2 - The Organisation of Agricultural Science, 1935–85

Summary

If the state requires an agricultural industry that produces more, and produces it more efficiently, and expects those output and efficiency gains to arise largely from scientific and technical changes, it should presumably, in a perfect world, invest in science to produce new technology and then ensure that farmers and their workers acquire familiarity with that new technology. This chapter is therefore concerned with investments in agricultural science, by both the state, on which there is much information, and by private firms, on which there is much less. It does not attempt to outline the work of agricultural scientists, their discoveries, and developments, or the resultant changes in technologies and practices in this period. There are two reasons for this: first, to do so would require another book of at least the length of the present one; secondly, two agricultural scientists, Sir Kenneth Blaxter and Noel Robertson, published almost exactly that book in 1995. What they did not do was to explain at any length why governments chose to fund agricultural research, or how they administered it, or how its results were supposed to be passed on to farmers. This chapter concentrates on the first two of these questions, and the following chapter attempts to trace the problems encountered in moving from science to practice. As a shorthand term for this process, we shall refer to it as a knowledge network. Since the science and its onward transmission in knowledge networks are intimately linked, it is appropriate to begin with a brief survey of the literature that is relevant to both chapters.

There are numerous theoretical approaches to the analysis of knowledge networks, in which we include here the analysis of technical innovation, diffusion, and adoption, although it could be argued that a knowledge network is simply one part of that larger process. A crude division would be between economic and sociological models, and it is crude because many of the models analyse both economic and sociological variables, although some privilege an economic methodology while others write from a sociological perspective. Thus Hayami and Ruttan with their induced innovation concept (essentially, that technical change is a response to factor price changes) would be among the more obviously economic in approach, although they emphasise the importance of land tenure and other rural institutions.