided into three parts. These parts correspond with what I have identified to be the biggest issues that farmers take offense with in regard to the Water and Land Plan. The first part deals with their assessment of the plan in general. The second part looks at the farmers’ perception of how the new policy will impact
75 their way of farming. The third part finally presents how farmers would like to see the policy improved.
6.3.1 Farmers discrediting policy makers
Most of the farmers I interviewed were well aware of the new plan coming in and also of the discussions around it. My initial assessment that Southland farmers are not particularly in favour of this new plan in its current form turned out to be right. Actually, there was not a single farmer among my interview sample that agreed with the plan in its current form. Most were actively involved in the making of the plan and questioned various aspects of it. Only one farmer did not seem to want to engage with it:
“The pressures and the restrictions that they're enforcing and wanting to enforce, to be honest, I haven't kept with it, because it's just… It doesn't interest me and I know that's the wrong attitude, but I've got enough to think about without having to do that, you know, environmental plans and all those. As I've said at the start, if we don't look after the land, we don't do well. So it is in our best interest to do it anyhow.” (Farmer 2)
The other farmers named a number of reasons why the new plan was not sufficient. These reasons were both based on the actual contents of the plan, as well as on how it is being worked out. The number one issue that the farmers I interviewed had was that they question the legitimacy of the policy-makers, that is, the fact that the people making the plan were not farmers and didn’t necessarily know how farming worked. This also let to some regulations, which were somewhat illogical to farmers understanding of their business.
“Um, they actually don’t know what they're regulating and so they've got a poor understanding of what they're talking about. […] There seems to be a real, you know, if I've got knowledge, I've got power.” (Farmer 3)
“The issue with the rules [in the new plan] is, they've been made by people that don't understand farming and politicians get caught up in like what we call the popular vote, you know, election cycles, they will say whatever they think is going to win them an election, which isn't necessarily good for the environment.” (Farmer 8)
“The rules, there’s some that are… really not too intelligent. Like one is you can’t have more than 150 animals in a paddock, doesn’t matter how big the paddock is. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense.” (Farmer 1)
“They don't come from a farming background themselves. They've got a lot of letters after their name, but no real practical experience. Like they want us to stop putting crop on gradient that's more than 20 degrees. Well that's the gradient of this roof. And if you go outside and look at the roof and you look at my farm, I wouldn't be able to put any crop in the ground whatsoever, because everything's over 20 degrees. But they can’t understand
76 that we actually graze off these areas in a manageable way that mitigates the damage to the ground and the streams, they think that we can't think like that.” (Farmer 5)
Another reason that was identified by the farmers was that the plan or policy in general would always be behind what was already going on. This also meant that the plan wasn’t up to date science-wise.
“When the regulators have been forming this plan, a lot of the information that they've had, hasn't had a lot of science behind it. And so we find ourselves potentially being regulated into something that has no scientific background to it. […] So before we get too many of the laws in place, we need to make sure that what we're doing is going to have the right outcome.” (Farmer 9)
“Well, my view is that policies, regulations, are a pain in the butt. The reason I reckon that is, it's always about five steps behind of where it should be. They can never move fast enough. […] And so it's almost like we've got to the stage now where we're realising that things are going to tip if we don't change something. And so that's actually a harder way to work when you're doing that. So it doesn't matter. You can't actually put enough policy underneath it quick enough.” (Farmer 3)
Underlying such critical perceptions of the new plan by the farmers seemed to be that the regulators and policy-makers did not appear to trust in the ability of farmers to do the right thing.
“I'm not a huge fan of this new plan to be fair. It's cost of compliance; these guys are coming onto my farm and are telling me how I should farm it. My family has been farming this place for 100 years and you get the impression from [the rule makers] that they think all farmers are out there to rape and pillage the grounds and wreck it, that's the impression. Whereas it's the complete opposite.” (Farmer 5)
In sum, there seems to be a clear division between us – the farmers – and them – the policy makers (being Environment Southland). However, there is also a division between different types of farming. Because dairy farmers have been blamed to be the main contributors towards environmental degradation so far, there is a bit of a divide between them and the rest of farmers.
“We often go into what, what I call a problem and solution mind-set, so what's the problem? What's the solution? What that then does, it creates distance. If I can blame you for the issue, then I can distance myself from the issue. That blame and the problem and solution has been used for so long that it has become part of how we do things.” (Farmer 3)
Some dairy farmers feel unfairly treated, saying that actually all types of farming have a negative effect on the environment. Indeed, many dairy farmers think like this, and therefore to them, the new plan is actually an improvement in the way that it is also holding other types of farmers – as well as urban areas – accountable for water pollution.
