Let's listen to one another, and learn together

A farmer recently told me about when he crashed his quad bike into a gate and flew off.

The second time he fell, he realised he needed a back-up plan for the farm. But it was the story of the crash that forced me to rethink my assumptions.

While some might focus on the injury itself as an occupational hazard, it tuned me into a new understanding of how decisions are made (or not made) on farms. I had assumed that only "real" crises - floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes - had impacts, but in reality something as simple as a head injury jeopardised the entire farm.

The Canterbury and Japanese earthquakes bring ideas of resilience, back-up plans and stability to mind. What would we do?

Disasters challenge our collective physical, mental, social, political and economic resources.

In order to develop better and more appropriate plans for responding to communities (and industries) in turmoil, we need to listen to the stories of what actually happened.

Journalistic accounts are great at telling extraordinary stories about heroism and tragedy, but are difficult to translate into policy.

In my own work collaborating with AgResearch on the Rural Futures project, we've asked farmers about the most difficult times in their farming careers.

Some mention droughts or floods. But more often they do not think in terms of crises. They tell stories about the unexpected illness of their father or about regret over giving up their sheep breeding business or the difficulty of their sons or daughters to go farming. They reflect a flexibility to the changing contours of farming.

The stories are important. But our industries and lobbying groups are comfortable assuming they know them already.

It's also become a common strategy to say that government or their urban cousins are out to get farmers, whether it's over water quality or reducing carbon. Is all compliance bad or do all farmers damage water quality? Of course not. But that is what we get told.

The world is complicated and volatile. We tell stories about our own lives - the successes and the struggles. But we also tell stories that critique and point out faults in each other. This is where we have opportunities to grow and overcome disagreements.

With the earthquake there will be stories that inform how buildings can be built differently, where it's all right to build and not.

And it's the same in agriculture. We all want our farmers and rural communities to succeed.

One of the problems of industry-sponsored research is a tendency to dismiss anything critical; there exists a "we paid for it, we only want the good stuff" attitude.

There are many stories of how great things are, but there are also stories with concerns over how animals are treated, concerns over the consolidation in the meat industry, concerns whether we'll ever get wool right.

We have to encourage avenues for these stories to be told at every level.

Many commentators and business people continue to identify the necessity for co-operation and sharing - the natural instinct following disasters. There's a great need to pursue that same instinct in agriculture as the Farmy Army indicates.

But we also need social scientific studies of these events and systems to increase communities' abilities to recover and rebuild. Sometimes just listening to someone tell their story is powerful enough to enact change. And yet our collection of farm stories is thin.

Stories are how we build stable families, communities and relationships. So we have tell them. And we have to listen. Together.

• Paul Stock is a sociologist and research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the University of Otago.