THE AGRICULTURAL TREADMILL AND THE RURAL ENVIRONMENT IN THE POST-PRODUCTIVIST ERA NEIL WARD”

Introduction

In seeking to explain how the development of agriculture in capitalist societies has resulted in a range of problems for the rural environment, commentators have often used the term ‘the agricultural treadmill.’ In- deed, the term has become so frequently, yet loosely, employed that it has come to mean different things to different people. For example, in the UK in 1991, Friends of the Earth published their wide-ranging envi- ronmental review of agricultural policy entitled Off the Treadmill. It began with the statement:

“ I t is over a decade since the Royal Commission o n Environmental Pollution noted that some farmers ‘feel themselves to be on a treadmill with regard to pcsti- cide usage - compelled by circumstances to depend on chemicals which they as countrymen, ultimately find disturbing.’ Yet in the intervening years, the farming ‘treadmill’ has grown bigger, faster, and even more unbalanced.” (Friends of the Earth 1991, p. I )

In this case, the treadmill term refers specifically to farmers’ increasing dependency on pesticide usage. Central to this conceptualization is the notion that through the use of pesticides farmers disrupt ecosystems and consequently need to use more chemicals to maintain effective pest con- trol. Either pests develop resistance to pesticides or new types of pests are unintentionally created. In this context, the treadmill concept has a strong ecological dynamic. The notion has also been used in this sense in a report for The Ecologist which provides a critique of industrial agricul- ture and explains how farmers are “pushed on to” and become “caught on” the treadmill (Clunies-Ross and Hildyard 1992). However, al- though the report takes pesticide use as the main illustration of the operation of a treadmill, the idea is also applied in a much broader form. For example, it is argued that:

* Centre for Rural Economy, Department of Agricultural Economics and Food Marke- ting, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Sociologia Ruralis 1993. Volume XXXIII (3/4), pp. 348-361.

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“Squeezed by prices, encouraged by advice and training, controlled by regulation, limited by research, and trapped by peer pressure, farmers have had little choice but to adopt more and more intensive systems.” (Clunies-Ross and Hildyard 1992, p. 59)

Under these circumstances, the political and economic conditions for agriculture, as well as day-to-day farming practices, are brought into the equation, with the key processes being the loss of control over farm inputs, increasing debt, increasing concentration of land holdings, in- creasing corporate control over the food industry and the declining bar- gaining power of farmers in the market place. Therefore, to the ecolog- ical dynamic can be added political and economic dimensions.

However, the term ‘treadmill’ is used beyond the discourse of envi- ronmental groups campaigning for reform in agriculture. It can also be found in the work of social scientists looking at agricultural change. For example, Pile uses the term ‘treadmill’ in a range of contexts to explain the adoption of different survival strategies on farms. He suggests that “the treadmill metaphor is useful because farmers themselves believe that they are struggling within a labour treadmill, involving both work and technology” (Pile 1991, p. 264), and then goes on to discuss the labour treadmill, the technological treadmill, the treadmill of farm man- agement and the financial treadmill. To this list we can add “the vicious treadmill of cut-throat competition’’ (Woods 1992, p. 14) and “the treadmill of competitive innovation” (Goodman and Redclift 1991, p. 102).

A number of questions follow. Are these all different treadmills o r elements of the same one? Is the notion of a treadmill useful in helping to understand the relationships between agriculture, the natural envi- ronment and the labour process? How are the workings of the treadmill being transformed as new sets of structural conditions in agriculture emerge?

In this paper‘ it is argued that the treadmill can best be conceptualized as a set of structural conditions, which have been shaped by internation- al political and economic processes and became embodied in agricultural and food policies across the advanced capitalist world. In turn, these conditions have played an important role in transforming how farmers ‘see the world’ and organize their production, such that the intensifica- tion of production through the application of science and technology has become a ‘logic’ of production at the farm level.

