Organic vs. conventional agriculture: knowledge, power and innovation in the food chain1

Geoforum 31 (2000) 159±173

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Organic vs. conventional agriculture: knowledge, power and innovation in the food chain Kevin Morgan *,1, Jonathan Murdoch Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardi€ University, P.O. Box 906, Cardi€ CF1 3YN, UK Received 24 September 1998; in revised form 28 April 1999

Abstract In this paper we examine the way that knowledge is distributed within economic networks. Adopting a broad evolutionary approach we examine the distribution of economic knowledge within two food chains: the conventional food chain, which relies on intensive inputs into the food production process, and thus tends to distribute knowledge towards input suppliers, and the organic food supply chain, which distributes knowledge back towards the farm as farmers must relocalise their understandings of the production process. We present two stylised accounts of each chain and show that for farmers to move from one to the other they must forget many of the practices so characteristic of the conventional chain in order to (re)learn how to farm in an ecologically benign fashion. In the organic chain, we argue, farmers can once again become ``knowing agents''. Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Evolutionary theory; Knowledge; Innovation; Agriculture; Organic

1. Introduction References to the ``learning organisation'', the ``knowledge-based economy'' and the ``information society'' have become commonplace in recent years. For the most part these references are used to signal, in shorthand fashion, the accelerating pace of technological change, the superannuation of existing skill sets, the trend towards more knowledge-intensive goods and services and the heightened need for innovation in the broad Schumpeterian sense of product, process and institutional innovation. Along with attendent political and economic changes ± like the liberalisation of na-

*

E-mail address: morgank@cardi€.ac.uk (K. Morgan). This paper emerges from a research project ± Organic Supply Chains in Wales ± funded by the Welsh Oce, the Development Board for Rural Wales, the Welsh Development Agency and West Wales Training and Enterprise Council. The material presented here derives from the secondary analysis of agriculture and food conducted for the project. It contains no new primary data and the literature and documents reviewed are fully referenced. We are grateful for the support of the organisations mentioned above organisations as well as our collaborators on the project, Jo Banks and Terry Marsden. We would also like to thank Richard Cowell, Carolyn Foster, Nick Lampkin, Ann Latham, Suzanne Padel and Neil Ward for their help with this paper. 1

tional regulatory regimes, the growth of global markets and the advent of new networks of inter-dependence ± these trends have created unprecedented levels of risk and uncertainty for capital, labour and public authorities, so much so that past practice becomes a less reliable guide to future action. In this paradoxical world, in which information overload co-evolves with growing uncertainty, it is perhaps not surprising that some theorists claim that knowledge is now the most important economic resource and learning the most important process (Lundvall and Johnson, 1994). In order to understand the growing centrality of knowledge to economic activity we ®rstly need to consider the composition of knowledge itself. Following Lundvall and Johnson (1994) we can identify at least four kinds of knowledge that are relevant here: know-what: this is close to what is normally called ``information'' and it largely consists of knowledge of ``facts''; know-why: this refers to scienti®c knowledge of principles and laws of motion and this has been important in for technological change in certain ®elds, in chemicals and electronics for example. The reproduction of know-why is often organised in specialised organisations, principally universities, and ®rms need to interact with these organisations to access this kind of knowledge;

0016-7185/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 7 1 8 5 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 2 9 - 9

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know-how: this refers to skills, the capability to do something, and it is typically the kind of knowledge that is developed within ± and jealously guarded by, individual ®rms. However, as the complexity of the knowledge-base increases, ®rms increasingly need to interact with other organisations to keep abreast of know-how trends; know-who: this kind of knowledge has become more important with the growing complexity of the knowledge-base and it essentially refers to social skills. Know-who involves information about who knows what, and who knows how to do what, etc. Most importantly, it involves the social skills which enable individuals and organisations to gain access to the know-how of others, which is extremely important when know-how skills are so widely dispersed. The ®rst observation to make of these four components of economic knowledge is that they are, by and large, forged within particular institutional structures which are themselves embedded in wider sets of economic, social and political relations. And, because knowledge is bound into institutions, it is unevenly distributed. We should say at the outset that, in our view, to theoretically understand this distribution of economic knowledge we need something more than neoclassical economics which assumes, erroneously, that ®rms have access to near perfect information, and that, therefore, knowledge acquisition is no problem. In mainstream neo-classical theory all agents are assumed to be equally capable of optimising because economic competence (broadly de®ned to mean problem-solving skills) is assumed to be relatively abundant. In practice, however, it appears that there are signi®cant variations in ®rms' knowledge bases and major di€erences in their capacity for creating knowledge from within and for absorbing it from without. Thus the neoclassical approach fails to account for the uneven distribution of knowledge. Yet, the uneven distribution of economic competence is evident in the wide variations in corporate behaviour and performance, and relatedly, in the slow di€usion of organisational forms within and between sectors, regions and countries (Coriat and Dosi, 1994). In the light of this shortcoming in the neo-classical paradigm we think it appropriate to turn, instead, to a theoretical approach which put learning and innovation at the centre of analysis, that is, evolutionary political economy. Moreover, in this paper we wish to apply the evolutionary approach to a sector that has normally lain outside such analyses, that is agriculture and food. We believe that the enormous changes that have swept through the food sector in the post war period have, to a marked degree, been promoted and aided by the intensive application of science, technology and logistics. Thus, the evolutionary approach it proposed might allow us to study such changes in

ways that highlight the application of knowledge to the production of food and in what follows we examine food chains as evolutionary networks. We study two ``ideal type'' networks: the standardised networks of industrialised food production and the more tacit networks of organic methods of production. We counterpose the two in the hope that they reveal some of the key processes driving the food system while also highlighting how these might be altered or ameliorated. 2. The evolutionary approach The evolutionary approach can focus on knowledge for it sees the ®rm as a repository of productive knowledge, a vehicle for continuous learning and knowledge-creation, operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Evolutionary political economy advances a number of key propositions about the innovation process which help us to understand the distribution and evolution of knowledge. The ®rst concerns the signi®cance of bounded rationality, which suggests that the world is far too complex for agents to understand perfectly, hence the need to acknowledge ``the inevitability of mistaken decisions in an uncertain world'' (Winter, 1988). All innovation, as Dosi (1988, p. 222) puts it, involves a ``fundamental element of uncertainty''. Secondly, it is argued that economic behaviour is guided and constrained by a wide array of habits and routines, the implication being that agents cannot be reduced to the dessicated calculating machines of neoclassical theory (Hodgson, 1997). One of the ``founding fathers'' of the evolutionary approach put it succinctly when he observed that ``all knowledge and habit once acquired become as ®rmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth'' (Schumpeter, 1934). This means that market forces, like price signals, may not be sucient to induce agents to change their routines as readily as neo-liberal policies tend to assume. The durability of routines, which make for regular and predictable behaviour, is associated with the third proposition, namely that technological change within the ®rm is a cumulative and path-dependent process: what a ®rm hopes to do technologically in the future is conditioned by what it has been capable of doing in the past (Dosi, 1988). While this proposition is generally applicable, it needs to be quali®ed where radical discontinuities are involved, as we shall argue below. The fourth proposition concerns the nature of knowledge, particularly the role of tacit knowledge, which has been de®ned simply but e€ectively as ``we can know more than we can tell'' (Polanyi, 1966). In contrast to codi®ed knowledge, which is explicit,