77 “It's better than any plan we've had in the past, because it's not just all about dairy, which in the past, most of it's been just all about rules and regulations on dairy farms and not a lot of rules and regulation on other types of farming. […] But I think what we've got now is better as a dairy farmer. I see there’s more fairness. It's still not completely fair, but there is now other industries, other farming types have to play by the rules.” (Farmer 8)
Farmers also had a lot to say about how the plan was developed. Environment Southland prides itself in using participatory techniques in forming the plan, something that is actually mandated by the Resource Management Act and the Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. Thus, in principle, farmers had the chance to have their say on the plan and there were some things changed as a result of this. However, here too, farmers felt that they were not taken seriously enough. One farmer for example complained that Environment Southland purposely set their meeting times when farmers would be busy.
“So I know the meetings are on a Wednesday night at seven o'clock. Do I go to the meetings or go spend time with my children?” (Farmer 2)
There was also the impression shared by several farmers I interviewed that the whole deal of having participatory events was a bit of a farce, because what farmers said was not really considered in the end.
“I was involved with some of the planning meetings early on […] I was representing the cropping industry and [Environment Southland] seemed to listen and take notice of what we were telling them. And they were learning a lot about actually how farming works and what different people did, what different sectors did. When they came out with the draft plan, it was like, I don't think they were in the same room as us, you know, they didn't seem to take a blind bit of notice of what we'd said, there was things in there that hadn't been considered when we were having the meetings with them. And uh, the consensus was, or the feeling was that it was a process that they were bound to go through and they did it, but only to tick a box. So their consultation with farmers was only to say that they'd done it. They already had their mind made up about how it was going to be done.” (Farmer 9)
So for many of the farmers, even though there had apparently been a lot of time invested in the plan, the result did not seem well thought out. In summary, none of the farmers eagerly anticipate the implementation of the policy in its current form. They question the policy makers ability to make just and correct regulations for a field that they have no knowledge or expertise in (according to farmers), which also reflects in farmers feeling discriminated against through a lack of trust in their farming abilities. In general there seems two be a distinct sense of us vs. them and the fronts are only hardening. In the next parts, I present why this is the case in more detail.
78 6.3.2 Keeping an eye on things but leaving room for trust
Interestingly, most of the farmers I interviewed agreed that the new rules would not be impacting them too much. This was mainly due to the fact that the farmers I have talked to are already quite progressive themselves in how they try to mitigate negative environmental impacts in comparison to others.
“Well, I think we were lucky because we started so early. We had it all done by the time the rules and regulations came in.” (Farmer 8)
There was some fear expressed that the plan would make on-farm decision-making much slower, because you would now need a resource consent – meaning an official permission from Environment Southland to carry out an activity that will have an impact on the environment – for a lot more things. And this could impact how farmers can work. This also comes back to the issue of trust, because with having to get an official consent for so many decisions, farmers are not as able to demonstrate that they have the skills to make good decisions. So in a Bourdieusan understanding, the implication of the plan is taking cultural capital away from the farmers, without them having the possibility to create more in another area.
“I'd like a lot less consents on things where there's more what we call permitted activities like you've got a set of rules you've got to abide by but you don't have to apply to the council but you’re expected to do certain standards.” (Farmer 10)
On the other hand, there was also a general agreement on the fact that ‘no policy’ would not be an option either. The farmers expressed that even though they themselves were ahead of the game, there are always some bad eggs that had no interest in the values of the community. In order to catch these out and point them in the right direction, policy, and the sanctions that come with it, were needed. It was also clear that there would be some farmers that will be a lot more affected by the new rules, because they had not bothered about mitigating negative environmental impacts so far.
“I mean you've got a range of different levels in farming, well not levels, a range of different … where people are at with their environmental awareness. Some are very aware and they're at the front of the game and there’s others who have got no idea. And you're always going to have ten percent at the bottom.” (Farmer 10)
In this context of targeting the 'bad farmers', the farmers I interviewed were also at issue with whether the plan was strict enough or not. For some – tending to be the ones who are already doing a lot of mitigation in comparison – the rules do not go far enough, and they think that the national goals will not be reached this way. For others, the plan was already too detailed in what it allowed and didn’t allow.