Evolution of the treadmill concept

In seeking to understand processes of agrarian development, the notion of a treadmill was first introduced by Willard Cochrane, an American

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agricultural economist, in 1958. H e practised on the left wing of Amer- ican agricultural economics and became Chief Economist in the US Department of Agriculture during the Kennedy Administration. He therefore played a distinctive role within American agricultural eco- nomics. His theory, though first introduced in the I950s, is best encap- sulated in his 1979 account of The Development of American Agricul- mre which has become the best known of his written works. Drawing on findings from rural sociological research into the diffusion and adop- tion of agricultural innovations, Cochrane argued in his ‘theory of the agricultural treadmill’ (Cochrane 1958; 1979) that non-risk-averse early adopters, who were the first farmers to adopt new technologies, bene- fited from lower unit costs of production associated with an increase in output, and these lower costs raised net returns. In the period when any particular new technique has only been adopted by a few farmers, total output is not noticeably increased and the price of the commodity does not fall.

The net incomes of the few early adopters rise and more farmers are attracted to the technique. But, once adoption has become widespread, the situation is transformed. Total output of the commodity increases markedly and so its price tends to fall. Increases in net returns are often largely capitalized into the value of fixed assets, such as land. Land prices, and sometimes rents, consequently rise, lifting in turn the unit cost of production. This change, combined with the falling commodity price, means that the financial benefits of adopting the new technique vanish. Early adopters take up the technology to increase returns, whilst it is those whom Cochrane describes as ‘Mr Average Farmer’ who find themselves on the treadmill. More and more are obliged to adopt the technology because the price of the commodity is declining. They are forced to adopt the new technology in order to reduce their costs and so stay in business.

Cochrane’s theory has been important in analysing the role of tech- nological change in agrarian development. According to Buttel et al. (1990, p. 130), one reason why it has been so widely accepted as an “orienting perspective” is because it draws upon linked knowledge from a range of research areas. Despite some of its assumptions being rooted in a neo-classical tradition, the theory has enjoyed particular favour among theorists of the political economy of agriculture in the 1980s (see, for example, Marsden et al. 1986; Goodman et al. 1987; Whatmore et al. 1987a,b).

The term requires critical re-evaluation since the international politi- cal and economic conditions shaping the agro-food system have changed from those of the 1950s when Cochrane’s theory of the tread- mill was devised. Viewed from the 1990s, Cochrane’s theory can be seen to be very much of its time. One of the main concerns of the immediate

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post-war period among those social scientists interested in agrarian de- velopment was the uneven uptake of new agricultural technologies, typ- ified by the plethora of diffusion-adoption studies at the time. In other words, the direction or trajectory of agriculrural development was ac- cepted, and those farmers who were not engaging with the treadmill were part of the ‘problem’ of rural development.

According to van der Ploeg (1990), there was a frequent assumption that diversity in farm characteristics was linked to ‘backwardness’ and that agricultural development would eventually lead to ‘modern,’ more technologically standardized types. Cochrane’s treadmill represents an early realization that technological change in agriculture can both pro- duce winners and losers. He used the term to criticize the direction of agricultural development because of his concern about the social and economic consequences of technological change. H e suggests the tread- mill “fostered a cannibalistic process in which the large aggressive, in- novative farmers gobbled up the productive assets of the smaller, less efficient less aggressive farmers” (Cochrane 1979, p. 405). However, the consensus surrounding the high-technology model of agrarian devel- opment has broken down, in part as a result of the environmental impli- cations of this particular development trajectory. Thus, the limits to Cochrane’s theory have become more apparent in the current context.

One inconsistency in the theory concerns the technologies it refers to. In the 1950s, the mechanization of agriculture was the key process of technological change and tractor numbers were rapidly growing. How- ever, an integral part of the theory is the assumed effect new tech- nologies have on output, but tractors do not boost yields. They save labour. This may, however, help to explain why since the 1950s the concept has tended to be more widely applied to the adoption of chem- ical technologies by environmental groups.

Butte1 et al. (1990) suggest that a major weakness of Cochrane’s theo- ry is his failure to address how agricultural technology is produced and diffused. Research by Friedland et al. (1981) showed that the social organization of different agricultural commodity systems varies and so, therefore, does the structural context for technological change. New agricultural technologies benefit different groups in different ways, em- phasizing the importance of specific social and historical contexts as foci for understanding both the production and consumption of new agri- cultural technologies (see, for example, Busch et al. 1989).

