To be or to suffer? The role of cognitive dissonances in the cognitive locking of farm structural investment: an interdisciplinary perspective

Abstract While concerns about farmers’ mental health have risen all over the world over the last twenty years, the impact of farm structure on farmer’s ill-being has been discussed only recently. In this article, farm investment decision-making is scrutinized in an attempt to shed light on the connection between farm structure and current farmers’ ill-being with an interdisciplinary conceptual framework. The institutionalist approach aims to integrate the anthropological concept of sacred and the psychological concept of cognitive dissonances. The interviews of 41 urban-influenced farmers in/around the Ontario’s Greenbelt, ON, Canada, and in Toulouse InterSCoT rely on the design of their investment decision-making mental models during semi-structured interviews. Results corroborate that the internalization of the norms of the current dominant agricultural model has solved cognitive dissonances and contributed to the adoption of the modern farmer identity. Nowadays, cognitive dissonances appear to be triggered by the diverging societal demands faced by farmers.