79 “We need something like [this policy], definitely, just to keep an eye on things. Yep. But, you know, there's a guy that completely abuses the situation and there's the other. There's gotta be somewhere sort of in the middle that is manageable for both parties. There's looking after the environment, and making sure the people that do abuse the system are made to look after the environment, but also to be practical as well.” (Farmer 5)
“I think the rules are too restrictive in that they're going to probably limit production unnecessarily. It could be; cause I don't think that they're going to solve any of the water quality issues necessarily.” (Farmer 10)
When I asked whether the re-introduction of subsidies for services that mitigated environmental degradation could be an option, most of the farmers declined. Even though they have to operate very economically, they seemed to favour a system without government hand-outs, where everyone was subject to the same conditions.
So in sum, while farmers agreed that a new policy was needed, and most thought they would not be overly impacted by it, they also feared that the policy would slow down the decision making process on-farm, because everything had to be checked with the council. In short, farmers agreed that a new policy needed to ‘keep an eye’ on how farming was done, in order to detect those lagging behind, but they wished for more room for trust towards their farming abilities in the policy.
6.3.3 How to improve the plan
The previous section showed that most farmers agreed, in principle, that a new policy was needed, because without policy you would eventually be paying the price of having to change the farming system entirely. It was also mentioned that other districts of New Zealand were having it worse in this regard, where policy was phased in even less smoothly and farmers were paying the price for it.
“And so I guess you kind of just get used to [policy coming in], but then you see things like up in the Waikato, where there haven't been those sort of rules and they do what we call knee jerk reactions, they go in and they make these stupid really hard rules and it just upsets everybody.“ (Farmer 8)
But although farmers agreed that some policy was required, there was a general consensus that such policy needed to be based on much more trust in farmers. If policy left room for farmers who were ahead of the game to demonstrate their skills in mitigating environmental damage, then this would provide an opportunity for farmers to demonstrate their skills and thus garner symbolic capital. Seeing this, other farmers could follow their example, because they too will want to gain a higher status, that is, symbolic capital.
80 So in order to have a plan based on more trust, farmers emphasised that a ‘meeting in the middle’ kind of approach could be the way forward. What this means is that the present top- down approach of agri-environmental governance by the official political representative gets combined with community bottom-up approaches. While some attempts in this direction have already been made by Environment Southland, from the point of view of farmers, these participative processes lacked a basis of trust in farmers and still had an air of ‘teaching farmers how to farm’. If these processes could be based on more appreciation of each other’s position, neither Environment Southland nor the farming community will have to lose face, meaning to narrow their symbolic capital. This can also be achieved by cutting out the middleperson in some situations. This refers to the perception that policy regulators or politicians do not need to control each and every situation. Sometimes it is better when experts and farmers talk person to person, for example scientist to farmer or in some cases a more advanced farmer to a lagging- behind farmer.
“They don't look at, um, what the social costs to those communities are, or the financial costs in some cases to individual farmers. So I think, yeah, some of the environmental rules can appear quite hard, but I think we just need to, um, we need to make sure that we can talk. Use science-based facts, not emotion. Once you get emotion into an environmental debate, it's never going to go anywhere.” (Farmer 8)
What was also mentioned was that after having been blamed and put down for so long, farmers now needed to acknowledge that their farming practices were part of the problem and take ownership of its mitigation. Farmers needed to become more proactive in the sense that they were not only in a reactionary position when it comes to policy, but that they could be actively leading the way.
“Because farmers traditionally in New Zealand… more Southland especially, we winch and moan about it and whatnot, but do actually nothing about it. You know, we'll slag the bloody council off for this and that but actually running for council, actually getting on there and doing something about it. We're very bad at doing that.” (Farmer 5)
More concretely, farmers emphasised the need for continuous efforts in the education of farmers. One of the issues is definitely that there are so many different levels in environmental awareness, but also in the skills that are available for dealing with the challenges. So by educating farmers – and farmers being willing to absorb the new information and implement on farm – the playing field could be levelled out and the farmers could become more of a unified community again.
