Introduction
In Western countries, successive green revolutions have replaced energy provided by human labor with that of animals and then with various natural sources (the sun, wind and water) and lastly with fossil fuelsReference Debeir, Deléage and Hémery1, Reference Mazoyer and Roudart2. Today, the agricultural model that is predominant in the West puts strong emphasis on high productivityReference Allaire, Allaire and Boyer3 that cuts down on human labor as much as possible. Farms of this type apply a strategy of low-cost leadershipReference Porter4, which includes reducing labor costs to a minimum. In contrast, all the Western systems of alternative agriculture, according to Michael Porter's terminology, seek differentiation where the products sold must be perceived by customers as being different from standard products, rather than low-cost leadership. From a labor point of view, alternative agriculture systems might then appear to be a backward step. Adopting an alternative system actually involves more human labor5. Results of the farm census in 2000, in France, show that heads of organic farms work full time in most cases and that they have 2.8 employees compared to 2.3 in other farms. But do these work requirements really put a brake on adoption? Other curbs are confirmed: regarding organic farming for example, GautronneauReference Gautronneau6 showed that a major obstacle to adoption in France was a fear of being marginalized, while a recent studyReference Brodt, Klonsky, Tourte, Duncan, Hendricks, Ohmart and Verdegaal7, carried out in California, proved the influence of management styles on adoption. Is the adoption of alternative agriculture systems hampered in Western countries, where everyone can make comparisons with the conditions in the productivity-driven farming system by the amount and nature of the work involved? More generally, is the work a threat for continuity of these alternative systems? Research based on 30 case studies conducted in Auvergne, a medium-sized mountain region in central France, may provide fuel for this debate. The exercise involves examining the complex relation between work and continuity and drawing lessons from that to help farms that specialize in alternative agriculture.
In France, farmers often approach extension advisors in connection with workReference Cerf, Sagory and Falzon8 and yet alternative systems have peculiarities with regard to work that make such advice difficult. Our aim is to help advisors construct the input they give to the various types of farmers. We put forward a typology of possible practices as regards advice on work, according to the assessments farmers made about the amount of work they do and their manner of working. The advice needs to be different depending on the particular type of farmer who is using or is considering using an alternative agriculture system.
The Paradoxes of Work and Continuity
Might bad working conditions be a threat to the continuity of alternative farms? It stands to reason that too high a workload threatens the sustainability of a farm and yet this is not automatic. Proper working conditions are not a guarantee of continuity either; for instance, there are many cases where farmers have a modest workload but still do not manage to perpetuate their farm. On the other hand, there are farms weighed down by a huge workload but this in no way hinders their continuity. This fact is illustrated by the following case:
In 2002, Mr and Mrs R4 found a couple of young people to take over their vineyard run using organic farming methods, even though it requires a huge amount of work. For instance, they considered it normal to work on Sunday as well: “Well, since we've reduced by a hectare, we've managed to stop working on Sunday afternoon.”
The same observation can be made about archaic practices.
In Auvergne for example, it was assumed that the milking of Salers cows had disappeared because the physiology of this breed is such that, for the mother to release her milk, she has to be in contact with the calf that must suck the first spurts. This practice would have been doomed because of the extra work it entailed and yet the survival of Mr C's farm, which is devoted to milking Salers cows, is in no way threatened: he has recently formed a farmers' economic interest group, or GAEC as it is known in French, with his wife and one of his employees. His two children are planning to take over the farm. As far as the milking is concerned, this is certainly a constraint but it is not an insuperable obstacle: “The system is like that. It calls for employees, so it takes two of us to do the milking, one who milks and the other who lets the calves out, so you need a herd that's a tiny bit bigger to be able to hire two people. To pay the contributions and the wages”.
