Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Taking stock of farm animals
and rurality
Richard Yarwood and Nick Evans
Introduction
The study of livestock has long been a part of rural and agricultural geography.
However, farm animals have usually been studied in an economistic manner and
have been regarded simply as 'units of production' within agricultural systems. As
Philo (1995:657) has stated, animals have only appeared 'in the background of
studies in rural geography' and there have been few attempts to view animals as
'animals' in their own right or, at the very least, as animals which have cultural as
well as productive value to people in the countryside. Some early effort was
expended on mapping and explaining livestock distribution using broad
(productive) categories such as 'dairy' cattle, 'beef' cattle, sheep, pigs, 'table' foul or
'laying' foul, as exemplified by Coppock (1964) in his agricultural atlas. As
agricultural geography has become more process-orientated, so too have analyses of
livestock. For example, Bowler (1975) considered specialisation in livestock
enterprises in Montgomeryshire, North Wales, through an examination of
'behavioural influences'. Symes and Marsden (1985) examined pig production in
Humberside as part of a trend towards the increasing industrialisation of
agricultural systems. Similarly, Halliday (1988) investigated the state imposition of
quotas on dairy farmers in Devon, reflecting an increase in interest among
researchers on the effects of government intervention in agriculture.
These changes generally reflect paradigm shifts in agricultural geography, except
that livestock are always incidental to some other goal, irrespective of theoretical
position. Even then, Cloke (1989) has suggested that rural geographers have had an
apparent reluctance to engage in new theoretical approaches favoured in other fields
of geography. This has certainly been true of the 'cultural turn' which influenced
the direction of so much geographical research in the 1990s. Although Cloke
(1997) has demonstrated that the application of cultural theory is now leading to
new 'excitements' in rural studies, these have yet to impact fully on agricultural
geography. Here, studies have remained so firmly underpinned by political economy
perspectives that, despite attempts to accommodate greater diversity in analysis
through modification (see Marsden 1998; Whatmore
et al.
1996), agricultural