Another problem with Cochrane’s theory arises again from the spe- cific historical context in which it is set, and concerns the assumption that farmers are solely food producers. This inward-looking or agro- centric view renders the theory much less applicable to those numerous parts of the world where pluriactivity as a household survival strategy has long been or has become more commonplace, and farm businesses

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and households have developed extensive links with the non-agricultu- ral economy. For example, in the United States the proportion of farm family income derived from non-farm sources rose from 26 per cent in 1940 to 40 per cent in 1960, and to over 60 per cent by the mid-1980s (Ahearn et al. 1985). Gasson (1990) has found evidence of broadly com- parable increases in Canada, Sweden and Japan. Where the farm busi- ness forms only part of the farm household finances because of the role of non-agricultural income, it is plausible that the pattern of adoption and use of new agricultural technologies may change.

The treadmill theory proved influential in Britain in the 1980s when a series of studies sought to reconceptualize the transformation of farm businesses within a political economy framework (Marsden et al. 1986; Whatmore et al. 1987a). A theoretically-based typology was developed by Whatmore et al. (1987a,b) to help understand the effects on farm businesses of external pressures from wider off-farm circuits of capital. The typology was derived from an assessment of the degree of sub- sumption of internal and external production relations. Internal produc- tion relations involved the ownership and control of farm capital and land, control over management and the balance between family and hired labour. External production relations concerned the level of cech- nological dependence and involvement in credit and marketing relations. It was acknowledged that the technological treadmill refI ected “the cen- tral mechanism” by which formal subsumption of production relations takes place (Whatmore et al. 1987a, p. 28). In effect, the subsumption typology provides a framework for classifying farm businesses accord- ing to the degree of subsumption of production relations and in accord- ance with four ‘ideal types’ ranging from the relatively unsubsurned “marginal, closed unit” to the “subsumed unit.”

While the typology recognizes the important role of the treadmill of technological adoption, it crucially widens the terms of reference be- yond technology to include credit and financial relations and the labour process. It emphasizes “the need to view change on the farm within the wider development of production relations within advanced capitalism” (Whatmore et al. 1987% p. 34), the assumption being that “the contin- uing control exerted by the nuclear family [over the farm business] is regularly threatened by the need for it to make new and more funda- mental compromises with external capitals” (1987a, p. 35). The four ideal types derived from the typology (and described in detail in What- more et al. 1987a, pp. 32-34) are:

Marginal, closed enterprises where the individual farm family owns and manages the business and the land, and carries out most of the work. Businesses carry few if any debts, tend to be smaller-scale and less technologically intensive.

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Transitional, dependent enterprises where greater but limited links with external capitals through technology and credit exist. Businesses and land are still owned by the family but often through family part- nerships or companies and hired workers are usually employed.

Integrated enterprises where higher technology systems are employ- ed, which are often dependent on associated external advice, and credit and marketing relations are more extensive. Businesses tend to be own- ed by a mixture of family and corporate capitals or by family or family- related companies involved in multi-farm or multi-sector businesses. Land occupancy relations become more varied because business and farm expansion “comes to assume a dominating perspective” (1 987a, p. 33).

Subsumed enterprises where corporate, non-family capitals own the business, all labour (including farm management) is hired and links with external capital via credit, advice, technology and marketing are exten- sive.

The macro-treadmill

The assertion that processes wider than simply the pattern of adoption of new agricultural technologies are implicated in the transformation of agriculture and its associated rural environmental changes raises new sets of questions about the establishment of the ‘state-sponsored tech- nological treadmill’ and its place within the ‘productivist’ regime of western agricultures. Those macro-level shifts which provide the chang- ing context for the restructuring of agriculture have recently become one of the central concerns of some commentators who have drawn upon the ideas of the French ‘regulationist’ school (see Aglietta 1979).