“If every catchment looked after itself or the community took an interest in it, the whole of New Zealand would get sorted, wouldn't it? It's been people in Wellington trying to tell us
81 in [our catchment] what they should be doing. So I think communities working together is the future.” (Farmer 8)
“I think a big part of it is education really, because a lot of people don't want to know what the issues are. You know it's like you have an opinion on something and it's based on, oh you know like the water's as good as when my grandfather was here. […] I think it’s actually at the farmer level, it’s getting your head around your own farm and understanding where your issues are.” (Farmer 10)
“Not only policy change but people need to be educated. Education is a big one. For example tell people you’re far better to put [fertiliser] on a little and often.” (Farmer 1)
“So to my mind it’s about gathering all the science and the science has to be living as well. So you're learning all the time and it has to be about education and educating the farmers rather than trying to regulate them.” (Farmer 9)
Educating farmers and farmers educating each other also comes down to farming communities knowing each other better again. In the end, the farmers of the same area have to deal with the same problems and usually they are all interested in improving them. And when one doesn’t want to play the game, it certainly helps when at least the rest of the community agrees. This aspect of ‘farmers educating farmers’ also has the potential to create more cultural capital, as agreed upon ways of practicing agriculture are shared by the community.
I want to conclude this chapter by giving insight into how farmers talked about how they think farming in Southland will look like in the future and what the big challenges will be apart from the environmental ones. When asked about what the future of farming in Southland could look like, all farmers said that they didn’t know exactly, but that it would certainly look different from what it was now. Some had bleaker outlooks and others were more hopeful that things would change for the better. Leaning on the findings from the previous parts, one thing that I could sound out from their responses was that the appreciation the wider public had for farmers and their work needed to improve. This also meant that farmers themselves need to realise that farming is not something ‘simple’ and that they could present it as a highly skilled career.
“I've always said that farming’s hard. And so when I do interviews now, I'm not trying to gloss it over, I’m just saying, right, you know, if you think the army's hard, this is just as hard. And then they came in with the mind-set that it's not going to be easy. […] I think it's the way we frame things up, you know, in a job description. […] I'm not just looking for somebody to do a job set, I'm looking for the passion and the, you know, why people are driven and then I expect them to be able to live that passion so, you know, put legs on it. So I look for passion then the legs come later. […] I think we're trying to ‘dumbify’ [farming]. I think we're trying to make it something that it's not, and if you keep doing that, you just do yourself a whole disservice. […] I think we haven't really looked at the why; why people are doing farming. We sort of sort of say, oh, we need to attract more people to farming.
82 Yeah do you? We actually need to say, oh, we need to attract the right people to farming.” (Farmer 3)
This is also important in regard to how ‘small’ farmers can act in relation to big corporate farms. The farmers seemed to agree that the presence of corporate farms would only increase in the future.
“Like the family farm side of it I think it's going to diminish a lot, because you're going to have bigger size sort of family farms sort of semi corporate or quite big outfits. […] You know the ownership will be in fewer hands as such. […] So yeah it's just going to be interesting because if it went 20 years out I'd just say there'd be a lot less people that owned the land as such. More corporations here. And a lot less small family farms. […] But it's a bit of a question mark who actually will own it you know.” (Farmer 10)
In sum, like in the previous sections, the overarching problem identified by farmers was a lack of trust in their farming abilities. If this could be respected in the policy, if both policy makers and farmers could ‘take a step towards each other’ and talk directly instead of through middlemen such as banks, industries or public arguments in the media, there was much potential for this policy to succeed. Furthermore, farmers realised that they need to take ownership of the problem of environmental degradation caused by their practices and take an active role in its mitigation. One way this action could take shape was by making farmers aware of the need for life-long education. This demonstrates an awareness of the fact that one’s habitus needs to change in order to successfully respond to a situation that has significantly changed from the circumstances that were around when the habitus was formed. This awareness will be increasingly important in the future, when the competition from corporate farms will likely increase and smaller scale farmers will need to carve out their ‘niche’.
83 7. Conclusion
In this study I have looked at the social realities of farmers in Southland New Zealand today. I have done this by asking what the circumstances of farming in Southland are and concretised this by looking at the case of the new Water and Land 2020 plan coming in, an agri- environmental policy that provided the opportunity to apply my research questions to a current case. Finally I have asked what fields of tensions can be made out in farming in Southland by analysing the responses to these first two questions.
I have first provided a background on the situation of farming in Southland, by giving a short historical overview and presenting the current situation through a literature review. I have then explained social science theoretical approaches to analysing change in agriculture, and have shown how using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice helps me to uncover how actors can navigate the field of struggle in farming in Southland and how they are influenced in this by outside constraints. I have then presented my methodology in more detail, where a block of ten farmer interviews, conducted in the field from November 2018 to February 2019 have built the main empirical data. Finally I have presented these results and analysed them in light of my research questions.
