Telling the farmers’ story: Competing responses to soil conservation rhetoric

Although government and private agencies have invested heavily in discursive efforts to convince American farmers to implement conservation practices, farmers have not adopted such recommended techniques on a regular basis. This essay argues that resistance to conservation is rooted largely in the mythology of American agriculture, which creates for farmers a fundamentally conflicted sense of self that conservationists have neither recognized nor resolved. After constructing responses elicited from individual farmers into stories, the essay proposes that these stories constitute an internally inconsistent discourse that has contributed to farmer's continued resistance to conservation rhetoric. Specifically, that discourse highlights the fundamental conflict between stewardship and mastery over natural resources implicit in current renditions of American agricultural myth. On a broader scale, the essay shows how abstracting stories from elicited discourse can facilitate discovery of cultural roots for motives.