Abstract
In order to implement environmental policies for sustainable and resilient land use we need to better understand how people relate to their agricultural land and how this affects their practices. In this paper I use an inductive, qualitative analysis of data gathered from interviews with kiwifruit orchardists and observations of their orchards to demonstrate how their interpretation of their relationship with their orchards affects their management practices. I suggest that these orchardists experience their orchards as having agency in four different ways—as wild, challenging, needy, and passive—and that these different perspectives result in practices which produce orchards that impact differently on sensory faculties—sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. This finding implies that land use policies that seek to change sensory aspects of the land which are in conflict with producers’, farmers’, or growers’ sense of relationship with the land—and how the land “should be”—are unlikely to succeed. That these orchardists produce fruit which is compliant with two comprehensive audit systems—one of which is organic—and also serve an international market, indicates that the constraints of such systems still allow orchardists to exercise autonomy, express their identity, and make sense of their orchard activities in different ways, indicating a potentially resilient and sustainable production system.
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Notes
Dry matter is the ratio of the dried weight of fruit to the total weight before the moisture is removed.
These figures add to more than 100% because some orchardists grow both green and gold fruit.
Hormone-based bud-break sprays are used to simulate frost which encourages greater budding and uniformity of flowering and fruiting. The product name, HiCane®, used in a quotation, is such a spray.
A native bootlace fungus Armillaria novaezelandiae.
“… actantiality is not what an actor does … but what provides actants with their actions, with their subjectivity, with their intentionality, with their morality” (Latour 1998, p. 2). In other words, actants are things actors use to mediate or translate their actions. They do not have to be “things” with a physical existence but may be laws, norms or other abstract ideas such as the “market”.
Abbreviations
- ARGOS:
-
Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability
- GlobalGAP:
-
Global Good Agricultural Practice
- ANT:
-
Actor Network Theory
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Acknowledgements
The ARGOS program is funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST), and is also supported by ZESPRI®. It is a joint venture between the Agribusiness Group, Lincoln University, and the University of Otago in New Zealand. I thank the ARGOS kiwifruit orchardists who share their lives with me from time to time, Chris Rosin who usefully challenged and critiqued my writing, Simon Lambert for his insights and good words and Jayson Benge, the ARGOS kiwifruit research field officer. I also received support for writing this paper from New Zealand’s Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences (BRCSS) fund. Thanks also to the reviewers and editor of this journal for their great suggestions which have resulted in a much improved paper.
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Hunt, L. Interpreting orchardists’ talk about their orchards: the good orchardists. Agric Hum Values 27, 415–426 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9240-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9240-7