Agricultural Discourse Research Articles

Gender Perspectives in Agriculture and Livestock Production: Insights from Garo Tribal Farm Households in West Garo Hills: Meghalaya

This study was conducted in two villages situated in the West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya in 2023, focusing on a sample of 60 tribal farm families. Respondents were randomly selected from the selected villages. Statistical analyses were performed using frequencies and percentage. The findings revealed that 80.0% of households had a nuclear family structure, with 61.67% being led by males. Agriculture was the primary occupation of 51.67% of households, and 33.33% reported an annual household income ranging from Rs. 85,001 to Rs. 150,000. Additionally, 78.33% of households possessed areca nut orchards and 60.0% utilized mobile phones for communication. Credit facilities were available to 31.67% of respondents. Regarding information sources, 98.33% of males and 96.67% of females relied on friends and neighbours for agricultural information. Decision-making was reported to be joint in 65.0% of households. Crop harvesting, which was primarily performed by females (55.0%), and the selling of harvests during financial needs, which were handled by males (35.0%) and females (38.33%), were identified as patterns. Revenue management from sales was undertaken by males (36.67%) and jointly (33.33%). In livestock-related decisions, 63.0% reported joint decision-making, and the grazing of animals was managed by children within households (68.33%). For healthcare, 63.33% of independent males consulted the veterinary department during instances of animal disease. Joint decisions were made for the purchase and sale of animals (81.76%). The present findings contribute valuable insights into gender in agricultural discourse, guiding informed and inclusive development in the North East Region. Practitioner Summary: The study was on 60 small Garo tribal farm families actively engaged in both agricultural and livestock activities. Study revealed that women has integral role in agriculture and livestocks then men. Joint decision making in agriculture collaborative farm management, males often takes lead in financial management and certain post-harvest processes.

Binary opposition heaven-earth in Russian and English

In the article, the author explores the semantic behavior of representatives of such fundamental concepts as "heaven" and "earth" in the Russian and English language spaces. This binary opposition, despite its ancient origin, demonstrates both interaction with relevant concepts and a tendency to nominate phenomena of a universal or particular nature. The pragmatics of each lexeme is determined not only by the realization of connotative potential, but also by the projection of actual meanings on a fragment of the universe. It should be noted the priority of differential characteristics that verbalize the functionally demanded spectrum of the semantic field. Each semantic derivative of the sky lexeme is characterized by a set of implication connections motivated by hypo- and hyperonymy phenomena. In the logical and meaningful space of English linguoculture, the concept of "sky" implements the values of the visible space above the earth and the equivalent-the religious name paradise, which illustrates the unification of each case of the development of the original meaning by a sign of height, location in the supramundane space. The linguosemiotic variation of the concept of "earth" in the English language picture of the world is associated with its functioning in topographic, legal and agricultural discourses. In the conceptual sphere of the Russian language, the mental unit of the sky provides information of a religious, spatial, physical or climatic nature, while the earth nominates phenomena of an astronomical, administrative-territorial, linguistic, ideal nature. This behavior of each of the pairs allows us to talk about nomination processes motivated by understanding the processes and phenomena of the universe through the prism of naive consciousness, as well as the desire of the language to use existing lexical units to express as many meanings as possible through association mechanisms.

ENCODING AGRICULTURAL DISCOURSE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF AGRARIAN LITERACY OF FARMERS IN THE MASS MEDIA

Agricultural discourse is the result of conveying a message to increase the agrarian literacy of a community to become agriculturally literate. The goal of this research is to obtain an objective picture about the text structures, social cognition, and social contexts used in the construction of agricultural discourse to establish the agrarian literacy of farmers. The research uses a qualitative method with a symbolic interactionism design to study the way a social interaction is constructed and developed. The data collection methods used were documentation and a content review. The data sources for the research were newspapers and YouTube. The data analysis used a descriptive qualitative method with the stages of identification, classification, and interpretation. The results of the research show that (1) the text structures used to establish agrarian literacy include elements of semantics and syntax, (2) the forms of social cognition utilized by speakers to shape the discourse are person schemes, role schemes, and event schemes, and (3) the social contexts that influence speakers in carrying out encoding are food security and sovereignty, agricultural consultants, and millennial farmers.

Transforming landscapes and mindscapes through regenerative agriculture.

