The cultural narrative in Scottish agricultural enterprise

Over five decades of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have shaped economic activity and output from agricultural enterprise. Controls stemming from the CAP structure mean that the economics of agricultural enterprise is understood and heavily reported through government agri-reports; the numbers of farm exits, incomes to farms and viable hectares of barley are annually reported. This is
the foreground for agricultural policy and the basis on which agricultural enterprise is currently understood. In the background however there is humanity and history in every farm enterprise; the family, individuals and communities that live the everydayness and entrepreneurship of farming life.
The purpose of this paper is to bring what has been a research background of agricultural enterprise to the foreground by exploring the cultural narrative. This discussion paper will argue that cultural perspectives provide firstly a necessary correction to the balance of knowledge currently over exercised from economic perspectives and secondly an insight to why the farm is what it is in the contemporary economy.
This paper contributes a view that cultural narrative yokes a unique understanding of why agricultural enterprise behaves the way it does from within a profound cultural architecture.