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standardised and easily transferable, tacit knowledge is often personal and context-dependent, and as such, it is dicult if not impossible to communicate other than through personal interaction in a context of shared experiences, and this seems to set a premium on physical (as opposed to virtual) proximity for transactions that involve a strong tacit dimension. Indeed, the need to exploit relatively immobile pockets of tacit knowledge is now being invoked, in conjunction with other untraded interdependencies, to help explain the persistence of territorial agglomerations in core regions of the world economy (Malmberg and Maskell, 1996; Storper, 1997). Taking these four propositions together we can see that economic knowledge emerges within sets of bounded relations, embedded in particular socio-economic forms which are constrained by their trajectories of development. Moreover, the four types of knowledge outlined above ± know-what, know-why, knowhow and know-who can be further re®ned into two main types: standardised (or codi®ed) knowledge and tacit (or local, context-dependent) knowledge. Thus, not only are economic agents situated in particular bounded contexts but these contexts will be con®gured and recon®gured by the combining of standardised and tacit knowledge forms. In fact, Storper (1996, p. 263 & 264) discerns ``two active forces tugging in di€erent directions'' in terms of the dispersal of knowledge: standardisation which ensues as large ®rms disseminate an ``internationally recognised matrix of rules'' while the technologies sold by such ®rms require ``abstract, codi®ed and reproducible. . . representations'' in order to move from locale to locale; tacit or local knowledge which emerges in a rather unplanned and unforseeable fashion as bounded actors evolve ways of doing things in local situations which are context dependent. Often the two knowledge forms are in an acute tension for standardised forms seek to con®gure economic behaviour in a range of contexts while ``local groups of people are constantly redi€erentiating their practices and relations at the same time that rounds of bureaucratic `standardisation' sweep over them'' Storper (1996, p. 263 & 264). This ``tug-of-war'' between standardised or codi®ed forms of knowledge and more local, context-speci®c tacit knowledge shapes that the geographical distribution of knowledge. If knowledge ± both codi®ed and tacit ± is becoming more central to economic endeavour because of technological change and the increasing knowledgeintensity of production then we must link the role of these knowledge ``types'' to changing institutional forms. In particular, in this paper, we are interested in how knowledge becomes distributed within ``networks''. Networks are forms of organisation in which knowledge is in, some sense, ``strung out'' along a chain of actors and organisations (for instance, be-

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tween scienti®c laboratories, ®rms and ``bridging institutions'' ± Freeman, 1982).2 Moreover, knowledge plays a key role in binding networks together. According to Murdoch (1998), knowledge in networks can be either prescriptive or negotiative: that is, the network links can be cast in forms which ensure that agents and nodes are forced to conform to the precepts of the entire network ± as with standarised knowledge forms ± or in forms which rely on some degree of local autonomy. Thus, as networks emerge or change so the knowledge held by the various participants is likely to be redistributed and this redistribution will be governed, in part, by the degree to which knowledge is standardised or open to negotiation in local situations. This distinction between standarised or codi®ed and tacit or negotiative knowledge forms focuses our attention on the various forms of ``coercion'' and ``co-operation'' which determine both the links between economic entities and the ability of those entities to innovate and acquire knowledge. In short, we must pay heed to the power relations which permeate all networks (Murdoch, 1995). However, in discussing power we should emphasise that power does not simply equate with coercion for the links in networks are frequently forged by co-operation even though the terms of this cooperation may be biased in favour of the stronger party. Power relations in networks are thus likely to be consolidated by some mixture of coercion and consensus. This is evident, for instance, in the recent concern with trust in economic life: it is now widely believed that, to be truly e€ective, networks need to have secured a degree of trust among the participants because, of itself, coercive power cannot guarantee that the weaker parties will be fully integrated into the network. In his pioneering study of work, power and trust, Alan Fox comes to the conclusion that the low-trust syndrome imposes severe limitations on collaboration (Fox, 1974). Moreover, degrees of trust and coercion will determine the extent to which knowledge is rendered either standardised or tacit, with low-trust relations leading to highly codi®ed forms of knowledge while high-trust relations result in high levels of tacit knowledge. There is, there2

Our reason for concentrating on networks here is that such institutional forms are particularly well suited to integrating the diverse institutional sources of knowledge so evident in modern economies (Dosi, 1988). Because markets tend to be too di€use and anonymous, and hierarchies too narrow and bureaucratic, to cope with a complex and rapidly evolving knowledge base, a good deal of strategic knowhow is increasingly being developed in and through networks, a governance mechanism which is more open and ¯exible than hierarchies, but not as loose and impersonal as markets (Powell, 1990; Freeman, 1991; Cooke and Morgan, 1993; Foray and Lundvall, 1996). In this perspective the capacity to innovate depends less on the ®rm as a discrete agent and more on the network of which the ®rm is a member.

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fore, a dialectical relationship between power and knowledge in networks. In the following sections we propose to examine how knowledge is bound into networks through an analysis of the role of agricultural knowledge in two (apparently) very di€erent food chains: the industrial food chain which is based on intensive agricultural production and the organic food chain which is based on more sustainable agricultural practices. We show that in the industrialised conventional chain farmers' knowledge tends to be rendered into codi®ed and standardised forms while in the organic chain there is increased scope for local, tacit forms of agricultural knowledge. The comparative analysis of agriculture in the two chains or networks thus illustrates the ``tug of war'' which takes place between standardised and tacit knowledge. In both cases knowledge is (re)distributed up and down the food chain in (consensual and coercive) relations of power and we trace these redistributions. However, before turning to our case studies we brie¯y examine why the issue of knowledge has been largely ignored in the food sector. 3. Knowledge, agriculture and food Discussions of economic knowledge have often bypassed agriculture and food production, giving the impression that little innovation and knowledge application is going on in this sphere. Limits to the application of knowledge in the food sector are generally seen as deriving from the ``laws of nature'' which play such a prominent role in this particular production process (Fine and Leopold, 1994). Thus the major innovations in production, processing and retailing that have so changed the food sector almost beyond recognition in the post war period have laregly been ignored by those concerned with the knowledge-based economy. Even when aspects of the transformation of food are recognised it is still often assumed that agriculture lies outside the contemporary application of knowledge in the food production process. Primary agriculture seems to enshrine a set of unique features, such as subservience to nature, extensiveness in space and the biological cycles of crop and livestock production, which resist incorporation into a single industrialised process along the whole length of the food chain. Thus, it is frequently assumed that while great changes in the processing and manufacture of food have taken place, farming has retained many of its traditional characteristics (such as a large number of small producers, family-based enterprises, and so on). Again, the assumption that agriculture enshrines clearly de®ned limits to industrialisation has constrained its investigation as a knowledge-based activity. Yet, while agriculture undoubtedly retains many traditional features, the relationship between farmers and other actors in the food system has changed