Agriculture occupies 38% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, using 70% of freshwater resources. Its modern practice is dominated by an industrial–productivist discourse, which has contributed to the simplification and degradation of human and ecological systems. As such, agricultural transformation is essential for creating more sustainable food systems. This paper focuses on discursive change. A prominent discursive alternative to industrial–productivist agriculture is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative discourses are emergent, radically evolving and diverse. It is unclear whether they have the potential to generate the changes required to shift industrial–productivist agriculture. This paper presents a literature-based discourse analysis to illustrate key thematic characteristics of regenerative agricultural discourses. The analysis finds that such discourses: situate agricultural work within nested, complex living systems; position farms as relational, characterised by co-evolution between humans and other landscape biota; perceive the innate potential of living systems as place-sourced; maintain a transformative openness to alternative thinking and practice; believe that multiple regenerative cultures are necessary for deeply regenerative agriculture; and depart from industrialism to varying degrees. The paper concludes by reviewing three transformative opportunities for regenerative discourses—discourse coalitions, translocal organising and collective learning.Supplementary InformationThe online version supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10460-021-10276-0.

The Urbanism of Racial Capitalism

AbstractEmerging in British agricultural discourse in the seventeenth century, the term blight moved from agriculture to culture, and so from countryside to city, in the context of the industrializing American city of the early twentieth century. This city housed increasingly large populations of reserve labor and provided increasingly large spaces to accommodate that population. Defined as “blight,” the spaces occupied by reserve labor were expelled from the very system that produced them: those spaces become obstacles to property development, as opposed to products of a disavowed form of de-development. As race has been the principal medium of difference that has legitimized and stabilized the hierarchical social order of industrial capitalism, the management of “blight” also inscribed race in urban space. A long but continuous line therefore connects the political definition of “black”—in terms of an absence of the full rights of persons, from the era of enslavement, through the era of segregation, to the present—with the political definition of “blight” in terms of an absence of full rights to property from the era of urban renewal into present-day austerity urbanism.

You should be slaughtered! Experiences of criticism/hate speech, motives and strategies among German-speaking livestock farmers using social media

Livestock farmers are advised to engage in direct dialogue with consumers. However, attempts to communicate in this way e.g. by farmers using social media have received little academic attention. The present article, based on an online questionnaire conducted in the summer of 2018, provides an explorative insight into the motives, strategies and experiences of criticism of German-speaking livestock farmers with a Facebook business page. The questionnaire reveals that farmers’ motives are not limited to immediate economic objectives. The farmers also aim to provide general information on agriculture and livestock farming. In doing this, they wish to regain the leading role in agricultural discourses and to improve society’s understanding of current agricultural practices with the overall objective of gaining wider societal acceptance of present-day livestock farming. However, the study also makes clear that Facebook is a platform on which farmers are confronted with criticism, and that this criticism can be violent and personally insulting, allowing the diagnosis that livestock farmers are exposed to hate speech. Key words: Descriptive ethics, social media, livestock farming, Facebook, hate speech, food production.

Still searching for (food) sovereignty: Why are radical discourses only partially mobilised in the independent Anglo-Caribbean?

The notion of ‘food sovereignty’ is often surprisingly absent in food and agricultural discourses in the Anglo-Caribbean, where over the past half century policy-making has aligned with conventional ‘food security’ approaches. This paper argues that, in addition to its contemporary entrenchment within a neoliberal environment, this is also due to the nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself in a region which has been shaped by a distinctive colonial, social and economic history. In order to demonstrate this, firstly, it makes the case for why, in the context of rising food imports and enduring structural legacies, food sovereignty matters in the Anglo-Caribbean. Secondly, it charts changes in the regional policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to show how, despite repeated calls to increase self-sufficiency, conventional neoliberal approaches to agricultural development and food security have predominated since the 1970s. Finally, it identifies and analyses limited instances where food sovereignty discourses have been mobilized, by farmers’ groups and political actors, and interrogates the meaning of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sovereignty itself in this post-colonial context. It finds mobilisations of food sovereignty to be characterised by a repeated conflation of domestic food production with the concept’s ideological principles as a political project, and a particular understanding of sovereignty that places an emphasis on ‘the state’ and ‘the region’ over ‘the people’. This shows that the very nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself plays a critical role in both the translation of, and possibilities for mobilising ‘food sovereignty’ as a radical project as envisaged in the wider literature.

