IMAGES OF FAMILY FARMING IN THE NETHERLANDS.

Since the 1950s the family farm has been an uncontested and self-evident component of Dutch agricultural policy and in the social sciences. But the guiding image for designing agriculture's future was consistently based on a rejection of the family. As such the ‘ideology of family farming’, conserving and protecting an 'agrarian ethic', never played a noticeable role in agricultural policy. Instead, family farming was perceived as a personal enterprise, detached from family influences and based on rational entrepreneurial skills. It was an ideological model that rejected traditional family farming and industrial farming based on wage labour. Its strength lay in providing a standard for the level of modernization to be achieved, whether technological, economic or in terms of lifestyle. The prominent place of the family idiom in public discourse is explained as a political strategy to minimize political controversy. The paper also shows the inherent cultural inconsistencies in the guiding image of farm modernization. It is concluded that combining elements of family farming and industrial farming reflected a modernization paradigm, which was hardly in touch with empirical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]