The problems of a changing field and why farmers stay in it
The 'field' – according to Bourdieu – in my study is the changing situation of the farming industry in Southland. The rule makers are in theory the policy makers – here the regional council – but in practice, they are heavily influenced by other players in the field, such as the national government, industry representatives, the general public, commercial banks and also the farmers themselves. The farmers and the ways in which they can and want to respond to the policy are thus also influenced by these factors.
My case study proved interesting because Southland presents a unique situation, where farmers have to operate in a completely deregulated economy – meaning they receive no financial support from the government. There also has not been any sort of accompanying measures from the government to guide farmers into this new reality. As a result, the farmers and the farming industry as a whole – the most important sector for export in New Zealand – have had to find other ways to adjust. One way was by intensifying their agricultural practices. This resulted in a wave of farm conversions into dairy operations, as these were more lucrative than other types of farming, such as wool, meat or crops. But these newly intensified agricultural practices have had enormous effects on the natural environment. The run-off from farms of effluent and fertilisers and other factors has severely deteriorated the freshwater quality in Southland.
84 When it comes to identifying the source of this environmental damage, different stakeholders are playing a typical blame game, where the stronger player puts the blame on the next weaker player. Potentially the most influential of these players, are the commercial banks. By coming into the field at a time where farmers were vulnerable as to where their financial capital was going to come from, banks had soon taken up a big influence. By playing their cards right and letting farmers believe that investing in dairy farming in a time of change in the free market was a good idea, banks have completely manipulated the direction in which farming in Southland is developing. Industry representatives are also pushing the blame around more than anything, confusing farmers in terms of what they should be doing now.
As this has become more and more visible, the public image of farming started to change as well. The wider public was becoming more aware of what was going on in farming and how this was affecting the landscape they were living in. As a result, public pressure on farmers to mitigate the negative environmental impacts has risen. Exerting their power through the media, the public has placed the ball in the court of the policy makers. Reacting to this public dissatisfaction with farming practices – instead of acknowledging that they have missed the boat when it comes to limiting farming activities – national and regional governments have made certain farming communities into scapegoats, where they can demonstrate their institutional power. When this did not have any productive effects, regional councils had to start to come up with new agri-environmental policies in order to achieve these mitigations. However, the most recent new policy suggested in Southland – the Water and Land 2020 Plan – has met with little positive response from farmers.
To understand the position of the farmers in this field characterised by many tensions, I first examined how farmers understand their ‘life-worlds’, by looking at what their motivations were for going into farming. Based on this analysis, I have identified three types of farming motivations present in Southland today. I have operationalised these motivations by suggesting three ‘ideal types’ of farmers in Southland. The family farmer type’s main reason to take up farming was to guarantee the succession of the family farm and to carry on this legacy. Their choice to become a farmer was thus less based on the profession itself but more on overarching family values. The lifestyle farmer on the other hand has more consciously chosen to become a farmer, because to them, the profession of farming – the ‘way of life’ – is superior to all other careers. They appreciate the variety of their job and take pride in the fact that they are producing vital consumables for the wider society. Lastly, I identified a newer type of farmer that has emerged as a result of the deregulation. The investor farmer primarily sees farming as a way of making money. While they might have traces of the other two types of farming motivation in them as well, seeing the financial lucrativeness of farming was ultimately what brought or kept them in this profession.
85 Having identified these three types of motivations for farming, I then analysed how they influence a farmer’s possibility to react and struggle in the changing field of farming in Southland:
The family farmer type is seemingly on the decline. Current family farmers realise that the difficulties present in their industry make it unlikely that the next generation will take over the farm. And many of these farmers – facing these difficult circumstances – are now reflecting why they themselves are farmers and whether they would not have liked to do something else instead. This means that when they are facing change – change that threatens the survival of their farm – ‘abandoning’ farming and going and doing something else is a valid option. For those who might have only gone into farming because it was the thing to do in the family, but they do actually enjoy it, they have come up with innovative ways to pass the farm on to someone who might not be related to them, but who has great motivation to go into this profession.
The lifestyle farmer type is more clinging to their farming life. It is unlikely that they will abandon this profession, unless they absolutely are forced to so. In terms of how they can react to change, this means that the lifestyle farmers can be hit harder by the changes in the field. When their farming practices have to become more about profitability and less about the way of life of farming, their motivation might decrease.
