170 Participatory Processes
contained within the major structuring forces – forces that applied to the past and
that will also determine the future.
English colleagues sometimes characterize this by the fine expression ‘the race to
the bottom’. Agricultural development acts in this script as a process that occurs
inevitably via a combination of scale enlargement and rural exodus: less and less
farmers, while the surviving farms become larger and larger. Similarly, a continuous
industrialization of the interaction with the living world (of ‘co-production’) is there-
fore inevitable. One glimpse of the ‘bottom’ is provided by the frequently produced
scenario studies, which speak of a Europe in which 75–80 per cent of rural areas have
become superfluous to food production. Similar figures apply to the farming popula-
tion (WRR, 1992). In other scenario studies, with regard to the Dutch dairy indus-
try, farms are mentioned that carry 1000 cows (LEI/SC, 1996). This would imply
only one and a half farms surviving in every rural municipality in The Netherlands.
The ‘virtual farmer’ acts as the pivot of this script, or rather of all these fore-
sight studies. He (she is hardly mentioned) orients the organization and develop-
ment of his farm to the laws of market and technology. These ‘laws’, which are
constantly made explicit by the expert system, allow no other course of action than
the race to the bottom.
In this book, I attempt to develop a different narrative, a different view. I will
demonstrate that there is no structural development, no inevitable race to the bot-
tom. Nor is there a ‘virtual farmer’, as posited by the knowledge system – and
where the sorcerer’s apprentice does succeed there is the devil and all to pay.
In other words, this book is an attempt to narrate the story of farmers, agricul-
ture and the countryside in a different way than is by now customary. This con-
ventional story is largely spanned by a number of axioms, by, in other words, a
number of institutionalized cognitive models. They concern, inter alia, the farmer
as agricultural entrepreneur and the behaviour that he (or she) should therefore
display. They also concern the processes that are supposed to characterize the sec-
tor as a whole: structural development, rural exodus and the dynamizing role of
the agricultural expert system. Furthermore, there are axioms concerning the real
nature of farming. Above all there are a number of deeply rooted and widely shared
ideas about the future of agriculture. Collectively, these axioms span a worldview
(one could almost say a ‘paradigm’) that I will characterize here by the metaphor of
the ‘virtual farmer’.^43 This worldview is deceptively consistent. The concepts within
it keep presupposing and (re-)confirming each other. To support the logic, the
inherent truth, of one axiom it suffices to refer simply to one, or a few, of the other
axioms. However, on the whole this is not even necessary. Axioms are self-evident
because:
1 they are shared by nearly everyone;^44 that is,
2 they are hardly ever disputed; and
3 neither are they interrupted by a ‘stubborn empirical reality’, precisely because
the same axioms constitute the frame for the perception and the ordering of
this reality; hence