The focus of analysis in regulationist theory is the institutions and structures through which society is organized, produced and repro- duced. It is argued that capitalism develops in the form of a succession of periods, each with specific institutional frameworks and social norms. These frameworks are conceptualized as ‘regimes of accumulation,’ a concept which has been taken to help describe the post-war capitalist development of western agriculture (see, for example, Friedman and McMichael 1989; Goodman and Redclift 1991; Marsden et al. 1993). They have drawn parallels between the evolution of the post-war mod- ern agro-food system and industrial ‘Fordism.’ The ‘Fordist’ (or in- tensive) regime of accumulation is based on the expansion of domestic markets for mass-produced goods in advanced capitalist states, and re- quires the progressive adoption of mass consumption by the industrial working class. The corresponding institutional context for Fordism was one of Keynesian full employment policies and corporatist politics.

Following this, Goodman and Redclift (1991) argue that two key

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processes have influenced the structure and development of the modern (post-war) agro-food system. Firstly, their major theme is the role of agriculture in the expansion of industrial capitalism, and within the gen- eral capital accumulation process. During the Fordist regime of accumu- lation, they argue, agriculture’s role had been to provide cheap food to an urban industrial workforce which would, in turn, enable higher pro- portions of household income to be spent on non-food consumption, and so further integrate the industrial working class in the market for mass-produced goods.

Within this wider context of capital accumulation, Goodman and Redclift’s second theme is one of accumulation inside the agro-food sector by agro-industrial capitals. The pattern of accumulation, they argue, is shaped by the biological constraints of the agricultural produc- tion process and human food consumption requirements, but in the process of transforming agriculture, environmental problems have re- sulted. As they explain:

“industrial capitals pursue independent sales and R&D strategies to prornotc wider use of their inputs, disregarding thcir impact on what Marx called the conditions of production or external nature.” (Goodman and Redclift 1991, p. 89)

Thus, Goodman and Redclift suggest that two processes were crucial during the so-called ‘golden age’ of (Fordist) accumulation in the mod- ern agro-food system. The first was the need for capital to develop new markets for commodities and labour in the western world, and the sec- ond was the mutual interests of a scientific community and agro-indus- trial capital in adopting a high-technology model of agricultural produc- tion and development. This second point warrants further discussion for it is the establishment of a particular technology/policy model in the aftermath of the Second World War, and in the context of the Fordist, intensive regime of capitalist accumulation, that has been critical in shaping the trajectory of agricultural development in western economies ever since (see, for example, Marsden et al. 1993, Chapter 3). In effect, for many, the treadmill concept has evolved to become a metaphor for this wider model.

In Britain, the model was adopted because the interests of the state, agro-industrial capital and science were in alliance. An implicit coalition developed, although it was the state that originally took the initiative. Acute food shortages during and immediately after the Second World War, combined with a looming economic crisis, focused attention on the need to boost domestic food supply in order to reduce the nation’s economic dependence on the US. The need to ‘dig for victory’ during the war soon became a need to dig the nation out of its balance of payments problems in the aftermath of the war (Marsden et al. 1993).

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The policy steps taken, in turn, reinforced the high-technology model. The government directly funded agricultural R&D with particular em- phasis on encouraging labour-saving and yield-boosting technologies, and support policy was geared to encouraging farmers to adopt new technologies through capital grants and input subsidies. Thus, it soon became in the interest of agro-industrial companies and agricultural sci- entists that such a model be maintained. Goodman and Redclift refer to the model as a “treadmill of competitive innovation” (1991, p. 1O2), arguing that its defining characteristic is the “symbiosis” berween these different interests (the state, ago-industrial capital and agricultural sci- ence), which “is at the root of the transformation and current economic and environmental crisis of modern agriculture” (1 99 1, p. 103).