markedly in recent years. However, the food production process at the farm level has changed selectively and incrementally and though these changes may add up to something amounting to an agricultural revolution, this revolution has occurred while keeping some essential structures ± e.g. large numbers of family based producers ± intact. Nevertheless, recent work on the place of agriculture in the food system does open out scope for its analysis as a knowledge-production process. To cite just one example here, Goodman et al. (1987) show that the natural and organic constraints in agriculture are not ®xed, although such constraints have made agriculture, as a land based activity, unattractive to the direct involvement of industrial capital (see also Whatmore, 1994). They clearly show that this situation does not imply that agriculture has remained outside the industrialisation process which has so integrated many elements in the food chain: as Commins, in a commentary on their work, says: ``unable to overcome the constraints involved ± and thus unable to devise a uni®ed production process as a branch of industrial production ± industrial capitals have responded by taking over selective elements of the production chain and transforming them into industrial activities'' Goodman and Redclift (1990, p. 50) see the industrialisation of agricultural production taking place in a steady and incremental fashion so that farm commodities are increasingly being produced by non-agricultural raw materials or industrial substitutes such that this aspect of food production accounts for a steadily rising proportion of value added to farm products. Commins (Goodman and Redclift, 1990, p. 50) thus says that ``whereas farmers occupy a physically indispensable link in the chains of production, the control of the conditions of production has moved towards external capital. In this way, primary agriculture becomes integrated into an agri-industrial complex''. According to Goodman et al. (1987) the industrialisation process has been driven by two imperatives: ®rstly, appropriationism in which elements once integral to the agricultural production process are extracted and transformed into industrial activities and then sold back to agriculture as ``inputs''; secondly, substitutionism in which agricultural products are reduced ®rst to an industrial input and increasingly replaced by manufactured non-agricultural components. As these two imperatives have been pushed within increasingly consolidated food networks so the structure of the food sector has been transformed with increasingly large scale industrial units found both upstream and downstream of the farm. The farm itself, however, has remained a permanent feature of an otherwise transformed food chain: as Goodman and Redclift (1990, p. 20) put it, family farming has shown an extraordinary capacity ``to adapt to, and incorporate, technological innovations

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without losing its fundamentally `family' basis''. Thus the agricultural labour process and agricultural property relations have withstood the industrial transformation of the food sector. These are the general process of transformation deemed to be operating up and down food chains and networks. In this paper we wish to emphasise the role of knowledge in the recon®guration of food chains for appropriationism and substitutionism tend to result in a standardisation of knowledge, thus displacing farmers' local knowledge. While local variation and di€erentiation are still evident in agriculture these can be seen, in van der Ploeg's (1992, p. 21) terms, as responses to ``dominant tendencies and relations containing an undeniable `blueprint' for standardisation''. In Section 4, we outline the main constituents of the ``blueprint for standardisation'' as we focus on the changing knowledge bases of farmers as the processes of appropriation and substitution play themselves out in the UK food sector during the post war period. In Section 4 we illustrate how farmers might use local knowledge as a response to such processes. 4. The conventional model of agricultural development and food production In this section, we investigate some of the key changes that have taken place in the food chain as they have a€ected farms. In particular we are interested in the role of farming or farmers' knowledge in the conventional food chain. We seek to investigate how farmers have been positioned in networks of food production which have been subject to a sustained period of industrialisation and standardisation, where farms have found themselves squeezed between mighty input suppliers and ever more mighty supermarkets. We present here an especially stylised account of the emergence of industrialised food networks in the UK during the post war period and concentrate on relations established between farmers and upstream input suppliers in order to show how knowledge was redistributed away from the farm in the conventional food production network. The conventional model of ``productivist'' agriculture was ®rmly established in the UK by the 1940s. This model has three main components: ®rstly, an economic and strategic rationale, given in this case by food shortages in the wartime and post war period; secondly, political commitment and administrative authority, again, given by the exigencies of wartime when a large bureaucratic structure came into existence to galvanise farmers into increasing output (this was continued into the post war period when, in the face of food shortages and the requirements of the Marshall Plan, the British state undertook to give farmers sus-

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tained assistance)3, thirdly, technological innovation aimed at increasing output and productivity. A number of innovations developed during the interwar period were a the point of application in the post war period. As Ward (1994, p. 62) puts it: ``Agricultural science and the production of new technologies were placed at the heart of the new development model''. These three components of the model were entwined within the 1947 Agriculture Act, a cornerstone of post war policy. The Act provided guaranteed markets and prices for the main agricultural commodities. But there was a price to be paid for such support: farmers were expected to maximise eciency and maximise value for taxpayers money. These aspects of state support became even more pronounced from the 1950 onwards when the Treasury sought to limit the amount of expenditure in agriculture by pushing farmers into eciency gains: thus farmers came under considerable pressure to adopt the most productive technologies available in order to keep their costs down.4 Eciency came very quickly to mean the application of the new agricultural technologies which were beginning to emerge onto the market in the early post war years. Encouraged by the degree of political and ®nancial commitment to the industry, many agricultural supply ®rms began to invest heavily in the research and development of new agricultural technologies. Many of these had been developed in the inter-war period but it now began to appear that a mass market for the products of these ®rms might be emerging. With the subsides going into agriculture farmers had both the security and the ®nance to invest in new technologies. And as farmers began to invest in technologies that would increase yields and productivity so the rest would have to follow in what has been called the ``treadmill e€ect'', i.e. as certain farmers gain productive advantages output increases and prices fall, other farmers are therefore forced to follow to keep their costs down. In the rest of this section we illustrate these processes through the case study of chemicals in the arable sector. This is a useful examples for a shows how farms became selectively incorporated into the process of industrialisation. It also highlights the displacement of local, tacit agricultural 3

Ward (1994, p. 61) quotes a Treasury ocial who in a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1945 stated that: ``the prospect of a dollar shortage has created the greatest opportunity for British agriculture that has occurred in a time of peace for a hundred years. [We] are now in a position where agriculture will be under ®re for not expanding enough. In these circumstances the time may come when certain advances which have hitherto been regarded as visionary may become practical politics''. These sentiments vividly capture the mood of the times. 4 It was this aspect of agricultural development which ensured that labour was lost in large numbers from the industry as labour-saving, productivity boosting technologies were utilised. Full-time agricultural workers declined by 600,000 between 1950 and 1980, a fall of 70%.

