Are Conventional Farmers Always Conventional?
Monday, October 12th, 2009
That’s the question posed by John Fairweather and colleagues in the latest issue1,2 of Rural Sociology (subscription required).
When we think of food production alternatives, we often think in terms of binaries—-large, global, industrial, ecologically destructive agribusiness vs. small, local, ecologically benign organic farming. This team argues that there are reasons to suspect this dichotomy is too simplistic.
Using New Zealand as a case study, they found from previous work that food standards systems (like organic) are often driven by supermarkets and other demand-side market forces. That is, farmers respond to consumer preferences by voluntarily improving agricultural practices in order to take advantage of these emerging niche markets.
In their latest article, they found that “conventional” farmers were a diverse group. When asked to rank their agreement with a series of questions assessing sustainable knowledge and practice, conventional farmers ended up falling along a spectrum of pro-environmental to non-environmental. The pro-environmental percentage of conventional farmers turned out to be a significant fraction of three ag sectors:
- sheep and beef (79%)
- dairy (44%)
- horticulture (39%)
Bottom line: These results suggest that conventional farmers may, in fact, be a more heterogeneous group than is currently recognized:
Our analysis… clearly identifies a strong underlying heterogeneity among conventional farmers. In addition to the overwhelming evidence that the majority of farmers attribute high levels of importance to environmental practices, it is also possible to distinguish a group that attributes significantly more importance to the selected IFOAM basic standards and their associated farm practices. Furthermore, we have shown that a plausible explanation for the development of the farmers’ environmental orientation is found in their varied exposure to best-practice audits and, to a lesser extent, government regulation. These findings indicate that, despite increasing recognition in the literature of the heterogeneity among farmers, greater attention to the underlying causes of diversity among conventional farmers is an essential step in improving understanding and promotion of agricultural sustainability. In effect, the attention given to the nature of developmental opportunities within alternative farming needs to be balanced by giving more attention to developmental opportunities within conventional farming. It follows that the presence of shades of ‘‘greenness’’ among conventional farmers has important implications for our understanding of the various and complex pathways toward the greening of agrofood systems.
….These findings demonstrate that, in conditions where compliance rewards producers both financially and socially (i.e., raising their status as good managers of the environment), best-practice audit schemes may offer a path toward more sustainable agrofood production.
1Fairweather, J.R., C.J. Rosen, L.M. Hunt, and H.R. Campbell (2009) Are Conventional Farmers Conventional? Analysis of the Environmental Orientations of Conventional New Zealand Farmers. Rural Sociology, 74(3):430-454.
2Bowdoin people can link to article here.
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