IMAGES OF FAMILY FARMING IN THE NETHERLANDS

Since the 1950s the family farm has been an uncontested and self-evide nt component of Dutch agricultural policy and in the social sciences. But the guiding image for designing agriculture's future was consisten tly based on a rejection of the family. As such the 'ideology of famil y farming', conserving and protecting an 'agrarian ethic', never playe d a noticeable role in agricultural policy. Instead, family farming wa s perceived as a personal enterprise, detached from family influences and based on rational entrepreneurial skills. It was an ideological mo del that rejected traditional family farming and industrial farming ba sed on wage labour. Its strength lay in providing a standard for the l evel of modernization to be achieved, whether technological, economic or in terms of lifestyle. The prominent place of the family idiom in p ublic discourse is explained as a political strategy to minimize polit ical controversy, The paper also shows the inherent cultural inconsist encies in the guiding image of farm modernization. It is concluded tha t combining elements of family farming and industrial farming reflecte d a modernization paradigm, which was hardly in touch with empirical r eality.