The previous section reviewed the New Zealand literature on farm management consultancy. This section briefly reviews the literature on knowledge cultures (Morris, 2006) primarily to highlight that farmers and farm management consultants come from different knowledge cultures. Consultants are important “boundary spanners’ (Eastwood et al., 2012) who can translate and assist farmers to interpret explicit knowledge from the science knowledge culture and integrate it with their tacit farming knowledge.
Farmers are reported by Morris (2006, p. 117) to ‘constitute their identities as farmers in contrasting ways to those constructed by the policy knowledge culture of agri-environmental scheme’ a point highlighted by other authors also (e.g. Burgess et al., 2000; Burton, 2004). The mismatch between the conception of farmers that informs agricultural and agri-environmental policy and farmers self-concepts and attitudes is illustrated by Burton and Wilson (2006). They challenge the accuracy of the conceptualisation of farmers moving from a post-productivist mind set and practice to a multifunctional one, as being useful for informing policy initiatives in the United Kingdom. Instead, they argue that post-productivism describes patterns at the macro-structural level but does not capture the multiple dimensions of farmers’ practice and thinking on-farm (Burton and Wilson, 2006).
The lack of effectiveness of voluntary agri-environmental schemes has been attributed, in some studies, to the prescriptive and means-based nature of the schemes (Ward et al., 1995; Hodge, 2001; Burton and Wilson, 2006; Burton et al., 2008; Riley, 2008). The schemes outline the specifications farmers are required to undertake, and rely on subsidies to encourage the uptake of particular practices, such as fencing off conservation areas, or harvesting on a particular date (Burton et al., 2008). As a result, it is argued that farmers have not fully engaged with (or internalised) the principles and ethos of the schemes and that real change has not taken place. This is argued to be because the schemes and associated subsidies do not require farmers to bring to bear their farming expertise or knowledge to this aspect of on-farm practice (Burton and Wilson, 2006) and ‘there is no incentive to act entrepreneurially, to introduce original ideas, to innovate or to be willing to take risks’ (Hodge, 2001, p. 101).
Burton (2004, p. 196) presents a rationale for considering how technologies contribute to farmers social/cultural rewards:
The reasons for the general failure of voluntary attempts to change the role of the farmer are often presented as either economic factors such as anticipated low returns or high establishment costs, structural factors such as the location of the farm relative to markets, or a perceived lack of skill on the part of the farmer to adopt the new practices. It is becoming increasingly evident that farmers may also resist change on the basis of an anticipated loss of identity or social/cultural rewards traditionally conferred through existing commercial agricultural behaviour. Clear examples of this challenge to the ‘good farmer’ identity are emerging from empirical studies of farmer response to government schemes.
Farming activities that contribute to a farmer’s identity and social/cultural rewards are argued to be those that require a level of farming skill and expertise that can be observed by other farmers in the outcome of the activity (Burton et al., 2008; Burton and Paragahawewa, 2011). The link between what farmers value and the visual dimension of productive farming is expanded upon by Burton (2012, p. 66):
‘farmers’ aesthetic landscape preference is closely tied with their understanding and practice of production activities, and...this connection has deep cultural and historical roots .. the cultural meaning of being a farmer is heavily embedded in the landscape itself.
‘Tidy’ farming and ‘straight lines’ are a widely recognised example of a farming convention associated with ‘good farming’ that is the source of resistance among farmers of the less ‘tidy’ organic production systems (Burton, 2004; Burton and Paragahawewa, 2011), including those in New Zealand (Egoz et al., 2001).
Farmers in Australia have a strong preference for voluntary and education-based tools ahead of regulation, in relation to supporting sustainable land management (Cocklin et al., 2007). This preference, it is argued, is aligned with farmers’ strong desire for independence and for being in control of their own destiny (Robinson, 2006; Cocklin et al., 2007; Leviston et al., 2011; Higgins et al., 2012). There is evidence also that New Zealand farmers are similarly opposed to regulation. The strongest opposition to Environmental Management Systems and Quality Assurance schemes expressed by the farmers surveyed as part of the ARGOS4 project in New Zealand, came from farmers who considered the schemes as a form of regulation of their autonomous practice and (as such) a challenge to their standing as farmers (Rosin et al., 2007).
This perspective is strongly supported by research that shows the relative success of schemes in which farmers have been actively involved in the instigation and on-going management of the scheme, and where the specifics of the scheme’s application were worked through at the individual farm level (e.g. Robinson, 2006). The advantage of governing mechanisms, tailored to individual farm circumstances were highlighted in a study in Canada. A growing interest from farmers to the Environmental Farm Plan scheme was attributed to a ‘renewed interest in generating ecological goods and services’ by farmers but also because
the effectiveness of uniform beneficial management practices in mitigating the negative environmental impacts from agriculture is limited by inherent heterogeneities in agricultural production systems (Yiridoe et al., 2010, p. 1104)
The importance of the relationship between farmers and the officials promoting and overseeing the scheme is also highlighted (Robinson, 2006). Morris (2006) argues that experts, who are outsiders to farmers’ knowledge-cultures, may not be the best people to be designing agri-environmental scheme or working with farmers to adopt these schemes. Improved environmental outcomes on farms, it is argued, rest on achieving improved communication and negotiation between farmers and people from outside farming (Burgess et al., 2000; Tsouvalis et al., 2000). Confirming this, credible intermediaries were identified as important in translating and assisting farmers to interpret and span the boundary between their tacit farming knowledge and expert farmer decision support systems in Australia (Eastwood et al., 2012). The authors concluded:
Linkages between users and retailers were impeded by the limited ability of each party to step outside their domain of expertise. The network of practice required translators to act as boundary spanners in bridging explicit and tacit knowledge domains. These individuals can prove effective not only because they can translate between farming practice and [decision support systems] knowledge, but because they also have a high degree of credibility with farmers (Eastwood et al., 2012, p. 17).
The large body of literature that has focussed on understanding why farmers do not act in accordance with scientific knowledge-based technologies has been criticised for its failure to value or recognise the legitimate status of farmers’ knowledge (Tsouvalis et al., 2000; Morris, 2006; Riley, 2008). A line of research accepted as constructive by the authors of this report is that which recognises and gives legitimate status to the experiential-based tacit knowledge of farmers as a knowledge-culture (e.g. Tsouvalis et al., 2000; Riley, 2008).
Farmers were shown to resist the policy knowledge culture of agri-environmental scheme with reference to their practical and experiential knowledge of managing the land (Morris, 2006; Riley, 2008). However, the farmers, in contesting agri-environmental scheme, Morris (2006) reports, drew on other knowledge, including that anchored in the productivity agenda of the neo-liberal project. Farmers’ scepticism about scientists and 4 ARGOS: Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability is a New Zealand research consortium with a mandate to examine the environmental, social and economic sustainability of New Zealand farming systems ARGOS. 2012. AGRICULTURE RESEARCH GROUP ON SUSTAINABILITY. Available: http://www.argos.org.nz/index.shtml.
21 Centre of Excellence in Farm Business Management
policy-makers, Riley (2008, p. 1291) concludes, is because their knowledge (compared with the farmers’ ‘longstanding, durable and certain’) is considered by farmers to be ‘uncertain and transient’. However, although there was evidence of a contest between farmers knowledge culture and that of those outside of farming, exchange (porosity) and a re-negotiation of knowledge-culture through interaction was evident, also (Morris, 2006).