Fordist agriculture and the environment

There remains in the literature an untested assumption that the ‘tread- mill’ is responsible for influencing how farmers farm and, therefore, those environmental problems associated with the technology/policy model. This is embodied in the notion that blame for environmental problems lies with the ‘system’ and not with farmers, who are tightly constrained in what they do. Here, the notion of the treadmill has been broadened at the macro-level to encompass the technology/policy mod- el of agricultural development. The impact of this model in the wider context of the Fordist regime of intensive accumulation has been to transform farm businesses and rural social structures, and, indirectly, the condition of the environment. The transformation of agriculture is, therefore, best conceptualized in a wider sense than simply the uptake of technology, and ought to include the capitalist penetration of farm production relations in other forms.

The typology devised by Whatmore et al. (1987ab) is centred around changing agricultural production relations. It therefore provides an em- pirical framework to test the assumption that the treadmill leads to environmental change. More importantly, the subsumption theory rec- ognizes that engagement with the treadmill can be uneven. This consti- tutes a marked progression from early political economy approaches which tended to regard farm-level change as largely determined by the changing needs of off-farm capital. It also acknowledges the scope for differentiation in the nature of production relations, or even the adop- tion of a quite different business strategy which need not necessarily be focused on food production.

Furthermore, the typology was devised as part of a wider study which also examined land use and landscape change on farms during the 1970s and early 1980s. Through a re-analysis of this farm sample and the associated data on environmental change, the relationship between the

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treadmill and the environment may be empirically explored’. During the British study, changes in land use and landscape features for each farm in the sample were measured using air photographs and farm maps. From these data, the rate of change per annum across a set of envi- ronmental variables could be derived for each farm. Two detailed farm surveys were conducted. The first was of 265 farm businesses in three lowland study areas undertaken in 1985. The study areas were (i) Lon- don’s Metropolitan Green Belt, an area of urban fringe mixed farming; (ii) west Dorset, an area of small, family dairy farms; and (iii) east Bed- fordshire, an area of highly mechanized large-scale arable farming. The study was extended in 1988 with a survey of 158 farm businesses in two upland study areas. These two areas were west Cumbria, an area of sheep, beef and dairy production mainly in the Lake District National Park; and north-east Staffordshire, an area of similar livestock produc- tion in the Peak District National Park.

Table 1: Subsumption ideal types and average annuul rates of environmentul change, 1970- 1985/8

Per cent per annum reductions

(length) (area) Subsumption ideal type Number of farms Hedgerow Woodland

Marginal, closed enterprises 72 0.89 0.44 Transitional, dependent enterprises 99 1.04 0.50

Total sample 189 1.09 0.53

Integrated enterprises 18 2.13 1.01

Annual rates of change in field boundary lengths and farm woodland area are used here to allow direct comparison between change on differ- ent farms in different study areas because the dates of farm interviews and air photography flights vary. Table 1 shows how the annual rates of removal of hedgerows and woodland on farms vary across the sub- sumption ideal types’. The results demonstrate that the average rate at which both hedgerows and woodland were removed during the 1970s and early 1980s increases as farm production relations become more subsumed. For each variable in the table, the annual rate of environ- mental change for the most subsumed category is more than twice that of the least subsumed category. This preliminary finding immediately begs further questions; how, for instance, does the relationship vary between subsumption and different elements of the farmed environ- ment? How do these relationships vary over space and between differ- ent environments and farming systems? Do some aspects of the sub- sumption process pose greater threats to the farmed environment than others? These will have to be the subject of future analysis. For now, the

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material presented here supports the assertion that rates of environ- mental change resulting from agricultural development can be empir- ically linked to the capitalist penetration of farm production relations. It is important to note, however, that the data relates to the period be- tween 1970 and the mid-1980s. This period could now be said to repre- sent the ‘dying days’ of the productivist era. Since then, the international political economy of agriculture has entered a period of greater un- certainty, and with this transformation in structural conditions come new sets of questions about processes of agricultural change and their relations with the natural environment.