Navigating a Tangled Intersection: Agricultural Communication as Public Meeting Space among the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Digital

The growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity within scholarly research offers several affordances, including an opportunity to initiate cross-disciplinary projects. By viewing instances of agricultural discourse in public contexts through a technical communication disciplinary framework, the collection Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics demonstrates how social sciences methodologies reveal such discourse as in fact embodying the digital humanities.

Ideal Coconut Country: Commodified Coconuts and the Scientific Plantation in Pohnpei, Micronesia

ABSTRACT Pohnpeians regard human beings, natural forces, and supernatural forces as equally important agents in the making of their island’s past. Pohnpei’s rapid transition from an island where families maintained only a small number of coconut plantings to one whose 20th century skyline was dominated by coconut palms should therefore draw our attention to the entanglement of human and nonhuman agents that facilitated the growth of the copra trade on Pohnpei at the end of the 19th century. This article focuses on the modern proliferation of coconut trees on Pohnpei, its link to a powerful scientific agricultural discourse, and the coconut’s attendant effects on Pohnpeian relationships and ecology. It argues that Pohnpeians and coconuts, commodified as copra, remade the land and one another as indigenous and foreign visions of the coconut collided.

"Bleed on, blest tree!": Maple Sugar Georgics in the Early American Republic

In the 1790s agricultural improvers in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States began to promote the growth of a domestic maple sugar industry, and their enthusiasm for this regional product resulted in a short-lived "maple sugar bubble" that remains an understudied episode in early American food politics. Not only did these boosters conduct their own maple experiments, but they composed a series of poems, pamphlets, and personal correspondence in support of the movement. Merging the tradition of georgic literature with abolitionist rhetoric, these maple sugar georgics imagined a form of agricultural and economic resistance to the injustices of slavery; thus, they constitute an alternative antislavery georgic that promises to enrich our understanding of the relationship among political discourse, agricultural reform, and artistic production in the early republic. In the maple sugar writings of Benjamin Rush, Tench Coxe, David Humphreys, and Thomas Jefferson, three key aspects of agricultural discourse come to light: its use of the georgic mode to promote economic and ethical agendas; its concern for questions of environmental justice; and its struggle to negotiate factors of environmental and cultural resistance.

From Arturo Escobar's development theory to Antony Giddens's structuration theory: a social constructionist analysis of rural entrepreneurship and multifunctional agriculture

Many research papers in the field of entrepreneurship have gained from a positivistic analytical approach, both in epistemology and methodology. Also there are very limited enquires concerning entrepreneurship in rural areas, or rural entrepreneurship in a new way. Through this paper, using social constructionism as a big paradigm, Antony Giddens's Structuration Theory and Arturo Escobar's Three Component Theory in development deployment, we try to present an explanation of rural entrepreneurship and multifunctional agriculture, as two main discourses in rural regions. The main claim is that it is necessary to shift from positivistic and hegemonic discourse of rural entrepreneurship to socially constructed discourse of agriculture's multifunctionality, through an analytical reversion of Escobar's theory, and using Structuration Theory as a theoretical context.

From Arturo Escobar's development theory to Antony Giddens's structuration theory: a social constructionist analysis of rural entrepreneurship and multifunctional agriculture

Many research papers in the field of entrepreneurship have gained from a positivistic analytical approach, both in epistemology and methodology. Also there are very limited enquires concerning entrepreneurship in rural areas, or rural entrepreneurship in a new way. Through this paper, using social constructionism as a big paradigm, Antony Giddens's Structuration Theory and Arturo Escobar's Three Component Theory in development deployment, we try to present an explanation of rural entrepreneurship and multifunctional agriculture, as two main discourses in rural regions. The main claim is that it is necessary to shift from positivistic and hegemonic discourse of rural entrepreneurship to socially constructed discourse of agriculture's multifunctionality, through an analytical reversion of Escobar's theory, and using Structuration Theory as a theoretical context.

