The Emergence of Rural Support Organisations in the UK and Canada: Providing Support for Patrilineal Family Farming

A certain type of rural support has emerged since agricultural restructuring of the 1980s. The article draws on research from the UK and Canada to suggest that support in both countries is derived from a patrilineal culture that still dominates family farming in both countries. Such a way of life, it is argued, involves the majority of farming men and women across generations working increasingly hard to ensure farm survival in order to facilitate an overall pattern of farm succession via the male or ‘patrilineal’ line. The article begins by providing a conceptualisation of patrilineal family farming drawing on insights from gender-informed work on farming identities, political-economy approaches from agricultural geography and the cultural turn in rural studies. This section will provide theoretical direction for discussion of the research findings. Here the article presents a discussion of the context to and typologies of organisations that emerged and five key findings derived from research conducted with members of the organisations in the UK and Canada. This assists in developing the argument that the emergent organisations are responding to and supporting this way of life and highlights some of the potential implications of doing so. The article has two aims. Firstly, it suggests that family farming in the UK and Canada continues to be predominantly structured by a way of life transmitted across generations which has the overall prerequisite of maintaining farm survival to enable patrilineal succession. Secondly, it suggests that a particular type of support for farming families emerged as a response to perceived threats to this way of life and provides evidence of its enduring nature.

Statistical-mechanical description of classical test-particle dynamics in the presence of an external force field: modelling noise and damping from first principles

Aiming to establish a rigorous link between macroscopic random motion (described e.g. by Langevin-type theories) and microscopic dynamics, we have undertaken a kinetic-theoretical study of the dynamics of a classical test-particle weakly coupled to a large heat-bath in thermal equilibrium. Both subsystems are subject to an external force field. From the (time-non-local) generalized master equation a Fokker-Planck-type equation follows as a "quasi-Markovian" approximation. The kinetic operator thus defined is shown to be ill-defined; in specific, it does not preserve the positivity of the test-particle distribution function f(x, v; t). Adopting an alternative approach, previously introduced for quantum open systems, is proposed to lead to a correct kinetic operator, which yields all the expected properties. A set of explicit expressions for the diffusion and drift coefficients are obtained, allowing for modelling macroscopic diffusion and dynamical friction phenomena, in terms of an external field and intrinsic physical parameters.