If we adhere to the line that ‘good’ working conditions are essential to the continuity of a farm, these paradoxes cannot be explained. But it is not that simple; every practitioner knows that the expression ‘good working conditions objectively defined’ is meaningless: faced with the same herd and put in the same situation, one farmer will cope with no problem while his neighbor will be snowed under. Only the farmer himself can say whether the working conditions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
In France there are two main ways to tackle the description of work on farms. The first is known as ‘administrative’ and is a learned description put forward by agriculturistsReference Porcher9. It is objectivist and macroscopicReference Dejours10. There are two variants according to Dedieu et al.Reference Dedieu, Laurent and Mundler11, the first favors breaking down tasks and measuring their duration; the second aims to show the work in the form of budgets worked out per period (taking stock of time available and needs). The second approach, described as ‘subjective’ by DejoursReference Dejours10, is comprehensive and intersubjective because it is formed from the experience that the operators themselves have of work. Our approach belongs to this category, since the reflections on ‘work’ that we put forward are always to be understood as being ‘the farmer's assessment of the issue’. This is one of the first keys to gaining an understanding of these paradoxes. The farmer is the one who has to assess whether the amount of work he undertakes is bearable or not and it is he again who gives purpose, or not, to his way of working. However, the debate cannot get off the ground without clarification of the term ‘farm continuity’.
Up until 1995Reference Rattin12 around 70% of French farmers were getting one of their children to take over from them. The number of farmers is falling and those who remain have fewer and fewer children who want to take over a farm, with the result that the use of successors chosen from outside the family circle could possibly grow13, although this runs counter to the French tradition of passing on a farm to a relative or, where none exists, of selling the land for development or planting it with trees. What does ‘farm continuity’ actually mean when someone takes over? It is necessary to draw upon the work done by Sophie MignonReference Mignon14 on companies in general. This author identifies four main modes of continuity when a succession takes place: two concerning continuity of power and two concerning continuity of project.
In farming, continuity of power is conveyed either by continued control when the capital stays in the hands of the same family, or by continued management, when successive farmers belong to the same family.
The other major type of continuity—continuity of project—is broken down into sustainability of the activities and of the organization. Sustainability of the activities is ensured when the farm activities continue, even when the founding family has lost control of them. Organizational sustainability is a subtler notion. It occurs through maintenance of the ‘spirit of the business’, which guarantees its singularity and its unity, or by keeping its identityReference de Geus15. Edith Penrose defines identity as the basic, permanent character of a group which lasts in spite of changeReference Penrose16. This form of sustainability is the one that alternative systems are interested in. Sustainability of these systems is dependent on the handing down of their ‘spirit’, of their own alternative identity.
To identify the conditions of this last form of continuity, we carried out research (2000/2002), based on 30 case studies of farmers in Auvergne, which focused on the farmer's work ethic to explain the intended continuity of the farm. This research gave rise to a management science dissertation defenseReference Macombe17. The specific goals were double. First, we wanted to understand why some farms were passed on and others not, in order to suggest advice for extension and training. Secondly, according to the field of management science, the dissertation hoped to make a contribution to managers' strategy. We therefore noted the conditions to extend these results to farms and, more generally, managers of small family firms, in developed Western countries, as per Albert David's methodReference David18.
Methodology
Data collection techniques
A selective sample had to be gathered to reveal a phenomenon that is, in principle, relatively rare. We were looking for people who might have something to say about the notion of quality. We therefore put together a list of 70 farmers working with alternative agriculture systems in the Auvergne region using seven media sources (Table 1).
Table 1. Source of the names that make up the list of 70 farmers.
FERME: Fédération européenne de revalorisation des races domestiques menacées (Association for the Promotion of Endangered Domestic Breeds). The addresses are rarely those of farmers because more often than not they concern spare time breeders.
CIVAM: Centre d'Initiative pour la VAlorisation du Milieu rural, not-for-profit association taking over from the ‘rural teachers’ of old.