Лингвосемиотическая актуализация знаков агроинженерии в англо- и русскоязычном сельскохозяйственном дискурсе

Лингвосемиотическая актуализация знаков агроинженерии в англо- и русскоязычном сельскохозяйственном дискурсе

Radical Acts of Cultivation:

ABSTRACT Ruth Ozeki structures the narrative of All Over Creation around the cultivation of a transgenic food crop, which provokes a debate exploiting a number of widespread representations of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The article focuses on the anti-GMO rhetoric, which offers a utopian discourse of agriculture clearly embedded within the pastoral convention, with genetic modification techniques represented as an intrusive “machine in the garden” and the mythological figure of the farmer exploited to fit the scope of the American context of the story. Exposing the conventions and mythologies behind the environmentalist narrative against the genetic engineering of plants, Ozeki's text demonstrates how the contrasting anti-GMO utopianism and pro-GMO techno-utopianism are both deeply rooted in the Western tradition, with its cultural and linguistic tendencies to objectify nature and conceptualize it as a female. Examining the value of genetically modified crops to different social groups, Ozeki's narrative accurately represents the complexities surrounding the contemporary practice of agriculture and opens up a discursive space for reformulating the rarely explored human–plant relationship, suggesting that neither kind of utopianism can serve as a conceptual framework for assessing the potential dangers and benefits of the introduction of GMOs into ecosystems and human bodies.

The Secret of Shangri-La: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming Discourse

The Secret of Shangri-La: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming Discourse

Always an outlaw: Daughters-in-law on Australian family farms

Synopsis This article explores the position of women as daughters-in-law on family farms in Australia. The significance of this focus relates to the fact that family farming continues to be the main form of agricultural operation in most western countries. Women typically come to farming through marriage, meaning that most experience being a ‘daughter-in-law’ on a family farm. Drawing on notions of subjectivity, discourse and agency, the article explores the meanings and experiences connected with the identity of ‘daughter-in-law’ on family farms. The article concludes by speculating on how shifts in gender and agricultural discourses may destabilize the traditional identity of ‘daughter-in-law’ within family farming as well as by considering the implications of such a destabilization.

Post‐industrial ‘quality agricultural discourse’: Techniques of governance and resistance in the French debate over GM crops 1

Pendant la periode 1997-2000, la Confederation Paysanne (CP), un syndicat de petits exploitants agricoles francais, a joue un role central dans la politisation du debat francais sur les cultures OGM. Cet article adopte un angle plus large que celui d'une analyse du combat de la CP contre l'agriculture industrielle et post-industrielle. Nous explorons aussi la facon dont les petits exploitants francais, depuis des dizaines d'annees laisses pour compte de l'agriculture industrielle, sont devenus des figures centrales dans la definition des nouvelles notions de qualite agricole dans le contexte national et international. La premiere partie de l'article retrace l'emergence d'un «discours agricole sur la qualit» (DAQ) comme forme de gouvernementalite qui normalise les questions sociales et environnementales associees avec l'agriculture industrielle. La deuxieme partie de l'article analyse la facon dont la CP utilise un QAD en developpant et legitimant leur vision et leur programme social et agricole, dans le cadre du debat francais sur les OGM mais aussi au-dela. Comme nous allons le montrer, alors que la CP pose la culture des OGM comme le symbole d'une agriculture industrielle depourvue d'ancrage territorial, elle etablit la notion de «qualite» comme symbole d'une agriculture enracinee dans la terre. Etudier la campagne anti-OGM de la CP nous permet ainsi de mieux apprecier la facon dont des groupes de petits exploitants, jusque la tenus a l'ecart, s'approprient des techniques de gouvernance pour promouvoir leur propre programme post-industriel.

'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's 'Country Parson' and Early Modern Social Discourse (review)