For the third type, the investor farmer, there is an important difference to be made: There are those investor farmers who are at their basis just small scale family farmers who had to loan a lot of money from the bank, when they saw that investing in farming could potentially bring them great financial returns. The other type of investor farmer is the large-scale corporate farm. These are often foreign owned and have great mobility potential, meaning that they can uproot and go somewhere else with their economic capital, when the farm becomes less profitable.
Paradoxical fields of tension
I have further asked how farmers talk about change and what this can say about the struggles and tensions of farming n Southland. I have found that farmers tend to be split into two camps when it comes to dealing with change. There are those who are tired of constantly having to adapt to changing circumstances and demands and who as a result have lost some of their motivation to farm. But there are also those who frame change as an exciting challenge, as something, which is keeping their job current and interesting.
I have identified three paradoxical situations in the changing field of farming in Southland. First of all, farmers are caught between the seemingly opposing poles of being expected to make their farm operations more and more profitable, while at the same time having to abide by an increasing number of regulations concerning environmental mitigation. Farmers find that when
86 they are trying to achieve one side, e.g. by investing in new infrastructure or increasing their herd size, they are automatically decreasing their ability to abide by the second pole. When they try to farm according to the increasingly high environmental standards, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay at the same level of profitability. Secondly, the way that farmers frame their relationship with the outputs of their farming operation and what they actually practice, appear incompatible. Farmers talk about how they are producing for the local market and having to operate within the public demands at the local level, producing healthy and natural food. But in actual fact they are producing the raw materials for highly modified consumables that are almost all processed and then exported to far away overseas markets. Thirdly, while operating in a neoliberal, capitalist economic system, all farmers are in direct competition with one another. Despite a decline in farmers’ perceived sense of community, Southland farmers have found a way to unify – for example into catchment groups – but only when they are attacked and blamed from the outside, e.g. for damaging the environment. This last point, though, bears some potential for hope.
Farmers’ dissatisfaction with policy makers’ lack of trust
Against the backdrop of these paradoxical tensions within which the farmers are operating, I have then looked at what they think of the incoming Water and Land 2020 Plan. In general, all the farmers I interviewed were aware that contemporary farming practices can be environmentally harmful, and thus agreed, in principle, on the need for a new policy. But none of them agreed with the proposed policy in its current state. Their main points of critique were:
• A lack of knowledge of the profession of farming by the policy makers, meaning they were drafting non-actionable rules from the point of view of farmers. The farmers were thus questioning policy makers’ legitimacy to regulate their ‘area of expertise’.
• According to farmers, the rule makers had not acknowledged that some farmers were well ahead of the coming rules in terms of what they are already implementing on-farm.
• Overregulation, meaning there was a lack of trust in farmers to be able to decide well within certain given standards. There was also the impression among farmers that the rule makers were not taking farmers and their concerns serious enough.
The lack of a clear illusio
The farming situation in Southland can first and foremost be described as complex. The farming field is in a state of uproar, where farmers have to fight for their existence next to other players in the field who have a lot more influence. It is simple to believe that the deregulation of New Zealand’s economy has levelled the playing field and that the free market will regulate things. But the field's realities are different. A great imbalance exists, where a few big players (e.g.
87 corporate farms) make fair competition impossible. The number of players adds further complexity to the field. This can make it difficult for the farmers to see the way forward. Therefore I have found that with this wide range of farming motivation in Southland, one issue of the changing agricultural field and the struggle for a position of more power in this field by the farmers, is the lack of a clearly shared illusio, a shared purpose of why they are farming here. Sharing such a motivation would mean that farmers could appear as one unified group in the industry and negotiate better vis-à-vis other actors in the field. However, the different types of motivation I have shown further above mean that Southland farmers are ‘made up’ of different compositions of types of capital – economic, cultural and social – according to Bourdieu. However, due to the deregulation and the subsequent opening up of the New Zealand export market, all farmers in Southland had to become more business oriented. Whatever problem farmers are confronted with today, they immediately analyse it from a business and profitability point of view. So while theoretically, economic capital is not equally important to all farmers, they have all apparently internalised the neoliberal economic regime. This means that the Bourdieusian ‘composition’ of the Southland farmer today in comparison to what it was like before the deregulation, has become proportionately more about economic capital.
