The CoProduction of Agriculture

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The Co-Production of Agriculture

• Overview
• Our objective is to reflect on the relationship
  between the ordering of the rural world and the
  ordering of knowledge, and our role in this as
  knowledge practitioners, through
• examining the historical embedding of three
  types of expertise in
• state structures and farming practice
• veterinary science, agricultural economics,
  and farm extension
• reviewing critiques of the segregated world
  of expertise and its
• consequences
• exploring the potentialities of a reflexive
  interdisciplinarity to
• open up the politics of knowledge practices
  in agriculture

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Expertise in the Co-Production of the
Agricultural State

• Agriculture as a domain of practice and order is
  both highly regulated and steeped in expertise.
• Regulation and expertise have progressed so
  hand-in-hand in this domain that it is difficult
  to disentangle them.
• The state has promoted the knowledge structures
  which have been employed to impose order on the
  uncertain, chaotic and recalcitrant realm of
  farming, which in turn has rendered this realm
  governable.
• The attempt to render the rural world manageable
  has thrown up a complex ordering of expertise

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Expertise in the Co-Production of the
Agricultural State

• Veterinary science, agricultural economics, farm
  extension (rural sociology) were and remain
  integral to the governmentality of agriculture
• veterinary science was the progenitor of the
  modern agricultural state in the late 19th
  century
• agricultural economics was the midwife of the
  managed agricultural economy in the mid 20th
  century
• farm extension (rural sociology) facilitated the
  widespread productivist transformation of farming
  practice in the second half of the 20th century
• In enacting these extensions of state power,
  these sources of expertise were formed and were
  able to lodge themselves in the new structures.

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• the control of nature is no easy task,
• and seems to ensure that civil servants,
• by their successes in controlling existing
• diseases, do not find themselves without
• a job
• Sir John Winnifrith, MAFF Permanent Secretary,
  1962

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• The Ministry of Ag. and Fish
• Does everything that one could wish
• To foster, guide and chaperon
• Those industries it calls its own
• And it would be unkind to chaff
• The members of its faithful staff
• Who seek no rest and find no peace
• But labour always to increase,
• By deeds of departmental derring
• Corn, flesh and fowl and good red herring.
• No slackness is allowed to smirch
• Their splendid record of research,
• No doubts molest their firm reliance
• On methods blessed by modern science.
• One expert, in his spacious lab.,
• Observes the habits of the crab
• Another takes his grain of wheat,
• His whiting or his sugar beet

Who mitigates his dull vocation With intellectual
recreation, And spends an hour of leisure
daily Playing upon the ukelele. The farmer
strolling round his paddock, The fisherman in
quest of haddock, Unite to sing with grateful
glee The praises of the Ministry. Rude simple
souls, they lack that store Of expert scientific
lore On which alone success depends, And this
their kind Department sends. For, if calamities
befall The men who till, the men who trawl If
beasts contract the foot-and-mouth, If blizzards
blow from north or south, If prices slump and
credit fails, If nets are rent by sportive
whales, The Staff is ready in a trice To help
them with its best advice, On land or sea, in
drought or storm, Sent free of charge in pamphlet
form.
Punch 20 April 1927
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Regulatory Expertise and Farming Practice

• Veterinary science established an order that
  distinguished authoritatively those diseases
  regarded and treated as exotic and those accepted
  for the time as endemic, and the rules and
  strategies governing the regulation of each.
  Crucially they established the norm that killing
  (possibly) diseased animals was the means to
  ensure the health purity of livestock.
• Agricultural economists established an order in
  which farms were treated as businesses, and
  farmers were stimulated and expected to act as
  commercially calculating businessmen.
• Farm extension specialists established an order
  that aligned farmers towards technological change
  in a world of progressive and traditional farmers.

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Critiques of the Politics of Agricultural
Expertise

• State segregation of expertise
• Lack of curiosity about the downside, the
  excluded, the marginalised
• Lack of sustained, discipline-based reflexivity
  regarding the politics and performativity of
  expertise
• Criticisms of handmaiden role for social science
  in post-war transformation of farming

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Potentialities of Reflexive Interdisciplinarity

• Overcoming end-of-pipe outlook
• Reflexivity about knowledge, its ordering and its
  performativity
• Reframing the science, exploring the politics,
  interrogating the boundaries

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Engaging in the Co-production of Agriculture

• To what extent does contemporary agriculture
  reproduce the logics and modes of ordering of the
  historical agricultural state?
• How are these practices bound up into changes in
  the regulatory state and demands for change in
  farming?
• STS of farming and food has to be an STS of the
  social sciences too

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STS of Farming and Food

• Farming practices are concerned with ordering the
  productivity of biological processes, about
  imposing and refining relative certainty and
  predictability
• Our historical case studies cover a shift in the
  magnitude and complexity of the knowledge
  practices involved in ordering farming the
  co-production of agriculture
• STS of farming and food cannot ignore the
  co-production of the agricultural state