Changing Technologies: Negotiating Autonomy On Cheshire Farms

Agriculture in Britain experienced unparalleled prosperity and stability for much of the post-war period. Political parties and major farming interest groups agreed on the broad objectives of agricultural policy which primarily involved the stimulation of production by providing farmers with access to guaranteed markets, fixed prices and capital grants. Such measures have tended to encourage, the specialisation and regional concentration of production and variable investment in new technologies. However, the 1980s have been a period of increasing economic and political instability for agriculture. On the one hand, farmers have been vulnerable to criticism from environmental and consumer groups. At the same time, real farm incomes have been falling, and whilst other sectors continue to increase their proportion of value added in the food production p Many of the political and economic problems that confront farmers can be attributed to technological change in agriculture. Commentators have focused on the political and economic processes of change in agriculture, but far less attention has been given to the impact of technology on farm-based production in this more recent period. This thesis examines technological change at the national and local level and specifically seeks to address three questions. The first concerns who is involved in the funding and direction of agricultural research and how have these research relations been restructured over the past decade ? The second is how are new technologies circulated from manufacturers to individual farmers, and what implications does technological change hold for these networks ? The third question is how and why do farmers integrate new technologies into farm production and how does this affect farmers’ ability to control farm-based commodity production. These questions are examined using a range of evidence from milk and potato production in Cheshire.