The Language of Farming:
Learning to speak about agriculture with an unbiased tongue
Before January of my senior year in college, I had never spoken with a farmer on a farm. Since I don't imagine I was alone among college students in this regard, I will share some of the lessons I learned from the process of conversing with these men and women. Since the analysis and
observation offered on this page are based only upon my own experiences,
I can make no contention that I present herein the final truth regarding social
interactions with farmers. Nonetheless, I believe these observations
offer valuable insights into the nature of social relations between farmers
and non-farming people like myself.My first contact with a farmer involved in hog-raising overtly made me aware of the delicacy of the territory in which I planned to tread. The email I received from Rusty didn't play games. He asked me if I was indeed genuinely interested in learning about his operation or if I was just planning to use the information to exploit him and the hog-raising industry. Rusty's approach was not a product of personal distrust or paranoia. Rather, it was a learned response, based on past interactions with people professing their interest in environmental welfare. The controversy between environmental interests and hog producers had not passed over Rusty's relatively small operation. He knew that people disagreed with him, but he also had his own side of the story to tell. After I assured him of my real interest in expanding my knowledge of hog-raising practices, he agreed to let me hear his knowledge, stories and wisdom of a life-long hog raiser.
I encountered similar hesitation among other hog-raising farmers upon issuing my request for an interview. I learned over the course of my interviews, that hog raising had raised considerable public debate in Rice Co., particularly on behalf of opinionated individuals from Northfield. Debates of the past over hog-raising practices had not elicited a healthy dialogue between hog-farmers and the primarilly non-agricultural individuals who opposed new practices. Instead, from the farmers' perspective, the opposing citizens had come to the public's attention with their minds already made up. According to one farmer, non-farming citizens went as far as to launch personal attacks against farmers wishing to build new confinement facilities. Consequently, the farmers I spoke with had good reason to approach a young Environmental Studies major such as myself with hesitancy and cynicism about my intentions.
Throughout all my interviews, I noted the importance of taking care in my choice of words. I became aware of the inaccurate
negative connotations involved with terms such as "factory farm" or "industrialized
agriculture." Each of these terms has developed as a sort of buzzword within
the rhetoric of groups opposed to large-scale agriculture. These buzzwords
have in turn spread among the general public without any firm definition accompanying
them. Images of factories and ugly industrialization spring to mind
with their use. Such images may generate negative impressions of agricultural
facilities not at all based on reality. Due to the unfounded aversion
to animal agriculture that terms like "factory farm" and "industrialized
agriculture" induce, farmers are understandably sensitive to their use. Other terms such as "corporatization of agriculture" cause a similar reaction. This is not because farmers believe that corporations do not play a significant role in agriculture. Indeed, the farmers I spoke with possess extensive knowledge regarding the increasing involvement of corporations in agricultural practice. Farmers dislike such terms because they are aware of how these terms have been used and the audience they have been presented to. While "corporatization of agriculture" presents no explicit derision of the practice, farmers know that this term has often been used in a negative way by anti-corporate groups that often condemn conventional farming practices (Mcknight, 1997 p174). In addition to negative usage, phrases such as "corporatization of agriculture" label an idea much more than an actual defined practice. With little knowledge of the details of what is actually happening in agriculture, most people cannot attach a fixed definition to such terminology. Without a clear definition that distinguishes between true corporate takeover of farming operations and a local family adding a new facility or acquiring several hundred new acres, this type of terminology may attach allows it to attach the negative implications of this phrase to any instance in which a family seeks to expand its farming operation.
These conversation taught me the value farmers place on being considered as an individual and not unfairly associated with irresponsible producers. I learned the importance of understanding the complexity of environmental benefits and problems before making judgements. Home