Dysfunctional path dependence in mid-century butterfat dairy farming on eastern Australia's subtropical coastlands: case studies at Moruya and Copmanhurst

Abstract

The concept of path dependence is central to the current discourse on evolutionary approaches in regional transformations. Along the subtropical coastlands of eastern Australia, low-input, low-income, and labour-intensive dairy farms were subject to prolonged dysfunction. Their creation and entrenchment serve as a potent case study of path dependence and lock-in that were driven by mutually reinforcing attributes—behavioural, socio-economic, cultural, political, and infrastructural. Functional rigidification and incipient dissolution were scrutinised in farm surveys undertaken from 1952 to 1954 in the Moruya and Copmanhurst districts of coastal New South Wales. At both locales, the dairy industry comprised a core of long-term stable producers located mainly on the more accessible and productive alluvial soils, together with a fluctuating number of marginal producers motivated by a variable mix of personal, locational, and temporal influences. The demise of dairying was prolonged, in part by the industry's exceptional survival capabilities and in part by the lack of any viable alternative farming staple. The belated collapse of dairy farming in the 1960s and 1970s has facilitated the emergence and lock-in of an alternative multifunctional pathway, driven primarily by consumption with subordinate production and protection values. The two case studies reveal synergies between the closely aligned path dependence and the multifunctional trajectory/transition concepts in yielding insights into the dynamics of rural change and in offering guidelines for further research within evolutionary economic geography.