Abstract :
Some actors in the “mainstream” agricultural sector are beginning to engage in strategies of influencing public perceptions of farming, responding to public anxieties over industrialised agriculture and to a supposed separation of non-farming publics from food production. This paper focuses on agricultural shows as sites and events central to such re-imaging strategies: shows are moments of convergence, assembling farming people, entities, knowledges and practices, and non-farming publics, and allowing agricultural societies to stage managed encounters between farming and non-farmers. The paper draws on research with show managers and others involved in agricultural shows. It discusses how a reorientation of shows’ presentation of farming to the non-farming public has occurred. While there is a continued display of farming as a spectacle, there are also attempts by agricultural societies to use shows to foster a sense of connectedness between the public and farming, and to ‘inform’ or ‘educate’ the public, on their terms, about farming. However, first, in several ways, shows reproduce a distancing and separation between farming and non-farmers, partly due to a partial evacuation of much mainstream agricultural content from some shows, and to the restricted and selective image of farming which is presented. Second, processes of informing and educating non-farming publics and imaging farming in particular ways, are, in addition, associated with a re-imaging of farming to farmers. The reorientation of agricultural shows towards a re-imaging of agriculture can be understood as ‘acting back’ on farmingʹs perception of itself. Shows thus also involve a reflexive repositioning of farmers in relation to the consumers of their products.
