Showing and telling farming: agricultural shows and re-imaging British agriculture

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Abstract

Some actors in the “mainstream” agricultural sector are beginning to engage in strategies of influencing public perceptions of farming, responding to public anxieties over industrialised agriculture and to a supposed separation of non-farming publics from food production. This paper focuses on agricultural shows as sites and events central to such re-imaging strategies: shows are moments of convergence, assembling farming people, entities, knowledges and practices, and non-farming publics, and allowing agricultural societies to stage managed encounters between farming and non-farmers. The paper draws on research with show managers and others involved in agricultural shows. It discusses how a reorientation of shows’ presentation of farming to the non-farming public has occurred. While there is a continued display of farming as a spectacle, there are also attempts by agricultural societies to use shows to foster a sense of connectedness between the public and farming, and to ‘inform’ or ‘educate’ the public, on their terms, about farming. However, first, in several ways, shows reproduce a distancing and separation between farming and non-farmers, partly due to a partial evacuation of much mainstream agricultural content from some shows, and to the restricted and selective image of farming which is presented. Second, processes of informing and educating non-farming publics and imaging farming in particular ways, are, in addition, associated with a re-imaging of farming to farmers. The reorientation of agricultural shows towards a re-imaging of agriculture can be understood as ‘acting back’ on farming's perception of itself. Shows thus also involve a reflexive repositioning of farmers in relation to the consumers of their products.

Introduction

Farming has a complex place in contemporary social imaginations. On one hand, imagined landscapes and lifestyles of farming constitute what Shepard refers to as a ‘bucolic fiction’ (Shepard, 1996, p. 244; Bunce, 1994); on the other, modern agriculture is associated with environmental damage, animal welfare issues, and food and animal health scares (see, e.g., Buller and Morris, 2003; Goodman, 1999). Simultaneously, many in the farming sector, in the UK at least, are experiencing a sense of ‘crisis’ (Drummond et al., 2000), combining economic pressure with a feeling of being beleaguered by an ignorant public and unsympathetic politicians. In response, some involved in farming have felt a need to begin a ‘re-imaging’ of UK agriculture. Such a feeling is evident in the 2003 launch of an ‘Image of Agriculture’ campaign, consisting of an alliance of farming unions, rural campaigning organisations and businesses, and agricultural societies, designed to boost the image of farming (Farmers Weekly (FW), 21 February 2003). While the public image of some parts of farming, e.g., the organic sector, is generally positive, there is concern with public perceptions of ‘mainstream’ agriculture. At least some in mainstream farming are thus attempting to mobilise farmers into taking an interest in reconstituting the image of farming by first, associating it with, e.g., food quality and environmental conservation, and second, ‘educating’ a non-farming public represented as misinformed about farming. Accordingly, a recent FW opinion column argued that ‘the image of most of farming needs an urgent makeover ... public information on general agriculture to the entire population needs to be updated and integrated. Only then can we expect the kind of respect currently reserved for the organic sector’ (FW, 9 August 2002). This paper seeks to explore one mode of response to this situation, focusing on agricultural shows as sites and events where an attempted re-imaging of agriculture is in progress.

The Association of Show and Agricultural Organisations (ASAO) emphasises the significance of shows to rural life, claiming that its 200 member societies hold over 400 ‘show days’ between them (ASAO, 2003).1 Shows are thus important sites for an attempted re-imaging. First, they consist of a convergence of agricultural and non-agricultural functions, entities and people at a particular place and time. Second, they give agricultural societies access, in a context where they have the ability to stage-manage the presentation of agriculture, to large numbers of non-farming visitors. Here, agricultural shows can be fitted into a long tradition of expositions, trade fairs and other types of show designed to promote particular products, spheres of activity or national spaces. In Britain, for example, events such as the 1851 Great Exhibition ‘offered to all comers an unequivocal proof of [England's] supremacy as a manufacturing nation’ (Harley, 1976, p. 227), and have been read as ‘giant new rituals of self-congratulation ... encased in a princely monument to wealth and technical progress’ (Hobsbawm, 1975, pp. 32–33). More recently, a diverse range of events, featuring cars, food, fashion, etc., have presented consumers with a display of available products and ideas (see, for example, Duggan, 2001, on fashion shows). Finally, agricultural shows can act as the basis for more extended strategies of connection with non-farming publics and, importantly, for encouraging actors in the farming sector to reconsider their own relationships with non-farmers.