We chose a varied sampleReference Blanchet and Gotman19 from this base according to known features (agronomic potential, main activity, tourist activities or none, type of marketing, production method, legal structure). Table 2 below examines the diversity criteria sought.
Table 2. Diversity criteria sought among farms in the selected sample, in comparison with the ones sought by Sophie MignonReference Mignon14.
Appointments were made by telephone during the school holidays as follows: summer 2000, Christmas 2000/2001, February 2001 and summer 2001. The 30 interviews took place on the farms and were recorded for transcription. According to standard recommendationsReference Yin20, visual impressions of the following elements were gathered: interview venue, the surroundings, interruptions during the interview, what the farmer wanted to show, what is important to him, visible equipment, buildings and lastly state of the land, crops and animals.
The utmost was doneReference Girin21 to put the interviewees at ease, so that they could express themselves freely. The two main subjects for the interviews had no relationship, in principle, with work. They were asked: ‘What, in your opinion, does the quality of farm produce mean?’ and then, if they did not broach the question themselves, ‘What future are you hoping for and what future are you planning for your farm’. The interviews were conducted according to the non-directive-active technique described by MucchielliReference Mucchielli22. The remarks about work recorded here were therefore produced spontaneously, without any specific question being asked on that subject. Analysis of the reflections on work was achieved by the grounded theory methodReference Strauss and Corbin23, which helps draw out new theories.
Evaluating the type of continuity sought
We did not select farms in the process of handover. We interviewed employers of all ages. A criterion was needed to detect whether the farmer wanted ‘organizational sustainability’. We assumed that, if this were the case, the farmer would refer to his business as an entity-cum-projectReference Macombe17. This is one of three possible representations. Each farmer regards his farm as representing either capital or heritage or an entity-cum-project. Table 3 shows the logical coherence between these three representations and the types of continuity looked for.
Table 3. Types of continuity looked for in relation to the way the farm is represented.
The expression ‘regarded as capital’ means that the farm is seen first and foremost as an asset to be realized in monetary terms. It can be ‘transformed’ into a forest or plots. It also disappears as an entity if the farmer sells the business without passing on the particular expertise that forms its identity. In this case, the farmer is not concerned about preserving identity because organizational sustainability does not matter much to him.
If the farmer regards the farm primarily as heritage, it is important to pass on not only the tangible assets, but also a series of intangible elements that are meaningful to him, for example love of the land, the area, know-how, cultural heritage, etc. In this case, he often wants the children to take over the farm. He considers that it is important to carry on the same activities and also to keep the ‘spirit’ of the enterprise.
The farmer who considers he is at the head of an entity-cum-project sees his resources as the means to fulfill his ambitions. This viewpoint contributes to subtle organizational sustainability. The important thing is that the identity of the farm lives on. So the farmer frequently anticipates that the person taking over can produce other things, provided that is done in ‘the same spirit’.
Each representation is linked to characteristic statements. For example, a farmer regards his farm as an entity-cum-project when he says, at an altitude of 1200 m in the Sancy Massif: ‘If a system isn't sustained, whether by the children or by someone else—that's not important—it's proof that it just no longer had its place’. Or indeed: ‘We are doing everything possible precisely to create something that can be taken over easily, because this here is a real creation’. Conversely, the farm is repudiated as a project by the people who maintain: ‘When you look at the life in towns, it'll be very difficult to get people to come here to do this job, just now we feel that people don't want to work 70 hours a day to do this job.’ or ‘My son's doing quite different studies, … I don't know if I'm not going to think of stopping anyway, just because of a problem of organisation, of too much work.
This interpretation table gives a precise idea of the continuity the farmer wants.
