Sustainable agriculture discourses in Germany: a comparative analysis of large-scale text data

Agriculture is a prominent topic in sustainability discourses. However, the debate on the context of what constitutes sustainable agriculture remains to be solved. The relationship between agriculture and sustainability is a rather emotionally charged topic. It touches upon central moral issues such as the relationship between people and nature. At the same time, in an era of increasing urbanization, there is growing detachment, particularly of the urban population, from the realities of farming, often leading to romanticizing the past and demonizing modern “industrial” agriculture. This often results in conflicts that are increasingly played out in the political arena, e.g. in the context of bottom-up initiatives such as referenda (e.g. “Biodiversity & natural beauty in Bayern, Germany”) or farmers’ protests (e.g. the protests against nitrate regulations in the Netherlands and Germany). These alternatives reflect public discourses, which seem to exhibit very little overlap. Ultimately, however, these discourses drive agricultural and environmental policy - understanding them is therefore crucial if one wants to understand the continuing failure of sustainability policies.

Here we present a large-scale text analysis using text mining tools to compare three discourses on sustainable agriculture: the scientific discourse (based on an analysis of abstracts from peer-reviewed publications on the topic); the public discourse (based on an analysis of newspaper articles); and the professional farming discourse (based on an analysis of articles from agricultural magazines). We collected three sets of data for the topic modelling analyses: scientific articles (6403 abstracts), newspaper articles (7851 full texts) and agricultural magazine articles (2414 full texts). These were subject to BERTopic modelling analysis to generate coherent topic representations. These topics are used to shed light on discourses related to sustainable agriculture with a focus on Germany. We apply topic modelling to identify topics that emerge from each of these three discourses and compare them in terms of prevalence and temporal development. The overarching question is what is being discussed under the label “sustainable agriculture”, how the three discourses differ in this respect and whether there are any signs of interaction or even convergence in terms of discussed topics. We thus provide a unique perspective on a central, heavily contested part of the sustainability discourse.