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Improvements in European agriculture are framed in the literature as arising from an Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System with innovations provided by others for farmers to adopt. The motivators for farmers who invent useful products for themselves, without outside involvement, are not well understood in such developed countries. These inventions, often shared with other farmers rather than introduced to the market, arise from a process of user innovation (von Hippel, 2005). This thesis examines Irish farmers’ motivators in the creation and subsequent sharing or commercialisation of farming artefacts. Their motivators are conceptualised from a sociological perspective, using Bourdieu’s theory of capitals (1986). Employing a multi-perspective research design, methods include a content analysis of 210 inventions, semi-structured interviews with key informants from innovation support organisations, and in-depth interviews with farmer-inventors. The findings indicate that most farmer-inventors get great personal satisfaction from problem-solving and, being generally without higher education, use their tacit knowledge to create inventions that increase efficiency as a means to improve family farm viability. Despite efficiency usually indicating skilful farming, Irish farmer-inventors are frequently derided by other farmers who deem their inventing to be culturally inappropriate. Farmer-inventors with entrepreneurial intentions, willing to withstand such hostility, face financial and temporal constraints, while the help offered by innovation support organisations is often inadequate. As a result, some inventions with commercial potential may never reach the market. Farmer-inventors who share their knowledge and inventions in social learning networks, similar to communities of practice, accrue social capital that leads to the emergence of a shared farmer-inventor identity. This thesis contributes to knowledge about user innovation in developed country agriculture by offering deeper understandings of farmer-inventors’ social, cultural, and economic processes. It proposes farmers to be an underappreciated source of knowledge and inventions, which offer low cost farm-level solutions to support family farm resilience.

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Small farms disappeared at a disproportionately high rate in interwar England, when compared to large farms. Unnoticed until now, this was coincidental with the dominance of farming and its political agenda by a hegemonic bloc of large-scale farmers and landowners and their supporters; this lobby neglected to demonstrate that it was small farm failure that they were utilising to represent interwar failure across the entire industry. Such continued dominance after the Second World War resulted in the historiography seeing shrinkage of the arable acreages found commonly on large farms as demonstrative of depression in interwar agriculture. Statistics show that large farms were actually better able to withstand agricultural depression. Large-scale farmers in all areas of England decreased their arable acreages voluntarily, moving into dairy production; indeed, historians have, recently, seen dairy farming expansion as showing interwar agricultural success. However, the increased competition and falling milk prices brought failure to the small farms traditionally involved in dairying. Simultaneous creation of Government subsidised smallholdings maintained artificially high numbers of small farms, further increasing competition amongst them and masking their falling numbers. The large farm lobby has attributed interwar agricultural depression to Governments’ lack of financial support; however, it used the social capital attached to ownership of substantial land and capital to influence agricultural policy to favour large-scale farming. The resulting price guarantees for milk and wheat benefited large farms even as disappearance of small farms quickened in pace. Large-scale farmers also profited from the employment of paid labour and from economies of scale, neither of which were available to small farmers. The agricultural hegemonic bloc also attributed agriculture’s problems, volubly and continually, to workers and minimum wage regulation whilst small farmers’ requirements went unheeded, leading to small farm disappearance. These problems of powerlessness amongst small businesses persist to this day.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse different aspects of the distribution of agricultural incomes in Scotland. More specifically, the thesis will first investigate the impact of agricultural income support on inequality through the analysis of its redistributive effect. Decomposition of the redistributive effect allows to determine if agricultural support has been progressive or regressive in absolute terms and whether discrimination between farms with equal pre-support incomes exists. Such assessment is performed both for actual data with the historic model of the Single Farm Payment (SFP) in place, as well as for counter-factual data generated by two hypothetical regional model distributions of the SFP; the latter is particularly informative in the context of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform that will require all Member States to adopt area-based entitlements. In addition, the thesis will study the evolution of agricultural income distribution through the analysis of income mobility. The first focus of this dynamic analysis is to investigate the transition process underlying the evolution of agricultural income inequality over time. This is achieved by decomposing changes in inequality over time into the part which measures if income growth was progressive or regressive (vertical mobility) and the part which measures the resulting reshuffling of individuals within the income order (reranking mobility). The characterisation of the expected income growth process will indirectly examine the validity of Gibrat’s law in Scottish agriculture. Furthermore, the determinants of vertical mobility will be investigated in order to analyse the impact of structural change and transitory shocks. The second focus of the dynamic analysis is to investigate whether the inequality in Scottish agricultural incomes is a transitory or structural problem, and to what extent structural inequality is caused by differences in the economic size of farms.