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knowledge by standardised technological knowledge (that is, know-how was replaced by know-what). By the 1940s one of the key innovations in the arable sector was the potential use of chemicals in combating both weeds and pests. Organic chemistry was thus starting to play a large role in agricultural innovation as it held the potential to provide a range of useful agrochemicals which might increase the output of all the main arable commodities. The development of agrochemical farming was promoted by a network of public and private institutions, including as the Agricultural Research Council, the Weed Research Organisation, the British Weed Control Council, the National Agricultural Advisory Service [the agricultural extension service], the main agro-chemical suppliers and the chemical companies. In the context of the priorities accorded to eciency and productivity, the application of chemicals to arable crops held the potential to drastically improve output, while promising the elimination of main pests and weeds (Dunlap, 1981). It is clear that this network of chemical promoters was extremely e€ective during the early post war years: during the 1950s 140 new agro-chemical products were introduced (85 insecticides, 35 herbicides and 20 fungicides); during the 1960s a further 256 new chemical applications came on to the market (110 herbicides, 96 insecticides and 50 fungicides), and in the 1970s, 202 (70 herbicides, 60 insecticides and 42 fungicides) were added. Not surprisingly, during this period the number of crop sprayers on British farms rose very quickly, from 3 455 in 1946 to 50 000 by 1959 up to 90 000 by the end of the 1970s. By 1982 over 31 000 ton of active ingredients of pesticide were being applied to almost 4 million hectares. And this level of application was of course evident in the production and sales of agro-chemicals: for instance, between 1948 and 1982 total sales of pesticides in the UK rose from £70 to £542 million, an almost 8-fold increase (Ward 1994). And output soared: before 1939 the average yield of wheat was just 2 ton per hectare; by the 1980s this stood at 6 ton per hectare and it was estimated that about half this increase was due to improvements in the use of agro-chemicals (Stanley and Hardy, 1984). The growing importance of herbicides and pesticides in crop production changed farming practice considerably. For instance, before the availability of herbicides weed populations were kept under control through the use of crop rotations so that no one weed species could bene®t from a consistently favourable environment. By the late 1940s, arable farmers had generally reached a high level of weed control using rotations and until the 1950s herbicides were usually incorporated into existing husbandry systems. However, during the 1960s herbicides began to be used as part of a more fundamental change in crop husbandry. Because they could now be employed to kill o€ weeds on a large scale, they enabled

farmers to grow a succession of crops without using either rotations or traditional techniques such as ploughing. Seed could simply be drilled directly onto the previous crop. As a result by the late 1960s rotation was considered ``old fashioned'' with many farmers believing that they could have ``an almost complete freedom of cropping as far as weed control was concerned'' (Elliot 1980 quoted in Ward 1994, p. 78). Moreover, the types of arable crops that were grown changed as more farmers began to grow winter sown wheat and barley, a move made possible by pesticides. According to Ward (1994, p. 81): ``the thirty years from 1950 to 1980 saw a chemical revolution in British agriculture. Production practices were transformed and the use of pesticides in general. . . became the mainstay of arable crop production''. This revolution put agriculture on a particular trajectory of development, one linked to the continuous application of innovatory technologies aimed at increasing output and productivity. And this trajectory was pushed by an interlocking network of actors: ``The network included the state ± which wanted to contain the costs of price support by encouraging improvements in agricultural eciency; the agricultural scientists from both the public and private sectors ± whose role it was to produce the new chemicals and the optimal means of applying them; and agro-industrial capitals ± including those farmers prepared to adopt, modernise and accumulate, and the manufacturers of agro-chemicals and spraying machines who saw their markets and profits grow'' (Ward (1994, p. 81). Each of these actors seemingly gained by the pursuit of eciency through chemical applications on crops. However, at this point we return to our key concern and ask what of the farmers? In particular, what happened to the farmers' knowledge base during this chemical revolution? Before the advent of herbicides and pesticides, farmers usually had an intimate knowledge of their land holdings, its fertility, composition and so on through the practices of rotation and ploughing. Because arable farming followed the rhythms of nature, farmers' knowledge was also attuned to these rhythms. Knowledge was localised; it was intimately tied to the farm and the local ecosystem. While the same principles of husbandry were widespread, they were di€erentially applied according to local circumstances. With the widespread use of chemicals however, the relationship between the farm and the local ecosystem was to some considerable extent disrupted. Rotations and ploughing were no longer the main means of ®ghting weeds and pests; chemicals now ful®lled that role. And the application of chemicals need not be attuned to local circumstances;

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simple instructions about application were all that were needed. Thus the tacit knowledge which had been established from farm to farm, whereby the farmer used his or her intimate knowledge of the land, acquired over generations, gave way to the standardised, codi®ed knowledge accompanying chemical sprays. This shift in the form of knowledge also had other social and economic consequences for farmers came to rely not on their own intimate knowledge of the farm, but on external sources of advice on chemical application. As innovations in herbicides and insecticides accelerated during the post war period, and more and more versions of the sprays came onto the market, so farmers were confronted with a bewildering array of complex chemical compounds; choosing between these compounds became a specialised task. Thus farmers soon came to rely upon crop protection advice from o€ the farm. This advice came from a number of sources but there is some evidence that the most common source was the agro-chemical companies themselves. In a survey of 60 farmers in the Bedford Ouse catchment, conducted during the early 1990s, Ward (1995) found that the most frequently used advice came from the manufacturers of farm chemicals, mainly because their advice is free. And, despite the close tie between advisor and company, farmers seemed to abide by the instructions coming from such advisors. While many farmers saw this advice, in general, as likely to be biased in favour of over-use of the chemicals, they tended to see their own advisors as ``trustworthy''; many said they had built up good relations over the years and perceived the advisor to be ``on their side'' in the ®ght against weeds and insects (an element of know-who was still important therefore).5 This story of chemical use on farms illustrates the trend for farms to be incorporated into an industrial food chain in a very selective fashion. Ownership of the farm remains unchanged but the practice of farming becomes transformed. Moreover, this transformation redistributes knowledge within the chain. Local, tacit knowledge is gradually replaced by standardised and codi®ed forms. Commenting on this general process, van der Ploeg (1992, p. 21) says ``agriculture is increasingly disconnected from those structuring elements that initially introduced speci®city into it''. Part of this speci®city is wrapped up in the local and tacit knowledge that linked farming practice to local ecosystems. As

5 Farmers of course use other sources of advice on sprays: some use agricultural advisory services while others use chemical ``brokers'' i.e. private contractors who will act on behalf of the farmer to select the most appropriate combination of sprays for the farm and its crops. Such advisors are usually agronomist, specialising in agro-chemicals, and have an intimate knowledge of both new innovations in the chemicals market and their application in a local/regional area. Such brokers also act to disseminate innovations amongst farmers.