Reviewed by: Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's 'Country Parson' and Early Modern Social Discourse Kelly Quinn (bio) Ronald W. Cooley . 'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's 'Country Parson' and Early Modern Social Discourse University of Toronto Press. 238. $50.00 A recent review of early modern studies noted unhappily a dearth of studies of single authors; amid such laments, the demise of the book-length [End Page 254] study of a single text would seem to be a foregone conclusion. Ronald W. Cooley's 'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's 'Country Parson' and Early Modern Social Discourse is immediately striking, therefore, for its unusually narrow focus: Cooley takes as his subject George Herbert's relatively slender 1632 pastoral advice manual The Country Parson. Happily, this book is striking also for its intelligent, incisive criticism, and, interestingly, for its remarkable range. Narrowness of focus does not correspond to narrowness of implications; Cooley's thorough, careful examination of The Country Parson's relationship to a panoply of seventeenth-century issues (including the professional, theological, political, agrarian, familial, and literary) amply demonstrates the merits of his approach. Cooley's cautious introduction positions his work within critical and theoretical traditions. He is more consistent in staking out a middle ground than adhering to particular approaches, and offers measured reflections upon critical debates. Some may find him too measured, but he is persuasively judicious and thoughtful rather than indecisive or uncertain. Of particular interest is his treatment of debates about the use of history in literary criticism. Mindful of critiques of literary historicism by David Cressy and others, Cooley is nevertheless unwilling to dismiss the likes of Foucault altogether, and argues, for instance, that The Country Parson seeks to construct the clergy as an instrument of social control. Instead, in the breadth of engagement of 'Full of all knowledg' he aims for a synthetical complement to historically informed criticism focused on more narrowly defined fields of historical inquiry. That is, while from a literary perspective the focus here is narrow, on a single text, from the historical perspective, the focus is broad. These areas of historical inquiry shape the first four chapters of the book; each examines The Country Parson in light of a particular historical issue. The first, on church history, puzzles over the very existence of The Country Parson, written when conformity was demanded but standards were in flux. Rejecting depictions of Herbert as Protestant Everyman, Cooley reads The Country Parson as an audacious, historically specific text, consisting of 'calculated interventions, and potentially risky ones, in a highly charged struggle.' Crucial to that intervention is the construction of the clergy as a profession. Cooley's second chapter examines Herbert's rhetorical strategies, whereby the discourses of the emerging professions of law and medicine are used to validate the professional clergy, but also to present the clergy as superior. The third chapter turns its attention to rural and agricultural discourse; here, Herbert is indebted more to the particulars of Wiltshire than to literary pastoral traditions, offering a view of rural life that reflects, Cooley argues, both disruptions in his personal life and remarkable changes to the countryside. Cooley refutes notions of a nostalgic Herbert, and suggests that The Country Parson bears witness to a conversion to agricultural innovation. For Herbert, the parson is not just [End Page 255] shepherd but also father to his flock, and Cooley's fourth chapter discusses The Country Parson's engagement with patriarchal discourse. The parson, as both God's child and God's representative, embodies a 'simultaneously constrained and delegated authority ... represented as having more power than he really has.' The final two chapters are essentially applied readings. From the start, Cooley rejects the notion that The Country Parson can simply be mined for solutions to interpretive problems in the poems, seeing it instead as the culmination of Herbert's literary development. He does, however, suggest that The Country Parson can illuminate the poems, and his fifth chapter offers what he calls 'enabled readings' of The Temple. These readings are engaging and enlightening; my only concern is that readers might be tempted to mine this chapter alone, which would be unfortunate. The greater significance...

Losing ground: Farmland preservation, economic utilitarianism, and the erosion of the agrarian ideal

The trajectory of the public discourse on agriculture in the twentieth century presents an interesting pattern:shortly after World War II, the manner in which farming and farmers were discussed underwent a profound shift. This rhetorical change is revealed by comparing the current debate on farmland preservation with a tradition of agricultural discourse that came before, known as “agrarianism.” While agrarian writers conceived of farming as a rewarding life, a public good, and a source of moral virtue, current writers on farmland preservation speak of farming almost entirely in utilitarian terms describing its productive capacity and its economic returns. Proponents of farmland preservation use essentially the same underlying framework as critics of preservation:n “economic utilitarian” paradigm that purports to eschew normative values and evaluate land use decisions based on economic criteria only. I argue that, despite their good intentions, farmland preservationists are doomed to piecemeal victories at best, because their arguments, which rely on a utilitarian justification and disregard the agrarian ethic, are inadequate. Without expanding its focus beyond farmland to encompass farming and farmers, the movement risks losing both integrity and effectiveness.

Contested Ground: Colonial Narratives and the Kenyan Environment, 1920–1945

This article focuses on the relationship between the creation of colonial agricultural and environmental knowledge and the exercise of state power in Kenya during a 25 year period that saw growing state dependence on African agriculture and evidence of the environmental costs of policies to expand such production. First, in the context of the political crisis in Kenya, which centred on the alienation of land to white settler farmers, it argues that the language of 'betterment' and 'environmentalism' became part of a bureaucratic apparatus. This, to follow James Ferguson,1 both extended state control more deeply into the Kikuyu Reserves and attempted to depoliticise the issue of land and its distribution. Second, in order to expose the political interests embedded in this construction of state knowledge, the article presents evidence to demonstrate that such knowledge was contested by some scientists within the colonial service. Third, it extends arguments about the reconfiguration of power between coloniser and colonised through the extension of state science by analysing the gendered dimensions of colonial agricultural discourses.