Post-productivist agriculture in new rural spaces

The productivist model of agricultural development became severely strained as the 1970s progressed. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of financial regulation, the largely US-dominated (For- dist) food regime entered a state of flux as the previous post-war stabil- ity became undermined. In Europe, the US technology/policy model had been successfully adopted with productivist strategies embodied in the protective framework of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The costs of the CAP rapidly escalated during the 1970s and 1980s taking up a large share of total EC expenditure. It was the EC’s attempts to reduce budgetary deficits, through the introduction of milk quotas, stabilizers and set-aside, that heralded the arrival of a new era in agricul- tural policy and fostered increasing financial insecurity at the farm level. In Europe, and across the advanced capitalist world, it became clear by the mid-1980s that states were no longer prepared to underwrite capital- ist accumulation in the agro-food system, or at least not to the same extent as previously. In effect, the state lost interest in maintaining the technology/policy model that had been established in the 1940s, leaving the global food system, and the production practices of the farm sector in particular, exposed to a crisis of legitimacy.

In addition, and parallel to these shifts, there developed in many countries a greater social consciousness over food quality and the envi- ronment. In particular, concerns about the cost of agricultural practices in terms of higher nitrate and pesticide pollution levels in water, pesti- cide residues in food, the loss of wildlife habitats and valued rural land- scape features and the animal welfare implications of intensive livestock husbandry have all helped to undermine further the legitimacy of the productivist technology/policy model. It is partly because of these con- cerns that agriculture in Europe now finds itself subject to greater regu- lation in the environmental sphere. The degree of environmental regu- lation and extent to which farming practices are becoming subject to new environmental restrictions are now such that broader understand-

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ings of agricultural change have to incorporate environmental change and its regulation (see Roberts 1992).

Turning to the British context, in particular, patterns of change on farms are being strongly influenced by new sets of pressures in the post-productivist era that have arisen since the heyday of the technol- ogy/policy model. These can broadly be defined as economic and envi- ronmental pressures. The economic pressures now faced on farms arise directly from the consequences of the technology/policy model in the Fordist regime of accumulation. Accumulation has become concentrat- ed in those sectors of the modern food system both upstream and downstream of the farm such that farmers’ economic position in the food system is being weakened. In turn, agriculture not only receives a shrinking share of total value-added in the food production process, but the nature of farming practice becomes increasingly determined by off- farm interests, either because of the power of input manufacturers to influence patterns of technological change (Munton et aI. 1990) or be- cause food processors and retailers exert pressures through contract purchasing arrangements to determine food quality specifications.

A second set of economic pressures facing British agriculture has aris- en partly as a result of those farm-level strategies fostered during the 1970s and early 1980s. The combination in the 1970s of a production- oriented support policy without constraints on the quantity produced and low real interest rates encouraged high levels of debt-financed in- vestment in agricultural land, machinery and buildings. However, by the mid-1 980s, and following the EC’s attempts to curtail over-produc- tion, farmers who had followed this strategy of business growth became embroiled in a debt trap of rising real interests rates, collapsing land values and falling farm incomes.

At the same time, environmental constraints on British agriculture have begun to mount. These may take the form of formal or informal regulatory practices, although both arise primarily because of the grow- ing demands of consumption interests placed on rural areas. The success of these demands in forcing changes in policy to improve environmental protection has, of course, been facilitated by the loss of public and political support for agriculture. Formal regulations to protect the rural environment in Britain have included the introduction of a straw burn- ing ban, the withdrawal of more persistent agrochemicals and increased hygiene regulations on farms. Some of these regulations have been in- troduced in response to the series of food safety scares that attracted widespread media and public attention in the late 1980s and further helped to undermine confidence in an already beleaguered industry.

The livestock sector has been particularly affected by a range of pollu- tion control regulations aimed at minimizing the risks to ground and surface waters from the disposal of effluents. Pollution control measures

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have required substantial investment in fixed capital equipment on many livestock farms and have become a major source of business uncertainty. For example, a national survey of dairy farmers in Britain in 1991 found that pollution regulation was the most widespread source of concern, with 75 per cent of dairy farmers citing the issue as one of the main problems facing the industry (Centre for Agri-food Business Studies 1991).