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standardised innovations such as chemicals come into use, so agricultural practice is disconnected from local ecosystems and the knowledge required to manage these. And as these standardised packages are disseminated throughout farming, so a locally embedded, craftbased activity becomes replaced by a set of uniform and spatially standardised procedures. Thus agricultural knowledge becomes a property of the large and powerful institutions which lie upstream (and downstream) of the farm. In Britain four multinational companies control over 60% of the agrochemical market (by the late 1980s ICI had 19%, Schering 16%, Monsanto, 18% and Bayer 18%). These ®rms have succeeded in substituting their products for a host of localised and di€erentiated practices. And this process continues for such ®rms not only dominate the agro-chemicals market, they increasingly control seed and plant genetic research. They seek to create more re®ned agricultural ``packages'' which combine fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and plants. Thus, farmers will increasingly be forced to buy a range of interlocking products from one company and it is likely that they will know as much about this range of products as they currently do about chemicals. Ultimately, farmers will ®nd that their local knowledge bases become replaced by specialised and commodi®ed agricultural inputs. In short, as the market for scienti®cally derived agricultural inputs has grown so forms of local and tacit agricultural knowledge have diminished. It is perhaps arguable that while the conventional model of agricultural development was working smoothly ± producing ever and ever greater quantities of cheap food with few noticeable side-e€ects ± then farmers could a€ord to trade local knowledge for increased output. However, as the conventional model has moved into crisis so the vulnerability of farmers becomes more apparent. The crisis stems from three main sources: ®rst, the escalating cost of agricultural support (often employed to produce surplus food); second, profound worries about the quality of food, and thirdly, the visibility of environmental externality e€ects. As farm output has increased so has the cost of price subsidies (given that the state still e€ectively guarantees markets even when food cannot be sold) and this has led to calls for reform of agricultural policy (now under the CAP). At the same time, a number of food scares ± notably concerning pesticide residues, salmonella, E. coli and most seriously, BSE ± have undermined con®dence in modern systems of production. However, as far as the increased use of chemicals is concerned, it is the emerging problem of pollution which is perhaps most serious. Of particular concern here is the recently recognised presence of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers in water courses. In 1992 the Drinking Water Inspectorate found 33 di€erent pesticides in British water supplies (Ward 1994), and it has recently been estimated that the cost to taxpayers of

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regulating and removing pesticides from drinking water runs at £121 million a year on top of an initial investment of £1000 million (Soil Association 1996a). Problems such as these have led to some anxiety about the trajectory of the conventional agricultural model. There is increasing pressure to reform the political structure which underpins this model, and concern that the food supply chain needs greater regulation so that the whole system of production is ``cleaned up''. While, at the present time, it is unclear whether this regulation will be undertaken by the state (i.e. the new Food Standards Agency) or by private interest regulators (such as the supermarkets which are now so dominant in the food chain ± see Flynn et al., 1991), it seems likely that there will be increased pressure on farmers to change their systems of production. And, as Winter (1997, p. 369±70) emphasises, under any new model of food production ``farmers will need new knowledge and skills''. However, as should be clear from the above, farmers are not particularly well placed to e€ect such changes. They have become dependent upon external, standardised, codi®ed forms of knowledge and have lost many of the traditional local, ecosystem-sensitive forms of knowledge which might have served them well in a new agricultural era. In Section 5 we examine some of the problems which now confront those farmers who seek to move from one agricultural model to another and we examine how they might reconstitute their knowledge bases in order to make this move. 5. An alternative model: the organic food chain In our view, the principles and standards employed in organic production constitute a radical break with the productivist paradigm which informs the industrial food chain. According to the Soil Association, one of the main independent regulatory bodies in the UK, certi®ed organic farming practices are those which: (i) co-exist with, rather than dominate, natural systems; (ii) build soil fertility; minimise pollution and damage to the environment; (iii) minimise the use of non-renewable resources (i.e. no chemicals); (iv) ensure the ethical treatment of animals; (v) protect and enhance the farm environment and (vi) consider the wider social and ecological impact of agricultural systems. To ensure that producers and processors adhere to stringent standards the organic food chain is subject to much greater regulation than the industrial food chain, hence anyone producing, preparing or packaging organic food was encouraged to register with one of the independent bodies approved by the UK Register of Organic Food Standards (UKROFS), which was established at the behest of MAFF in 1987 to set uni®ed standards for the UK market. Since 1993, however, all organic agricultural produce has been regulated by the

European Commission and the hitherto voluntary UKROFS scheme is now mandatory, with the result that UKROFS has been transformed into a designated inspection authority charged with policing the EC scheme either alone or in conjunction with approved certifying bodies like the Soil Association, which certi®es around 70% of organic foods in the UK. But certi®cation varies widely around the world: in the US, for example, only a third of the 15 000 organic farmers have certi®ed products. The main point to note about these regulatory regimes, however, is that they are recent creations: the EU regime for agricultural foodstu€s only came into e€ect in 1993, while federal (as opposed to state) regulations were issued as recently as December 1997 in the US. In other words, the regulatory rules of the game are still unfolding, still being contested and therefore still liable to change, all of which compounds the problems of risk and uncertainty which have played such a major role in preventing farmers from going organic.6 Despite these uncertainties the organic market has been growing rapidly in recent years, stimulated in the main by the rash of health scares in the industrial food chain and a growing concern for animal welfare, environmental integrity and ``ethical'' products. The market for organic produce in the UK has nearly doubled in the two years since 1995 and in 1997 it was estimated to be worth some £260 million. Imports account for some 70% of the UK market because domestic organic production is so small, with just 870 organic farms in the UK out of a total of 100,000, equivalent to a mere 0.3% of farmed land, which compares poorly to 7% in Austria and 3% in Germany (Mintel, 1997). While the market looks set for robust growth in the years ahead, this alone is no guarantee that UK farmers will be able or willing to commit themselves to the enormous task of converting to a radically new set of practices, given what we said in section one about the powerful role of habits and routines in economic calculation. These habits and routines are more deeply embedded in farms than in ®rms because farming is not just a business but a ``way of life'', embodied in which is a set of practices that has been underwritten by a subsidy regime without parallel in scale or scope in other sectors. With the reform of the 6 Despite the seemingly uncontroversial nature of these precepts, the de®nition of ``organic'' has been the subject of prolonged and heated debates around the world, especially as between a narrow and pragmatic de®nition, which merely prohibits certain inputs, and a broader, more purist de®nition, which sets a premium on the wider social and ecological processes involved, including decentralised marketing, which would seem to rule out transactions with supermarkets. Far from being a trivial semantic issue, the organic label is set to become a political battleground as the market grows, particularly in the US, where large agri-chemical and bio-technology companies are lobbying the regulatory authorities to allow genetically-modi®ed organisms to trade under the organic name.

