The Co-Production of Agriculture

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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.

5. “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

6. 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 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 And tries by some ingenious test What mode of living suits it best; While others dedicate their lives To proving how the ploughman thrives

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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