In terms of cultural capital, farmers appear to be ‘floating’ in a search for identity and a sense of culture of farming in Southland. By this I mean that because farmers are so pre-occupied with staying profitable and farming according to all the other demands that are posed on them, they have little time or motivation to invest in their cultural identity. Because this cultural identity is not apparently important for the accumulation of economic capital, it makes up a smaller part of a farmer’s identity compared to what it might have been in the past. While institutionalised cultural capital in the sense of breed pedigrees and other certificates for good performance is still important and objectified cultural capital has a seeming edge of economic capital now, embodied cultural capital has significantly lost in importance. While farmers can still ‘rate’ each others farming operation by looking at the skills of a farmer visible in their farming landscape, much of these skills have become externalised, e.g. by hiring an expert for every aspect. With this, it has become less meaningful. However, as farmers are struggling with the public image of environmental degradation caused by farming activities, there is the potential for embodied cultural capital to become more important again. Those who have properly fenced off their waterways and who have for example planted riparian strips might be seen as trailblazers and as better equipped to deal with change.
As I have already mentioned, when looking at this situation through the example of the new incoming policy, it can be said that the new policy restricts farmers in their ability to demonstrate and thus accumulate cultural capital. Cultural capital can be localised in the ability for farmers to demonstrate their skill of their craft. When there is no room for trust in the policy
88 and farmers have to check virtually every decision they make with Environment Southland first, they lose the ability to generate cultural capital and thus rely more on other types of capital.
In terms of social capital, the deregulation has brought with it a division of the farming community. The ability to know your neighbours and share equipment and help out with chores has become less common. In general it can be said that those farmers, who are able to mediate between different parties or interest groups, possess more social capital and those who are more isolated from this policy making process are not able to gain it as well. For example, farmers who are able to rally the farmers of the same catchment area in order to stand up to the policy makers are attributed high social capital. On the other hand, farmers who are perceived to be at the bottom in terms of their awareness of environmental problems, are only seen as having little social capital. In general, those farmers who possess a lot of symbolic capital, are generally regarded to be ‘good farmers’ by other farmers.
Outlook
This study has shown that Southland farmers are subject to a constantly changing work environment, where they have to adapt their practices virtually all the time. While this is normally a skill farmers can possess, the complex and paradoxical circumstances of the field of farming in Southland make it almost impossible to adapt in a way that is sustainable. The way things are at the moment, this paradoxical situation – particularly the predicament of economy vs. ecology – appears to be impossible to resolve from the perspective of farmers’ agency. The only thing that is defying this deadlock-situation to some extent, is the fact that farmers are realising that they have a stronger ‘voice’ when they are banding together, e.g. in catchment groups. It is possible that herein lies enough potential to find a way out of the field's contradictions.
Accordingly, the future looks bleak for farmers in Southland. While at a local scale projects towards farmers’ empowerment might look promising, their situation can only really be resolved at a bigger scale. And this ‘resolvement’ will likely be painful for a number of farmers. If New Zealand wants to develop their standard of living back to the high OECD ranking it once had, they need to diversify their export industry. This in turn will mean a smaller number of farms will be needed, and in turn, those who are the least productive will be the first to fall victim. Unless some measure to protect small-scale family farms is introduced (like subsidies), for example because the cultural potential of it is realised at a policy level, the farming landscape of New Zealand will look even more intensified in the future.
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96 9. Appendix
9.1 Statement of independence
I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or processional qualification except as specified. Signed:
Anna Geiser Bern, the 10th of February 2020
9.2 Questions catalogues
These were the guiding themes and questions I used going into an interview. Depending on what I already knew about the interview partner, these catalogues would be adapted. The specific questions posed were generated during the interview, in order to steer it a certain way.
Expert interviews
Role • Individual and institution
Involvement with farming • What problems do they see? • Opinion on state of the environment?
Involvement with policy making • Specifics on the WLP2020
The future of farming in Southland
97
Farmer interviews
Icebreaker/Farming history • Type of farm, stats • How did they become a farmer? • Can they imagine doing something else? • Relationship with the place
Pressures • What pressures do they identify on farming? (economic/environmental/social) • Elaborate on these
Rules and regulations • How do rules and regulations that are already in place influence their farming practices? • Do they think more rules are needed/rules are a good way to govern farming?
WLP2020 • Their opinion of the plan? • Involvement with the policy making process?
The future of farming in Southland
98 9.3 Interview coding
These coding nodes are not exhaustive; rather, they represent the initial assessment from which queries and analyses were then made.
99