The Contested Futures of UK Farming: Livelihoods, Landscapes and Technologies

This project will analyse how the future is imagined by different actors in the food system through ethnographic research with food producers in the United Kingdom. I will ask 'how do British farmers imagine, plan for and create the future?' and, further, 'how are these plans mediated by the contested futures of different actors in the food system?'. What can the way different imagined futures disappear or materialise tell us about the balance of power in our food system? And, faced by the realities of climate change, how does this friction affect the capacity for British farming to become more environmentally friendly? The ultimate aim of this research is to integrate a better, longer-term understanding of the future into agricultural policymaking by interrogating the environmental viability of different ways of perceiving and practicing the future.

I will conduct extended periods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews within a single farming community. Through prolonged engagement with the embedded experience of others, ethnography offers an excellent way to examine something as slippery as 'the future'. This will involve interacting with a cross-section of different types of farms and farmers within a bounded area. It will be necessary to work with a number of farms of varying output and size in order to develop a nuanced and comparative view of the contested visions of the future different types of farms have. This must include both smaller and larger farms, organic farms and those utilising novel technologies. Interacting with a diverse range of stakeholders in a specific area should allow for the development of a more embedded and ethnographic sense of space, place and time. This qualitative work with these food producers will be supplemented by a reflexive use of future studies research methods like scenario analysis. In addition, I will conduct semi-structured interviews with other stakeholders in the future of UK food production, including policymakers, non-governmental organisations and businesses to examine how broader approaches to the future affect farming communities.