Socio-productive strategy and family agriculture: new technologies and their implications on family and productive relationships in a town of southern Santa Fe

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide some theoretical and empirical knowledge regarding the profound transformations undergone by the rural sector in the Argentinean Pampa, where technological changes have had a significant impact both on productive and everyday life never seen before in the history of this area. We will try, in particular, to identify to what extent the addition of new technologies and productive motivations have changed the traditional family socio-productive pattern that took precedence among small and medium farming producers in a particular town of Southern Santa Fe (Bigand), which for the last decades has experienced an increasing and sustained process of “agriculturization”, technological advancement and specialization of the primary farming activity in relation to the monoculture of soya. This article’s design is based on a case study and aims to convey to the reader the complexity and diversity of socio-productive strategies of these farming exploitation cases that we have chosen, as related to their contexts. The strategies implemented by farming producers, which stem from the complex combination of social and economic factors, will allow us to observe the articulation between the productive initiative and family project, as well as the incidence of the “technological factor” and socio-productive context of this town of Southern Santa Fe in each of the cases