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CAP, however, intensive farming practices may not be a viable option for many farmers in the future, and this may make some farmers more receptive to new, more sustainable practices (Winter, 1997). Although it is rarely treated as such, organics constitutes what the evolutionary literature on technological change might call a ``radical innovation'' (Dosi et al., 1988). However, this literature is singularly unable to accomodate organics in its taxonomy of innovations because the latter tends to be predicated on a view of innovation as a cumulative and path-dependent process. In contrast, organics represents a radical discontinuity with the past, an almost complete break with the knowledge networks of the productivist paradigm, especially the upstream networks dealing with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Instead of the cumulative growth of knowledge which typi®es most conventional innovations, the organic conversion process requires innovators to forget much of the knowledge they have acquired in intensive production. Some innovation theorists have recognised this point. For example: ``the role of forgetting in the development of new knowledge has been underestimated. The enormous power of habits of thought in the economy constitutes a permanent risk for blocking potentially fertile learning processes. It may be argued that some kind of 'creative destruction of knowledge' is necessary before radical innovations can di€use throughout the economy. Old habits of thought, routines and patterns of cooperation, within as well as between ®rms, have to be changed before technical change can begin to move ahead along new trajectories'' (Johnson, 1992). Forgetting needs to be accompanied by the acquisition of new knowledge and the latter is not easy in the organics case because virtually the entire sectoral system of innovation in the agri-food business ± the R and D labs of the agri-chemical companies, the agricultural advisory agencies of the state, university research departments, the technical and procurement divisions of the leading retailers and the like- is geared to generating, testing and di€using knowledge for the industrial food chain. This knowledge acquisition problem is further compounded in organics because the innovation di€usion process here is very atypical: organics was not developed by the scienti®c establishment and disseminated through the extension services; on the contrary, it was developed by ecologically committed practitioners, and later examined by the scienti®c establishment, with the result that the formal knowledge system lagged way behind organic practice (Gerber et al., 1996). Not surprisingly, researchers have found that lack of knowledge is one of the key barriers to organic conversion among farmers (Padel, 1994). This is echoed by

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the National Farmers' Union, which in one of its few organic publications said that most farmers concerns are ``about moving away from widely accepted conventional practices to something di€erent, taking on methods of which they don't have immediate experience'' (National Farmers' Union, 1997). Signi®cant as it is, however, the knowledge de®cit is but one of the many barriers to organic conversion. Up until the late 1980s the institutional apparatus of the productivist paradigm, including farmers' unions, considered organics as marginal, part of an ``alternative'' life style and not a little subversive. In the UK, for example, a senior MAFF ocial conceded that the ministry considered organics to be ``weird'', hence it was not treated seriously until recently (Byng, 1997).7 In other words, the knowledge de®cit needs to be understood as an e€ect of the systemic bias against organic farming, a bias which ranged from the formal organs of the state to informal, but no less important, peer pressure from intensive farmers at the local level. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that some of the early innovators tend to have been well-educated people, with urban backgrounds, less farming experience and with more social contacts outside their locale, all of which meant that social censure in the rural community was less of a deterrent (Padel, 1994). The process of organic conversion ± which covers the stages of awareness, evaluation, trial and adoption ± involves the farmer in a new set of relationships in which his or her local knowledge is respected and harnessed, rather than debased and dismissed, as in the productivist paradigm. Just as ®rms learn from other ®rms, so farmers learn a good deal from other farmers, and this is especially so in the organic context, where there is more scope for farmers to utilise their tacit knowledge, and indeed to share it with their peers. This can take a number of forms, ranging from informal civic interaction to more structured forms of interaction like farm visits, study groups and regional associations. In addition to such face-to-face exchanges, organic farmers and growers can also draw on specialised knowledge networks, like the Henry Doubleday Research Association, which maintains close links with its 22 000 members and its 60 odd local groups (Henry Doubleday Research Association, 1997). While organic agriculture resurrects local, contextdependent knowledge the latter needs to be combined with new forms of external knowledge and the conversion process poses a challenge for the traditional extension system just as much as for the farmers themselves. Recent research in this ®eld (Roling and

7 The ocial attitude in the US was more sinister according to Bob Scowcroft, who said that when he started organic farming in 1979 ``I remember being called a `Communist' by some government ocials'' (Reuters, 1997).

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Jiggins, 1994; Bager and Proost, 1997; Padel, 1997) suggests that the productivist extension system is wholly unable to play the innovative role which is necessary to foster organic conversion. The productivist extension system is predicated on a linear, top-down model in which the extension agent is deemed to be a messenger, imparting codi®ed science-based knowledge to farmers who are largely perceived as passive receptacles. In the context of sustainable agriculture, however, this is totally inappropriate, hence: ``This model is increasingly challenged by knowledge systems in which innovative learning processes within the farming community are central, with farmers' local or indigenous knowledge being combined with science-based knowledge'' (Bager and Proost, 1997). In this interactive extension model the role of the extension agent is to act as a facilitator of the learning process within the farming community rather than as a messenger from above. In the productivist paradigm farmers are encouraged to have blind trust in the technical advice of the agri-chemical suppliers, but in the organic paradigm they are required to construct what has been called ``studied trust relations'' with fellow farmers on the one hand and with organic extension agents on the other because, to have con®dence in the information, they need to have con®dence in the source. Knowing-who thus becomes an important part of knowing-how. It is here that rural enterprise agencies (like Antur Tei® and Menter a Busnes in Wales) are beginning to play an important role in brokering local networks in which farmers, processors can learn to cooperate and explore joint solutions to common problems, like aggregating their producer power for marketing purposes (Menter a Busnes, 1997). For their part organic extension agents need to have a broader set of skills than their intensive counterparts. In addition to ``people skills'' they need to o€er more than narrow technical information about crop rotation, pest control and animal husbandry and so forth because, in the organic paradigm, marketing is an area where the farm is likely to change dramatically, especially if direct marketing and on-farm processing are to be developed (Padel, 1994). The organic food supply system also leads producers into di€erentiated relations `downstream' of the farm and marketing can pose particular problems for organic producers. Notwithstanding the purists' preference for decentralised delivery through local box schemes and the like, the multiples dominate the distribution side of the organic food chain, at least in the UK. In 1996, for example, distributors' shares of the UK organic food market were 60% for the supermarkets, 20% for farm gate/box schemes, 12% for independents, 4% for

healthfood shops and 4% for market stalls (Mintel, 1997). The UK organic food chain is thus biased towards a centralised delivery system, in contrast to the decentralised system in Germany, where a network of independently-owned specialist food shops (Naturkostladen), in which each is ideologically committed to organic principles, accounts for some 65% of retail sales (Lohmann and Foster, 1997). In the UK the mainstream retailers thus play a bigger role in the domestic organic market than in any other country, and here the largest organic item is vegetables, followed by fruit, other (e.g. bread, cereals, processed food etc), meat and dairy products. While Safeway was the ®rst supermarket to stock organic produce in 1981 (followed by Sainsbury's in 1984, Asda in 1986 and Tesco in 1988), Sainsbury's now claims to be the leading multiple with some 182 organic lines, which it claims is double the number of lines of its nearest supermarket competitor. Although organic produce currently accounts for just 1% of its sales, Sainsbury's believes that it could easily reach 5% in the near future since the organic market is developing into ``a mainstream customer requirement rather than a niche product'' (Merton, 1997). The company's own research suggests that interest in organics has reached an all time high, with up to 40% of its customers actually buying organic food and with organics topping its most recent customer food poll for future requirements (Sainsbury's, 1997). The role of the supermarkets has divided the organic producer community in the UK. The pragmatic line, adopted by the likes of Peter Segger of Organic Farm Foods, is that the supermarkets dominate the retail market and therefore they must be used to build the organic market (Segger, 1986). Purists, on the other hand, contend that: ``the pragmatic approach to organic growing is pushing our ethics into obscurity and irrelevance... The better quality of life that many search for is a reaction to consumerism, excessive economic growth, over-a‚uence, centralisation etc. Supermarkets belong to this latter world and selling through them is implicit acceptance of a system we should be ®ghting'' (Urwin, 1986) These con¯icts are partly resolved by the fact that purist producers are addressing themselves to alternative food chains, which rely on decentralised delivery systems like farmers markets, box schemes, etc. For their part the pragmatic producers face a Faustian bargain: while the supermarkets provide a large and ready market, they seek to tailor organic produce to the conventions of the industrial market. This problem is especially acute with regard to ``quality'' conventions: supermarkets set a premium on cosmetic appearanfce, which is achieved in apples for example through the use of a wax