The emergence of shows, run by newly formed agricultural associations, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries during a period of focus on the application of scientific thought to livestock breeding, equipment, etc., meant that they were used as events to display the ‘best’ livestock and innovations, and as mechanisms for disseminating new farming techniques and good practice from elite to all farmers (see, for example, Fox, 1979; Goddard (1989), Goddard (1981); Hudson, 1972; Overton, 1996; Wilmot, 1990 and specifically on livestock, Ritvo, 1987).2 These functions have tended to continue to be regarded by agricultural societies as at the core of their activities. In this sense, shows can be regarded as part of the process of innovation diffusion or knowledge transfer which has been important within broader discourses of progress and improvement in agriculture; the idea of a geographical spreading away of information and technologies from nodal points has been a significant, if contested, notion within discussion of agricultural change (Brown, 1981; Hägerstrand, 1967; Ilbery, 1985; Jones, 1965; Rogers, 1983).

More recently, societies have focused on incorporating ‘education’ of the public into a mix of business, competition, spectacle and consumption. They are increasingly interested in encouraging non-farming publics to learn and think about farming in particular ways, in presenting a particular image of farming, and influencing current public sphere debates over farming's furture. UK shows might thus be seen to be moving more towards the North American model for agricultural fairs, many of which tend to have been aimed at showcasing farming to urban or non-farming audiences for some time, alongside the existence of highly specialised farmer-oriented technical events (Henning, 1998; see also Edwards, 1999, for an historical example of US agricultural boosterism). In this context, the paper develops the following themes. First, agricultural shows have become part of a struggle by farming to legitimise and defend its status and practices against widespread criticism. Shows thus present a particular vision of farming, emphasising the successes of expertise in food production and conservation. Second, despite the emphasis on re-imaging agriculture to a non-farming public, in some ways this re-orientation of show events can ‘act-back’, influencing how farmers imagine themselves. There is thus a degree of reflexivity involved in the process of re-imaging agriculture, as show managers consider their own, and farmers’, position in relation to non-farming publics, and become concerned with adjusting farming identities. Third, although shows emphasise reconnection, a farming/non-farming distinction is reproduced in showing farming to the public. In particular, non-farmers are represented as lacking knowledge of farming and food, and as inhabiting lifeworlds separated from those of farmers. While strategies of ‘educating’ non-farmers seek to inform, they are implicated in presenting a particular and partial image of farming which maintains the distancing of non-farmers from many of the ‘realities’ of agriculture. The paper concludes by suggesting that the sense in which agricultural societies fulfil their stated charitable objective of ‘promoting’ agriculture has thus partly shifted, from furthering agricultural ‘progress’, towards acting as public relations agencies for farming.

Section snippets

Constructing the image of farming

The changing position and image of farming in the British countryside has been the subject of much debate (e.g., Ilbery and Bowler, 1998; Wilson, 2001). From the perspective of farmers at least, what had become a naturalised position of authority in rural areas has increasingly come under threat. As Halfacree (1999, p. 69) suggests, ‘... British farmers now both feel and indeed are in a much less secure and certain position as regards their role in both agriculture and rural life generally’.

Reorienting agricultural shows

Doubts have been expressed over the future of agricultural shows for some time. Many have experienced declines in attendances, and for many agricultural societies running a show is a net cost to their budgets, but necessary to meet the conditions of their constitutions. The rationale behind shows has therefore altered over time; the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, for example, developed a new policy emphasis on education of the non-farming public from the 1970s (Hall, 1987). Similarly, Goddard

Repositioning farming

In the above, some ways in which agricultural shows have attempted to become involved in a process of re-imaging agriculture are illustrated, suggesting that particular agricultural narratives have been invested in by show societies as something to present to various non-farming publics, including the (overlapping) categories of children, consumers and urban visitors. However, other processes noted by show managers have also become important in influencing how re-imaging might be taking place,

Conclusions

Effort is clearly being expended by agricultural societies to, on their terms, inform the non-farming public about farming, and agricultural shows are prime mechanisms for this, as part of a strategy of fostering a particular image of agriculture. The agriculture presented at shows is thus one which is environmentally aware, reproduces attractive landscapes, assures animal welfare and produces healthy, high-quality food. It is essential to the countryside, and should be respected and protected.

Acknowledgments

Research conducted for this paper was supported by the Nuffield Foundation Social Science Small Grants Scheme. I would like to thank Phil Dunham and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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