It should be added that as well as being subject to restrictions in farming practices because of new environmental policies, farmers are becoming subject to more ‘informal’ regulatory pressures on their own doorsteps too. Social change in the British countryside has been such that the non-agricultural middle classes have moved into smaller villages and settlements in the deep countryside during the 1980s. This trend has been facilitated by flexible working practices, information technology and the liberalization of the planning system. Ironically, farmers them- selves have aided these changes through converting redundant farm buildings for residential purposes. The annual number of conversions rapidly increased during the late 1980s (Kneale et al. 1992), and this has meant that a growing number of farmers now have new neighbours who often have quite different ideas about how the rural environment should be managed. Of sixty dairy farmers surveyed by the author in south- west England in 1991, ten had experienced direct pressure to change their farming practices from neighbours or local people, for example. The farmers felt that social change in the countryside has further dimin- ished their autonomy. This, coupled with greater powers for the author- ities regulating water quality, is beginning to force a rethink over farm enterprise mix and production systems (Ward et al. 1993).

As the technology/policy model of agricultural development associ- ated with the Fordist regime of accumulation has experienced this crisis of legitimacy, and the plausibility of productivist ideology has been undermined, so today’s farmers have found themselves in a very differ- ent world from that of their parents. Shifts in the global political eco- nomic order have been compounded by a changing perception of the purpose of rural areas which includes demands for rural space, recre- ation and conservation.

The treadmill continues to trundle on, however, in part because the productivist rationale or ethos remains prevalent among agriculmral in- terests. This need not necessarily be solely because the technology/pol- icy model served the interests of the agricultural industry (or at least those sections which survived through accumulation) but because the productivist era was characterized by clearly defined goals of expansion and technological ‘progression’ about which there was little disagree- ment. Achieving the goals of producing food for the nation facilitated a sense of pride in the industry. This sense was encapsulated by Sir Derek

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Barber, a committed agriculturalist and former extension agent, in his review of the agriculture-environment debate in Britain. In keeping with the analysis presented here, he argued that to inform current debates about ‘greening’ of agriculture, it was important to examine what hap- pened in the two decades after the Second World War when the “real and sustained attack” on the rural environment took place (Barber 1990, p. 22). Although a passionate and implicated advocate of high-tech farming, Barber’s account of farmers’ experiences during what we might now call the early days of the state-sponsored technology/policy model, does invoke the idea of the treadmill as a ‘way of thinking’ or a set of values on farms. He describes events as follows:

“It was like living on a roller-coaster when day by day something new happened that was designed to make the industry and you more prosperous. No one wanted to get off. When was there ever any excitement in going backwards or standing still? The aspirations - and it is a fair word - thepassions of the husbandman were being fulfilled to the uttermost: and he was being paid for doing his job, ViRUally as never before this century.” (Barber 1990, p. 22, original emphasis)

It is easy to see how under these conditions, new technologies in agri- culture were embraced by farmers. A faith in the powers of technology to solve development problems through the control of nature was, it has been argued, a key feature of the modernist project (Katz and Kirby 1991) and can be identified in a range of economic activities. Burkhardt explains that when it comes to the adoption of new technologies in agriculture:

“as every individual repeatedly makes the same kinds of choices, the treadmill is institutionalised in the larger society. Once institutionalised. increasing technical change may indeed appear inevitable, indeed natural.” (Burkhardt 1992, p. 225)

So the goals and values of farmers can be important, not only in affect- ing action at the individual farm level, but also because they can become institutionalized. Therefore, under new sets of policy conditions emerg- ing after the crisis of the technology/policy model, key research ques- tions arise about the ‘momentum’ of the treadmill. Productivist values and actions may persist on some farms, whilst new strategies are sought on others. In seeking to make sense of new patterns of uneven devel- opment, van der Ploeg (1990) suggests that heterogeneity is a structural feature of agricultural production in both advanced and developing economies. H e emphasizes the need to recognize the central role of farmers’ actions in constructing and reorganizing farming practice. Dif- ferences in farming practice result from differences in farmer strategy, rationality and access to internal and external resources such that the standardized technical artifacts can be used in different ways. Van der Ploeg identified two styles of farming - an intensive style and an exten-

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sive style - and suggests that important determinants of farming style are farmers’ goals or ‘logics’ of production. Particular styles of farming are influenced by “the specific cultural heritage that farmers in a partic- ular locality share which defines how farming ought to be done” (van der Ploeg 1990, p. 31). Applying these models to questions of uneven agro-environmental relations provides a way forward in making sense of post-productivist heterogeneity. Moreover, it helps shift attention away from the simple adoption of particular technologies to how they become adapted and used.

