Framing tools for fooling farms: An agnotological history of the nitrogen-dispute in Dutch newspaper discourse (1950 – 1980)

Abstract

In a period of accelerating modernization of Dutch agriculture (1950 – 1980), newspaper media saw the coming of a public debate about fertilizers, a cosmopolitical issue combining technical aspects from agricultural sciences and ecology, as well as aspects of social justice, class-struggle, and post-colonial relations. Controversial themes included how to ensure global food security for a growing population and how to deal with new worries of environmental pollution. Especially from the late 1960s onwards, the debate started to polarize, positioning environmentalist ideology against a technocratic one. Although publicly highly controversial, in societal ‘reality’ bio-farming, vegan diets, and socio-economic solutions to global inequality, were barely practised. Values of good business, economic growth, and the promise of scientific innovation, remained dominant, clearing the way for an eco-modernist mindset that would change the character of the debate during the 1980s. Against that background, the public fertilizer debate cannot be viewed as a free marketplace of ideas, for the newspaper reader to consume and choose between as part of a democratic process. Rather, a wide range of public actors, conventional farmers, bio-farmers, directors of fertilizer companies, politicians, scientists, and journalists, actively used the public platform of newspapers to support their cosmopolitical claims, and ridicule, marginalize, or hide the claims of others. That rhetoric of ideological manipulation can be interpreted and studied as a process of producing ignorance about ideological alternatives. On the basis of 144 newspaper articles, the fertilizer debate of the time is represented with regard for its complexity. Afterwards it is analyzed by looking at the selectivity of authors, showing how various fertilizer-related problems where dealt with in reductionistic fashion, producing ignorance about their systemic interdependencies. In addition, in this agnotological history, seven different rhetorical strategies or tools are conceptually worked out (hypothetically) and used to identify the making of ignorance in newspaper discourse, wanting to know how ignorance of ideological alternatives was produced. Many examples were found of cruel optimism, hypocritical philanthropy, false oppositions, normative facts, knowledge as doubtful noise, fake news, and stigmatization, used to frame the notion of the modern farm. A close reading of my sources also suggests that many authors at the time were both aware of various ideological options, as well as at least some of the agnotological strategies available. Ideological manipulation, thus, was in part intentional.