This thesis focuses on UK Government policy-making as it pertains to the UK farming and food industry. This sector faces many serious economic problems. In response, the UK Government has developed policies and strategies to create profitable, sustainable and internationally-competitive farming and food chains. One policy has been to promote ‘partnerships’. Considerable time and money has been spent on implementing this policy. However, the many initiatives launched have only been partially successful. A key reason for this is that many of those trying to implement ‘partnering’ have not recognised that, whilst there are many tangible and intangible advantages to be derived from ‘partnerships’, they are not always appropriate or possible. A key factor in determining when a ‘partnership’ is either appropriate or possible and whether an attempted ‘partnership’ was successful is buyer-supplier power. Unfortunately, the concept of power never featured in UK Government policy documents. The thesis also aims to improve our understanding of buyer-supplier power. While the cases showed that power was an important factor in affecting relationship success, they also showed that current power-related methodologies (Cox et al., 1999; Cox et al., 2000; Cox et al., 2003) may be too crude and require further development.

Fishing gears, and especially those that are towed across the seabed, can impose a number of impacts on the marine environment. The long term implications of many of these impacts are poorly understood and often hard to quantify from both the ecological and economic perspective (L0kkeborg, 2004). At a global level the general trend towards ecosystem based management (FAO, 2003; Pikitch et al .. 2004) and adopting the precautionary principal (FAO, 1995b, 1996) implies these impacts should be reduced. Within Europe, the focus of management has primarily been on reducing the level of commercially important species being caught incidentally ("bycatch") and subsequently discarded. These reductions have mainly been pursued through the application of restrictions on the type of fishing gear that can be used (generally termed "technical measures"). However, hard management constraints such as technical measures tend to impose increased costs on fishers, primarily through reduced productivity. These create incentives to mitigate the effectiveness of the measures, and may ultimately result in a failure to achieve the management objective. Despite ongoing attempts to reduce these impacts, bycatch and discarding rates are estimated to be in the range of 20% to 60% of catch weight for European fisheries (European Commission, 2007b). This study investigates the importance of individual environmental impacts within the context of European demersal trawl fisheries and then assesses the effects of attempting to reduce one of these impacts, that of bycatch and discarding, through the application of gear based technical measures. Priorities for the reduction of impacts are quantified at the stakeholder group level using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The results indicate that Europe's historical focus on reducing primarily commercial discards with technical measures needs to be broadened to account for other non-commercial impacts. The effects of attempting to reduce bycatch and discarding through the application of gear based technical measures are then considered using two case studies. Ex post assessments are undertaken on two fisheries; the UK East coast Crangon crangon (Brown shrimp) fishery and the Belgian large beam trawl fishery. In both instances vessel level productivity was observed to have fallen as a result of taking up bycatch reduction measures with productivity effects estimated to range between -14% and -23%. On the basis of these findings, a review was undertaken of alternative measures that may better account for the set of incentives fishers face. Whilst not yet widely applied in the context of fisheries, their potential tb simultaneously improve both economic performance and resource sustainability means they have been receiving increasing attention (Grafton et al., 2006a). Such measures appear to provide a potential solution to the main issues surrounding command and control type measures and are likely to have application when attempting to reduce discards in fisheries.

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