Results and Repercussions for the Work Issue
Main result
In our sample, 23 farmers wanted above all to pass on the spirit of their business. The main result of our study is that these farmers have a genuine work ethicReference Macombe24, assessed according to precise criteria. We tried to apply the most varied and most extreme situations possible in an attempt to disprove this proposition but it stood firm. In other words, if we extend these results, the fact that the farmer has a work ethic would seem to be a deciding factor in his alternative system being sustained. In such a case, the business is underpinned by a spirit and a purpose and the farmer does everything possible to preserve it beyond the end of his working life. He will actively look for a successor if he does not have any children who want to take it over. And above all, he will actively seek to pass on the spirit of the business. These results shed light on the paradoxes seen with regard to work. The manner of working is one of the principles that underpin the work ethic of these farmers, whereas it is not particularly meaningful for the other farmers. Similarly, the extra amount of work does not have the same consequences on the continuity of an ‘entity-cum-project’ as on the continuity of the other farm types.
Relationships between continuity and ‘way of working’
When a farmer has a work ethic, the ‘work’ itself is part of the principle. In this case the word ‘work’ is used in the etymological sense reflecting a time when labor, which was ‘neither counted nor measured’, ‘used to take shape in the product’ as BarthezReference Barthez25 wrote. So, ‘work’ refers to the ways of working to obtain a product and takes shape in this product, which owes it its worth. When a farmer has a work ethic, his way of working, and particularly some of the requirements he sets himself, take on a special meaning. For instance, a way of working that others might consider hard is regarded as a necessary sacrifice for the quality of the products obtained. It is part of the principle that gives purpose to the job, as the following passage shows:
Mr O (herd of 55 Montbéliard cows): “We don't have a milking parlour and we've got quality, we always have milk that's an A in quality. It's far more demanding than a milking parlour, and I won't say that we won't adopt it one day but we can monitor the animals, we are in contact with them, but that's a breeder's attitude, our animals are much more docile…”.
Conversely, when a farmer does not regard his farm as a project, the way of working does not have any particular significance. It will be a case of doing things as efficiently as possible, or indeed as quickly as possible:
“The guys who are chasing after acres and subsidies they don't care, they'll look at the big tractor … that's going to do the work as quickly as possible, because there's 150 hectares of hay to do and it's got to be done quick”.
In other words, when a farmer has a work ethic, an outside observer could consider his way of working to be strange or archaic, but it often reflects the way he sees the job and is the hallmark of this way of seeing things, which actually leads to continuity.
Relationships between continuity and amount of work
The second approach involves the amount of work. When a farmer only sees his farm as capital, large amounts of work will be considered excessive. His work is a chore to be suffered and is hard to come to terms with. He therefore tries to reduce his working time by any means:
“Mr K: That [label requirements] is great on paper but in terms of work it's awful. We handle tons of lambs, it's horrible.
Mrs K: It's cottage industry on a big scale, we say that all the time. We work traditionally while trying to produce industrial quantities”.
If a farmer sees his farm as an entity-cum-project, his position is different. He accepts that huge quantities of work are inherent to his way of running the alternative activities he has chosen. But he may realize that the amount of work he has no problem putting up with will never be acceptable to a potential successor:
“Mrs R: Because before getting to the end there's a huge amount of work to do, work in the fields, afterwards work by hand” … “nobody's interested. We had a trainee at the beginning who was really interested, but when he saw the work that was involved ….”
The result is that the farmer may like to pass on the entity, but she admits that it will be hard. On the other hand, the aim to work ‘well’ is in active opposition to the aim not to work a lot, both for activities requiring a huge amount of processing and for field crops, for example.
(Mrs T) “If we want a good, clean snail, that means a huge amount of work, taking a long time. I only do 3,000 in a day. I can't do any more, that for me is a quality snail!”
(Mrs U) “The processing really does give a lot of work when you want to make a quality product, it takes time to make it…because we only use fresh products … you need garlic and onions and to peel all that.”
(Mr P) “Well, for example, to control corn borer, the trichogram is a parasite that is placed at the bottom of small capsules where there are larvae inside and we put them in the maize, in a little box, we place them by hand, so that means extra work.”