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containing pesticides, a convention which leads to considerable waste because it is intolerant of blemishes and voracious in its use of packaging. In contrast, the organic community understands ``quality'' in terms of taste and nutrition, and it accepts blemishes as natural and sees little or no need for packaging. These di€erent conventions have led some writers to argue that ``organic food challenges, rather than peacefully co-exists with, other food sectors'' (Clunies-Ross, 1990). For all their power in the food chain, supermarkets have been obliged to accept the principles of supplier standards based on internationally-accepted criteria, like the Soil Association Symbol, including independent veri®cation of their supplier monitoring programmes. Indeed, some supermarkets are beginning to accept some cosmetic imperfections in organic produce which they would not tolerate in their conventional lines, hence there is a process of mutual accomodation underway. This process is likely to continue as supermarkets step up their e€orts to build domestic sources of supply in the UK. Sainsbury's has gone furthest in this respect and, in 1997, it launched SOURCE, a producer club, the aim of which is to build a trading network to maximise production in the UK. Elaborating on this initiative Sainsbury's Director of Primary Agriculture said: ``The network will help use the whole crop by giving growers more and more information. As an example ± crops can be fully utilised by ensuring that product which is potentially oversupplied in high seasonal periods can be sold in other sectors of food pro®tably to maintain supplies to customers, and this in turn should result in better returns for growers...We can also develop and extend the organic o€er into new food areas. The objectives would be to stimulate and support new product development... Another objective will be to create a centre of excellence designed to give commercial help, advice and guidance to growers. We are already sponsoring the technical lea¯ets given to organic growers. These are designed to inform growers how to grow organic crops. We need to give practical guidance and help and arrange producer group meetings where appropriate... We will also be supporting the organics sector with further information to our customers'' (Merton, 1997). In other words Sainsbury's is seeking to play a more active role in alleviating the knowledge de®cit in the organic sector by creating its own supply chain as a mechanism through which to disseminate economic knowledge (such as technical information about growing methods and commercial information about product development and new marketing opportunities). Like other supermarkets Sainsbury's wants to minimise the number of suppliers with whom it deals, hence most

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organic growers market their produce to the multiples through a cooperative, the main ones being Somerset Organic Producers, Organic Growers West Wales and Eastern Counties Coop (Clunies-Ross, 1990). The supermarkets' policy of minimising transaction costs, together with their insistence on continuity of supply, means that farmers and growers have a vested interest in co-operating at the local level to ensure that they meet these procurement criteria. The organic ideal of reducing food miles through colocating production and consumption ®nds no echo in the supermarkets' current agenda. Deeply embedded as they are in globally organized logistical chains, the devices which have allowed them to transcend seasonality, there are signs that they are beginning to feel vulnerable to the charge that they are disembedded institutions ± cornucopias of consumption which syphon-o€ local spending, returning little or nothing to the local economy other than wages. This was certainly the perception of aggrieved beef farmers in Wales, who picketed local supermarkets to protest at the inequities of the food chain, where retailer prices were so much higher than farm gate prices, and where supermarkets refused to stock local meat whilst importing it from abroad. The reassertion of locality interests is not con®ned to aggrieved producers: the supermarkets' own market research suggests that consumers prefer to buy local produce because they associate it not just with freshness but with safety. Perhaps this is why Tesco is now experimenting, albeit on a modest scale, with local production for local consumption. A Tesco representative says: ``We do have a Buy British campaign, and 80% of our organic produce is from British farmers. Safety and quality are of paramount importance to us. We have traceability on 99% of our products and we never buy on the open market. We know where they come from, we oversee the whole chain, and we are very thorough. One thing we have done post-BSE, for example, is to set up Producers Clubs, and all our meat suppliers have joined. We know everything about their animals' feeds and welfare, and their whole lifespan'' (Murphy, 1997). One of the interesting questions about the organic food chain±a question which we raise, but do not address, in this paper ± is whether the resurrection of local, context-dependent knowledge gives organic producers any more bargaining power vis-a-vis supermarkets than conventional producers. If organic producers do enjoy bene®ts on account of their local knowledge, their bargaining position with the supermarkets is further strengthened by the fact that domestic demand is outstripping supply. As supermarkets develop their own organics know-how, however, and as more producers

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come on stream, the favourable situation in which producers ®nd themselves today may rapidly change.8 The resurrection of local knowledge takes on a wider meaning in decentralized organic food chains because it embraces not just the producer but the consumer as well. In contrast to the industrial food chain (where the consumer is a largely passive and ignorant actor) the consumer tends to assume a more active role in decentralized organic chains, variously known as consumersupported agriculture, direct distribution schemes or local food links (Steele, 1995; Powell, 1995). Decentralised delivery has been championed in the UK by the Soil Association, which launched its Local Food Links Project in 1994 as a practical alternative to the industrial food chain because: ``This complex system of producing and distributing food creates ignorance amongst consumers about the methods and impacts of food production. It also isolates farmers and growers who are unable to respond to consumer concern about food production. Local Food Links schemes are showing that regular contact with a local producer provides an excellent channel for health and environmental education'' (Soil Association, 1996b). The local knowledge which producers require in decentralised food chains needs to be more than technical on-farm knowledge: it needs to include commercial knowledge about specialized local markets as well as know-who knowledge about the networks through which producers and distributors can liaise to service markets beyond the locality.9 For their part the consumers of these organic schemes tend to be well-educated, middle class professionals who are able to pay a premium for organic produce and who are willing to get involved in running local food schemes. Having said

8 In fact some supermarkets believe that consumers may settle for cheaper, half-way alternatives to organics, like Integrated Crop Management, which promotes natural predators and crop rotation to minimise the use of pesticides and fertilisers. Nearly 90% of Sainsbury's UK fresh produce supplies are already grown to ICM standards, and many of these suppliers belong to a network called LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), which promotes ``green'' farming (Maitland, 1997). 9 To illustrate the signi®cance of networks take the Organic Roundabout, a workers cooperative based in Birmingham, which currently supplies over 1500 customers each week. It buys in bulk from the Organic Marketing Company, which is the jointly-owned marketing arm of Green Growers (a network of growers in Hereford and Worcester) and Organic Growers West Wales (a network of 30 growers). It o€ers standard box schemes and customised orders delivered to the door or to street collection points. This coop runs similar enterprises in other towns, including Oxford, London and Coventry (Soil Association, 1996b).

