Decoupling farm, farming and place: Recombinant attachments of globally engaged family farmers

Abstract

Farmers have traditionally been perceived as having a deep attachment to land and place that contrasts with the mobility of modern society. In this paper, we use this work as a starting point for analysing new forms of attachments among a cohort of Australian farmers who are highly mobile in their business activities. In response, we devise a new way of thinking about farmer attachments that involves decoupling three elements: attachment to farming as an activity and source of agrarian identity; attachment to the farm as an economic and social unit; and attachment to place. Individual farmers recombine these different elements of attachment in different ways, depending on their specific context, promoting both mobility and stasis. We illustrate these recombinant attachments through examples of globally engaged Australian farmers who enact different configurations of attachment of place, farm business and farming identity.

Introduction

The attachment of farmers to place and land has been extensively debated and researched within the rural studies literature. On the one hand, such studies have revealed farmers as being rooted in the land, and thus as embodying a deep, embedded and/or autochthonous attachment to place that contrasts with the perceived mobility and rootlessness of the non-agricultural population in contemporary society (Dominy, 2001; Flemsæter, 2009; Gray, 1998; Hildenbrand and Hennon, 2005; Kuehne, 2012). Genealogical inheritance and kinship, the co-location of home and workplace, and an intimate and embodied knowledge of the land, generated through the performance of repeated, iterative practices across a farm property, have been shown to tie farmers to particular rural places. In contrast to the elective belonging of in-migrant rural communities, farmers are sometimes perceived to be constrained and obligated by their inherited and economically-dependent connection to place, which in turn informs their business and land management decisions (Hildenbrand and Hennon, 2005; Gosling and Williams, 2010).

On the other hand, more limited research has suggested that the modernization of rural communities and global capitalist imperatives have diluted the temporal and spatial connection to place among farmers that was once characteristic of agrarian rural societies (see for example Johnsen, 2004). Drawing on contemporary sociological theories of reflexive modernization and detraditionalization (see Beck et al., 1994), rural researchers have suggested that the reorganization of social relations across time and space are not uniquely urban phenomena, but have reconstituted local identities and connections in rural areas as well (Bryant, 1999).

In this paper, we interrogate the processes by which various emotional attachments to place and farm are formed and maintained in particular geographic, political-economic, historic and cultural contexts by focussing on a cohort of highly mobile and strongly business-minded family farmers who have actively sought to integrate themselves into the global economy. We term these farmers ‘globally engaged’ by virtue of the fact that in contrast to many of their counterparts who have been enrolled unwittingly into global processes and structures, they display considerable agency in actively negotiating their own pathways through the economic and political realities of global conditions. Prima facie, they could be considered to have a weak attachment to place, having sold family properties or spatially separated their farm property, business office and/or private residence. Yet, we argue that their business and lifestyle choices continue to reflect emotional attachments as well as rational economic decision-making and, accordingly, that they are characteristic of neither autochthonous local nor disembedded global actors.

As a way of making sense of these complex, and seemingly contradictory, expressions of attachment to farm and place, we develop a more nuanced model of attachments that decouples these two components while still accepting that, in some contexts, they may well remain strongly connected. We first define place as a distinct geographical space comprising the biophysical attributes of the farm property and surrounding landscape, along with the social ties and relationships that are fostered within that space (Altman and Low, 1992). Second, farming as a practice and source of identity based on the cultivation and stewardship of the land and/or stock. And third, the farm business as an economic and social unit. We suggest that individual farmers may form separate attachments to each of these elements in particularistic ways, recombining them in new acts of place making or entrepreneurship depending on their own situation and priorities. As such, while some farmers may feel deeply committed to maintaining a connection to the family property, others may prioritize sustaining the farm business over attachment to a particular place at any given time. Mobility as well as stasis may therefore produce, as well as be produced by, farmers' emotional attachments. In what follows, we first situate the research by reviewing the existing literature on place attachment, rurality and farmers, before outlining our research methods, introducing our analytical model of the recombinant features of farmer attachment, and empirically examining these connections with reference to globally engaged family farmers.