Experts in their fields: farmer-expert knowledges and environmentally friendly farming practices

Through a focus on farming practices this paper considers farmer – science knowledges and explores three interrelated issues. First is the hitherto neglected issue of temporal dynamicity—the paper gives attention to how past history and time are constructed, organised, and drawn upon both in the way farmers develop and understand their own practices as well as in how they understand and negotiate those practices that they are now being asked to undertake in contemporary agrienvironment schemes. Second, the paper considers the way in which farmers draw on context-specific experiential understandings in completing their practices, and how these understandings conflict with, and are negotiated alongside, those understandings embedded within conservation schemes and their ‘prescriptions’. Third, the paper develops recent suggestions relating to the potential role of farmers within agrienvironment schemes by illustrating how, when approached through the appropriate methodology, farmers’ localised understandings may be usefully incorporated within the discussion of hay-meadow management for conservation.