that some local food link schemes- like the Organic Roundabout in Birmingham for example ± seem to be reaching working class consumers as well (Powell, 1995). Although supermarkets continue to dominate the distribution end of the organic food chain, it is interesting to note that decentralised delivery systems, in the shape of farm gate/box schemes, recorded the highest growth rates between 1994 and 96 (Mintel, 1997). Laudable as they are, in the light of the in-built obstacles to organic conversion, these local food initiatives can only achieve so much without robust national support, something which has been conspicuous by its absence in the UK. The UK's lowly position in the EU conversion league is largely attributable to two factors: ®rst, to the lobbying power of the industrial food chain, which straddles everything from plough to plate and, second, to the neo-liberalism of successive Conservative governments, which persuaded them that market signals (like price premia) would be sucient to induce a shift to organic farming.10 This neo-liberal stance means that the UK's ®nancial incentives for farmers wishing to convert to organic are the lowest in the EU (Lampkin, 1996). Ironically, the absurdity of this neo-liberal stance was eventually accepted by the Conservative-dominated Agriculture Commitee, which called for more support for organic farming as part of a more enlightened response to the EU's Agri-environment Regulation (House of Commons, 1997).11 The latter, which accompanied the CAP reforms of 1992, o€ered EU assistance to member states wishing to develop new training programmes for farmers and others in agri-environment skills, but the UK declined to take up this part of the Regulation (Hird, 1997). This refusal to re-educate is just as much a barrier to organic conversion as weak ®nancial incentives because without publicly-sponsored retraining schemes ± designed to help farmers acquire the agri-environment skills in which to use their local knowledge ± the burden of conversion will be beyond all but a few, environmentally-committed farmers. So while better ®nancial incentives are necessary, these need to be complemented

10 In this sense, the Conservative government's approach to organic conversion accorded with neo-classical thinking which belittles knowledge acquisition. 11 The Agriculture Committee put the case succinctly when it said that ``it does not make sense to argue that organic farming should be encouraged by market mechanisms when there are such powerful market-distorting mechanisms operating through the CAP to encourage non-organic farming practices. We are also concerned that the high level of organic production in certain other member states, underpinned by relatively high public support, has created a substantial trade de®cit for the UK in organic produce'' (House of Commons, 1997:77).

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by measures to redress the organics knowledge de®cit, which is especially acute in R and D, training and extension (Lampkin and Padel, 1994). Without a more robust support system the organic food chain in the UK may well continue to be what it is today: a miniscule band of domestic producers supplementing an importdominated niche market which is largely serviced by supermarkets catering for their more health-conscious, middle class consumers. Being knowledge rather than input intensive, organics needs armative action from the state if the agri-food system is to be transformed into a safer and more sustainable system. 6. Conclusion In this paper we have presented two stylised accounts of conventional and organic food chains. This approach has allowed us to exaggerate reality for the sake of conceptual clari®cation (in much the same way as Weberian ideal types allow key aspects of social phenomena to be rendered clearly visible). By counterposing key aspects of each chain or network we hope to have shown how the contemporary food system comes to take the shape it does and how it might be changed. We have concentrated on the distribution of knowledge in each of the network types. In the conventional chain we proposed that as the process of industrialisation tied together all elements, so farmers' local knowledge was displaced by standardised knowledge emanating from up-stream supply industries. However, the conventional production process has moved into crisis, so the fragility of farmers' economic situations has been exposed. And one important aspect of such fragility is their reliance on external, specialised sources of knowledge for this weakens their ability to explore new agricultural practices. In the organic food chain we showed that farmers must forget many of the practices acquired under the conventional system and must (re)learn to farm in ways much more in tune with local ecosystems and the rythms of nature. This food production process also entails learning new forms of distribution some of which are highly localised. In presenting such stylised treatments of the two chains we accept that we may have over-simpli®ed the distinction between standardised or codi®ed knowledge and tacit or local knowledge. In practice, it is clear that we are really dealing with di€erent combinations of the two. What we wish to point to is that the conventional chain is biased towards standardised knowledge with the e€ect that tacit knowledge is debased so that it cannot easily be drawn upon once this chain moves into crisis. In contrast, the organic model a€ords more scope for the utilisation of tacit knowledge in combination with benign standardised forms. This combination aims to revalue local knowledge, local ecosystems and local

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identities so that farmers can once again become ``knowing agents'', able to exercise more autonomy and control over both their relations with other actors in the food chain and means of production on the farm. We accept, however, that the claim that organic production necessarily increases the autonomy and control of the farmer, rather than simply reallocating social and ecological dependencies and knowledge networks remains to be seen. What we can say is that in taxonomies of learning, the organic example is almost unique as it signi®es a ``radical discontinuity'' from the conventional trajectory of innovation in the food system.12 Here, knowledge is tied to both local practices of production and an acute sensitivity to ecosystems and natural processes. As industrialisation has proceeded so much of the local knowledge in agriculture has been ``squeezed'' by external forces. The organic example illustrates how local, tacit knowledge can be re-learned. However, this locally senstive practice requires a supportive regulatory environment in which the institutions of national (and international) government recognise the need to more wholeheartedly shift agriculture away from its unsustainable past. In the process, the value of combining local, tacit knowledge with codi®ed, standardised knowledge in ways which empower farmers to manage their resources in more sustainably innovative ways will also have to be acknowledged. At present, systems of regulation are swinging ambivalently between the two types of food production outlined in this paper. The row over genetically modi®ed food which so rattled the UK's Labour Government in the early months of 1999 indicates that regulators are caught between a seeming requirement to promote further industrialisation in the food chain and the need to ensure that the concerns of consumers for safe and ``natural'' foods are addressed. Similarly, in the US arguments have broken out about whether the ``organic'' category can include GM food and animals kept in ``factory-style'' livestock facilities (see The Economist 17/4/99). These debates signal that any shift in the trajectory of development in the food system will need to be fully re¯ected in the way the food system is governed. The prevailing system of governance will, likewise,

12

Following the comments of an anonymous referee we accept that there is scope for debate around this issue. For instance, it might be argued that organic agriculture is in keeping with artisanal or craft oriented production and that it is industrial agriculture, rather than organic agriculture, that is the ``aberration''. However, we belive that industrial agriculture is now e€ectively the ``norm'': it supplies the standards and prescriptions against which all agricultures are now assessed. In this context, organic agriculture proposes an alternative developmental path.

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emerge from a struggle between the large corporations of industrial capital ± which is now fully involved in the application of knowledge to the process of genetic modi®cation- and the many producers and consumers now concerned to protect food against further industrialisation and standardisation ± mainly by extolling the virtues of ``natural'' knowledges (Murdoch and Miele 1999). The struggle between these two perspectives on food is now fully engaged and it is clear that the future of the food system ± industrialisation or naturalisation ± rests on the outcome.

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