Studying conversion as a human activity system

Summary

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Farmers convert to organic farming for a variety of reasons including environmental concerns, problems with conventional systems, and personal and financial reasons. They also vary in their management styles. These personal characteristics are rarely considered as explaining variables in comparative studies of farming systems, because of the contrasting methods used to evaluate personal objectives and attitudes as opposed to farm activities. Farming should be seen as a human activity system, in which people actively manage some natural resources, for the purpose of producing output, influenced by their subjective values and attitudes. The Farming Systems Research (FSR) approach aims to consider the social, cultural, ecological and economic context of farming, but provides little methodological guidance on how these aims can be achieved in a rigorous way. In this paper reference is made to the tradition of qualitative social inquiry, especially case studies, whereby inductive research is undertaken in real world situations without deliberate manipulation. The paper provides an example of case studies of converting dairy farms integrating structured data on farm activities with unstructured ones of personal characteristics.