(Mr and Mrs M) “What you find in shops is onion seedling, it's very hard so it can be 100% machine processed! Ours is onion bulb and it's more fragile, so we pick it by hand too. It's a question of quality.”
The result is that farmers with a work ethic consider an amount of work that would be deemed intolerable elsewhere to be ‘normal’. This long work period in comparison with the unit produced is willingly accepted because it contributes to the purpose of the farmer's alternative project.
Implications for Advice
Typology and interpretation of the paradoxes
What becomes of our paradoxes in the light of the explanations given? The first case showed a couple of winegrowers using organic farming methods who were able to find successors, despite the huge amounts of work to be put in. But the amount of work was considered normal, because it was linked to a fundamental choice of an organically grown product. They related their meaningful way of working with the need for an amount of work which others might have considered excessive. As they wanted to sustain this ‘organically grown’ spirit, it is not surprising that they successfully brought a handover to fruition. The second case showed a way of working (milking Salers cows) which is generally considered to be archaic and doomed to disappear and yet the farmers organized themselves to take on the work and to pay for it by selling the cheeses for a high price at market. The archaic milking process is an integral part of their work ethic, itself at the root of their desire for the entity-cum-project to last.
We can thus put forward a typology of the farmers' attitudes to work and to the continuity of their farm (Table 4).
Table 4. Typology of farmers according to the opinions given on the amount of work and the way of working.
A farmer who is at the head of an entity-cum-project and who considers his amount of work to be ‘normal’ accepts that this workload is the sacrifice needed for his practices to match his work ethic. He hopes to pass on the farm entity, maintaining the same spirit. If, on the other hand, he thinks that the amount is too much for a potential successor, the farmer would like to hand over, but fears this may be impossible. He is therefore prepared to review his practices in order to cut down on the amount of work for the successor.
A farmer who regards his farm solely as capital or heritage does not have the same attitude to continuity. While the amount of work is accepted as normal, the way of working may have no particular significance, but the farmer may, however, want to pass on the heritage to one of his children. Alternatively, if the amount of work is thought excessive, the farmer will see it as a chore that he is obliged to suffer! He has no ambition as far as sustaining the spirit of the farm is concerned.
Neither the amount of work in itself nor archaic or modern methods of working prompt or thwart organizational sustainability. On the other hand, the fact that the farmer reasons according to an ‘entity-cum-project’ is crucial. The subjective opinions given on the method of working and on the amount of work are closely related to a desire for continuity, provided that the ‘entity-cum-project’ dimension is taken into account.
What implications for advice as regards work?
It is worth thinking about the chances of success in terms of improving the likelihood of continuity, arising from reorganizing the work on all these types of farms. Intuitively, extension advisors use different advisory practices depending on the type of farmer they are dealing with (the author was an agricultural advisor from 1980 to 1984). They predict that their efforts will sometimes be a ‘waste of time’ whereas ‘the game will be worth the candle’ in other circumstances. We hope that they will find some theoretical suggestions here to support the practices dictated by their intuition.
The situations presented in Table 3 are worth considering for the person who has to give advice on reorganisation. The advisor's freedom of action and the results (improvements to continuity) he/she can hope for are not the same everywhere. Four variants, summed up in Table 5, are conceivable.
Table 5. Model of typology for advice on work reorganization.
When a farmer thinks of the farm as an entity-cum-project and considers his amount of work to be ‘normal’, any advice on improving working conditions will be extremely limited. It is worth remembering that some practices are untouchable, including those that, at first sight, seem strange. They make sense to the farmer and give him the desire to carry on and to hand down. This is the case for Mr I, who refused his accountant's advice.