Conclusions

To conclude, the technology/policy model, rooted in the Fordist regime of intensive capital accumulation, entered a crisis of legitimacy in the 1980s, during which the whole rationale of the productivist era has been increasingly called into question. The implications of the shift from the model’s hegemony for agriculture’s relations with the environment are as yet unclear because the move to a ‘post-productivist’ era is not lead- ing to a similarly coherent set of policy goals. A number of factors are implicated here and crucial among these is the state’s withdrawal from its earlier role as the regulator of production and consumption interests more generally. In the agricultural sphere more specifically, neo-conser- vative governments in advanced capitalist states have moved to a greater commitment to the goals of free trade and internationally ‘competitive’ agricultures. At the same time, and in the British context in particular, processes of social and economic restructuring in the countryside have increased the diversity of demands on rural space.

Under this new set of structural conditions, it is quite possible that patterns of agricultural change will become mow rather than less differ- entiated both between and within rural localities. In Britain spatial spe- cificities are likely to become further accentuated because of the emerg- ing plethora of environmental policies. These include the designation of Environmentally Sensitive Areas where income supplements are paid to farmers for maintaining ‘traditional farming practices’ (principally ex- tensive livestock rather than cereal production). Also, in 1989 twelve pilot Nitrate Sensitive Areas were designated in England where farmers can receive payments for carrying out ‘desirable’ nitrate application practices, and these may well provide a precursor for water protection zones in which agricultural practices will be more strictly regulated. So far, however, these schemes have been vofmtury rather than compulso- ry, and so do not represent the dismantling of the technology/policy model for environmental purposes. Indeed, they have been regarded by some environmentalists as a distraction from the task of tackling the prevailing productivist logic (see Baldock, et al. 1990).

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These schemes also raise the question of the possibility of a ‘two- track countryside’ in the British context, as a characteristic of the ‘post- productivist’ era. Under a post-GATT, liberalized international food system and national policy goals of an ‘internationally competitive’ agri- culture, the high technology model of agricultural development could become further intensified. Where the environmental (and, therefore, political) consequences of this model were deemed to be unsustainable, such ‘sensitive’ areas may be spatially delimited and attract environ- mental protection through additional regulation and incentive pay- ments.

The lack of coherence in current policy goals combined with in- creased spatial diversity means that the implications for social action at the farm level, and for agriculture’s environmental relations are consid- erable. Indeed, in particular (sensitive) areas or for particular farming systems (such as, for example, intensive dairying), it may be that ‘regu- latory treadmills’ emerge. In this new context, it is quite plausible that those farm businesses which gained the most from the operations of the technology/policy model in the productivist era (and in doing so, wrought the most damage to the rural environment) will be best placed to withstand increasing regulatory pressures. The prospect of increasing diversity in agriculture represents a challenge to social science research. In order to understand how new sets of regulatory, market and social pressures impact upon farm businesses and households, models will need to be more sensitive to the actions and values of individual actors involved.

Footnotes

1. A draft of this paper was presented at the European Society for Rural Sociology Summer School, University of Trondheim, Norway, 13th-18th June 1992. I would like to thank Fred Butte1 and Richard Munton for their constructive comments.

2. For such empirical purposes, taking the subsumption ideal types as indicative of ‘en- gagement with the treadmill’ does not represent a problematic leap in thinking. I have already argued that widening the terms of reference beyond the uptake of technology to include credit and marketing relations is useful. The subsumption typology also offers the opportunity here to include the transformation of the agricultural labour process and business ownership and management as important elements of this wider transformation.

3. The fourth ideal type - the subsumed enterprises - has been excluded here because only six farms fell into that category, and landscape change data could only be gath- ered for four of them.

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