Farming Styles in Austria, 1930s-1970s

Given the international and national state of research, the project`s general aims are, first, to overcome the fragmented accounts of historical studies on the agricultural transformation in the twentieth century by adopting the more integrative and cross-disciplinary food regimes approach and, second, to overcome the structural bias of the food regimes literature by focusing on the practices of the actors involved. For this purpose, the concept of farming styles - as symbolic constructions at collective and individual levels, as negotiated strategies within local, regional and supra-regional contexts, and as farming practices resulting in farming systems as structural outcomes - provides a heuristic framework. By aid of this framework, the transition from rather extensive and diversified agrosystems in the first half of the twentieth century to intensified and specialised - `productivist` - agrosystems from the 1950s onwards is explored from an actor-centred perspective. In order to grasp the temporal and spatial diversity of farming styles from the 1930s to the 1970s, two regions, one characterised by favourable conditions of agricultural production and one disfavoured area, are selected. The project consists of three modules: Module 1 explores farming styles as symbolic constructions at the collective level as expressed by contemporary farmers` journals. Module 2 investigates farming styles as practices resulting in farming systems as structural outcomes by statistical analysis of time-series of farm records. Module 3 addresses farming styles as ideals of individual persons which are negotiated with other individual and collective actors before being carried out; this is done by conducting and interpreting narrative interviews with retired farm holders and their successors. The project intends to contribute essentially to the `new rural history`, i.e. the actor-centred, comparative and long-term exploration of rural societies and their linkages with other realms of the natural and social environment.

The projects overall goal is to address agrarian change in Austria in the second half of the twentieth century from an actor-oriented perspective. For this purpose, it adopts the sociological concept of farming styles which emphasises the natural and social embeddedness of agriculture. A farming style is conceived as a socio-technical network tying together the material, social and symbolic elements of a farming system. By following a specific farming style, actors gain coherence within the farming system and distinction with regard to other farming styles. The project consists of three modules, each of them addressing an aspect of farming styles: module I investigates the subject-positions of the media discourse in a popular farmers journal in Lower Austria from the 1950s to the 1980s; module II follows farm development pathways in the agrosystem of two Lower Austrian regions from 1945 to 1985; module III links the results of the preceding modules by reconstructing the farming styles of selected family farms in the regions under investigation with aid of farm statistics and narrative interviews with family members. The projects results call for a revision of the conventional view on post-war agrarian change in Austria. The crucial question the project has tried to answer is why the peasantry which was rhetorically sentenced to death by the advocates of liberal or socialist modernization from the late-nineteenth century onwards and by current mainstream historiography survived the post-war agrarian change in Austria in considerably large numbers. The project has revealed the actors everyday struggle for survival (as seen from a life-worlds perspective) or the resilience of their farm-household systems (as seen from a systems perspective). For explaining and understanding the actor-induced resilience of family farming systems, two flows of resources have to be taken into account: first, the external upstream and downstream flows of commodities from and to markets; second, the internal (re- )production of a self-controlled resource base. The resilience of the family farming system depends on the relation between these resource flows: the more subordination to factor and product markets gains hegemony, the more class differentiation between accumulation and proletarisation takes effect; vice versa, the more the farms self-controlled resource base is strengthened, the more the family members are able to cope with unfavorable conditions. These resource flows are guided by the hybrid, both peasant-like and entrepreneurial farming styles of the farming families who run households and manage enterprises at the same time. On the one hand, they acquire technology and other commodities from factor markets and deliver food and other commodities to product markets; on the other hand, they manage to control market dependency to a certain degree by maintaining a self-controlled resource base. This combination of strategies enables them to keep the balance between dependency and autonomy.