Farmer identities and perceptions of public good provision

Agricultural policy discourse highlights the role of farmers as providers of public goods to justify agri-environmental measures. England’s post-Brexit agricultural policy reform, with its originally stated aim of ‘public money for public goods’, presented an opportunity to assess how farmers respond to this idea. Informed by social psychological accounts of how farmer management reflects their identities, our thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with farmers in south-east England examines their interpretations of public goods and willingness to identify as public good providers. Farmer interpretations of public goods as both commodities and benefits helped them categorise certain farming outputs as distinct public goods. Views of public goods were also linked to the context in which farmers saw the concept being used. Farmer scepticism reflected familiar arguments for why farmer identities may resist change: farmers linked appeals to public goods to concerns over lost opportunities to generate symbolic capital underpinning good farmer identities and external challenges to productivist identities represented by a narrative around farming’s environmental harms. While many farmers sought to reject this narrative, some saw opportunities to shift the narrative provided they could secure more direct public recognition of farming’s diverse benefits. To achieve this, the interviews highlighted the value of making signals of farmer quality more accessible to non-farming audiences. Despite the challenges involved, we suggest this is worth pursuing for the potential benefits in reducing farmers’ sense of disconnection from wider society, increasing receptiveness to measures for enhancing agricultural public good provision and engagement with alternative good farming ideals.