To reduce Mr I's workload, his accountant advised him to introduce Charolais crossbreeds, and give up rearing Abondance heifers, without understanding that this cattle farm, although demanding, made sense for Mr I and was even a condition of his son, a trained inseminator and passionately fond of this breed, taking over: “I see things in a certain way, that's how I am. Whenever my accountant comes, my management consultant, he says to me “you're losing masses of money with Abondance cattle”. He wanted me to introduce Charolais but I didn't. I do pure breed, I want heifers (it means a bit more care and attention but … ) and I don't want crossbreeds, that's my opinion, that's how I see things, that's all.”
Still in the context of the entity-cum-project, when the farmer thinks his amount of work excessive, he hopes and prays for a thorough reorganization that might drastically change his activities but not their ‘spirit’. This is the case of Mr and Mrs J. The advisor then has to make sure that the new activities do not make the same time-consuming mistake.
Mr and Mrs J. believe in organic farming but they have noticed that the practices are too hard to handle and too time-consuming. They therefore began to change them: by building a pen for the goats instead of herding them four hours a day, by reducing the acreage for growing vegetables and by accepting help from neighbors (and a round-baler) for hay. They are now thinking about other less demanding or less physical activities such as horse drawn carriage rides and guided tours of the farm.
When a farm is not regarded as an entity-cum-project and the amount of work is thought normal, it is possible to cut down on time spent or make changes to ways of doing things because they do not have any particular significance. Any improvement may contribute to one of the children taking over the farm. But the mere fact of reorganizing the work does not mean the farm will become an entity-cum-project. If the amount of work is thought excessive, it has to be reorganised so as to improve the lot of the current farmers. They will then be able to ‘survive’ for as long as possible. Nothing stands in the way of changing the activities or ways of doing things, but as they do not have a particular significance, it is unlikely that a reduction in working time will be able to erase the impression of suffering a chore. A really large-scale reorganization might, however, increase the chances of handing over to a family successor.
To conclude on the subject of advice, the advisor's task is more difficult when he or she works on an entity-cum-project. This is the case of most French farms that revolve around alternative farming systems. He or she has to distinguish what, among the working practices, makes sense for the farmer, what is a ‘necessary sacrifice’ on a scale with his work ethic. And these practices—however irrational they might seem—are untouchable if one wants to protect the entity-cum-project!
Conclusions
Cutting down on human labor on the farm is a credo of agriculture that puts strong emphasis on high productivity, a system of agriculture that works out its margins precisely in relation to working times and, by definition, wants to derive the greatest possible value per unit of labor hired to work on the farm. From the farmer's viewpoint, the work required by an alternative system will seem to be greater in quantity and naturally different. This could be a major obstacle to the adoption of such systems and to their sustainability, but the issue is more subtle than that. Continuity at the point of succession depends to a great extent on the meaning that the farmer finds in his work, on the value he attaches to the spirit of his business. And alternative systems are particularly meaningful: the busy days, the use of plentiful labor and the often detailed or archaic practices are frequently the trademark of these alternative systems. As a result, advice on work reorganization cannot be managed with the same free hand or the same results among farmers who look at their situation in a different light.
Table 5 sheds light on the paradoxes presented at the start of this paper and, more generally, shows some implications for advice in matters of reorganizing farm work. But these recommendations should not be voiced without a reminder of their limitations. First, the scientific work that suggests these results was not initially devised to answer a question about work. This guarantees spontaneity and therefore reliability of the views collected, but does present some drawbacks. For instance, the sample included standard types of company, without being particularly concerned about dealing with all the possible types of companies. Secondly, the farmers interviewed were confined to Auvergne, so it would be helpful to test Table 5 on other regions and on other types of farms in terms of work organization. It would be interesting to link the farmers' subjective assessments of work to a calculation of their actual work time. Likewise, our survey has not yet been able to go on to verify the actual continuity of farms, which would need to be done in the future (in 20 years' time!).
A heavy workload is not always a handicap in an alternative system. On the contrary, it can be its hallmark, a way of expressing the farmer's ethics in his practices. That is why it is important to theorize about these observations, which French extension advisors in the field are aware of from experience.
