Today's guest post is from my husband Mel.
"Why are farmers so conservative?
This is a question my son Mikey asked a couple of months ago and I struggled to articulate a convincing answer. But yesterday I was reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, which had some interesting things to say about the Vikings in medieval Iceland and Greenland and which might provide some sort of explanation.
Diamond explains how trying to exist in marginal conditions leads to an excessively cautious outlook. If you're struggling to survive, not only are you probably unreceptive to trying anything new, but the consequences are likely to be catastrophic should any of these new ideas produce unintended results:
'The ultimate reason behind the conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society's conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive for many generations, they found that variations in the economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative." (Collapse, p240).
As most of us realise, even in the 21st century farming can be quite a difficult life. It involves hard work and long hours, and a run of crop failures can wipe you out completely. This would make the most progressive of us quite risk averse and if we managed to find ways of doing things that assured our continued existence (prosperity, even), we'd be likly to stick with them. This attitude might well affect our response to new ideas, whether economic or political, which tend to come from people rather different from ourselves, usually from urban environments."
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Why are farmers conservative?
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1 comments:
Doesn't surprise me..let's face it, agriculture did not change THAT much for thousands of years until 2 things happened. The industrial revolution which (at least in this area) impounded waters formerly used for irrigation and also lured many people to factory work, and the development of chemical fertilizers/pesticides as an alternative to traditional organic techniques. Both events had a huge impact on agriculture and to what benefit for the farmer? It's now almost impossible for the family farmer to stay in business due to global agri-business and competition. And chemicals have degraded agricultural soils so badly that they are now devoid of life and need the chemicals to keep growing crops. All of this heavily encouraged and subsidised by the government whose pockets are being lined by the tycoons of agri-business.
So no, it's no surprise to me that most farmers don't view any kind of socio/political/economic change to be in their best interest. Farming is definitely a tough life, but it's not just the forces of nature that most farmers have to battle to stay afloat.
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