Analysis: as an important cultural identity, negotiating with the 'good farmer' appears to be essential for ensuring meaningful emission reductions
By Emmet Fox and Michael Tobin, SETU
The farming sector is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25%. While much lower than society-wide reductions, these cuts are likely to involve change to what happens on Irish farms. As an enormous body of research in societally sensitive disciplines, such as sociology, repeatedly demonstrate, how people relate to the world and its problems -- including climate change – is largely based on how society is configured and people’s lived experience of it.
However, much of the discussion leading up to these reductions have failed to consider farmers' lived experiences. These lived experiences bind many farmers into complex social value systems that have been shown, in numerous studies, to coalesce into the powerful ideal referred to by rural researchers as the ‘good farmer’.
The ‘good farmer’ cultural status is an important part of maintaining the respect of people whose opinions matter to farmers, which is essentially other farmers. UCD academic Louise Burns' research identifies a strong value being placed on the ‘tidy farmer’ whose ‘good farming’ practices consist of "well-trimmed hedges", no weeds, clear yards, and in parts of the country where land does not drain freely, "well-drained fields". While more data is needed on how widespread this ‘good farmer’ type is in Ireland, ‘tidy farming’ practices have been recognised by rural researchers as a common international phenomenon, whereby neat landscapes are used to display farmer values, work ethic, knowledge and orderliness.
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Unfortunately, 'tidy' does not easily equate with more ‘environmental’, clashing with organic farming and the perceived ‘messiness’ of its greater weed tolerance. Tidy farming also conflicts with one of the best means to reduce farming emissions: planting woodlands. However, while Ireland’s tree cover is one of the EU’s lowest, practices of forestry growing are rarely perceived as ‘farming’ and therefore present an obvious obstacle to the demonstration of tidy farming.
Understanding the ‘good farmer’ requires acknowledging the obvious; no one can be a farmer without access to land. How land is held onto, and passed on, shapes the entire nature of farming as a way of life, which in Ireland remains overwhelmingly through inheritance along the male line. Consider how this steers daily practices and regularities of farm life; how it filters the kind of qualities that ensure membership of, aid staying power, and movement within farming.
The centrality of such inheritance to maintaining and solidifying familial access to land – where around 96% of farm holdings are family farms - has invested power in properties of being familial, place-anchored, and especially male, with men owning 87% of farms. These qualities define local peer relationships, communities, and work networks, through a particular form of ‘maleness’. The maleness of ownership feeds into other perceived masculine values of perseverance, independence, autonomy, hard physical labour, and competitiveness - qualities from which much of the identities of the ‘good farmer’ emerges.
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‘Tidy farming’ aids in displaying such ‘good farmer’ values through ensuring that physical labour, know-how, being ‘on top of things’, are imprinted onto the landscape for all neighbouring farmers to see. That tidiness holds a more potent value for Burns’ male farmers than her female interviewees, offers support to the role masculinity plays in shaping this ‘tidy farmer’ status. The particular affinity for roadside displays of neat hedge-cutting, which Burns finds as being most often first referred to as indicating good farming, points to the importance of signalling tidy farming to others through concentrating on the more outwardly visible parts of the farm. Tree planting is therefore seen as preventing farmers from displaying the status of their hard and tidy labour and from being able to observe work they value come to fruition.
Furthermore, that ‘tidy farming’ can garner more respect from the farming community than profitable farming, suggests a weakness in the government’s use of incentives in farming policy. It would seem the conditions attached to government and EU funding, likely receive less resistance when not running contrary to ‘good farmer’ status. The relevance of this for emissions reduction is apparent in the declining take-up of the government’s afforestation schemes despite being offered more money than what many farmers (especially drystock beef farmers) can earn doing conventional farming. The decline has recently prompted substantial increases to grant payments.
Importantly, the ‘good farmer’ can change. There are some indications that female farmers – just 13.4% of farm owners - take a less competitive approach to demonstrating the ‘good farmer’. Researchers note a different type of ‘good farmer’ aligned to recent dairy expansion. Here scale becomes part of what already constitutes the competitively masculine nature of ‘good farmer’ status. Displaying such scale incorporates, as one dairy advisor puts it, ‘bigger tractors, bigger sheds, more cows’. Successful expansion and growth is tangibly displayed on the back of cow numbers and new technology with the emphasis on the ‘industrial farmer’ rather than the ‘tidy farmer’ (although these can still overlap).
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The ‘good farmer’ of dairy expansion also conflicts with environmental goals. The autonomy, embedded in such versions of the good farmer, struggles with agri-environmental policies while seeking to uphold the symbolic displays of scale and growth. In the recent years, this has become an obvious paradoxical consequence to programmes of dairy expansion followed by targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in farming.
While the latter does not bode well for successful emission reductions, that the ‘good farmer’ can change means it is something policy makers need to pay heed to. Whatever its form, as an important cultural identity, negotiating with the ‘good farmer’ appears to be essential for ensuring meaningful emission reductions.
Dr. Emmet Fox is a Lecturer and researcher in Sociology in the Department of Arts and School of Humanities at SETU. Michael Tobin is a Lecturer in Social Policy and the Programme Leader for the BA(H) Social Science in the Department of Arts at SETU.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
