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Outside of Denmark, straw-based bioenergy has seen uneven success across Europe. In the UK, straw-based bioenergy has been positioned as making a potentially important contribution to the UK government's energy and environmental objectives. However, growth of the sector has been modest and supply shortages have been experienced despite straw being anticipated as readily available in the UK and surplus to existing market requirements. This paper explores a previously under theorised and neglected aspect of this story, the role played by agricultural intermediaries, merchants, contractors and advisors. Drawing on interviews with farmers, bioenergy industry representatives, agronomists, straw merchants and contractors from three case study areas, it finds that intermediaries undertake key roles providing physical and social labour required to maintain straw supply chains. They provide baling equipment, maintain informal and formal agreements with producers and users, build and maintain trust, influence on-farm management of straw and increase supply chain resilience to market shocks. However, there is tension between agronomists who advise straw incorporation and the aims of straw merchants/bioenergy policy which seek to incentivise baling. If policy makers are committed to developing a straw-based bioenergy industry, then policy frameworks need to engage in a multi-actor approach that enables the development of committed and well-resourced intermediaries.

This article explores a form of knowledge politics played out within and between universities and research institutes as sites of certified disciplinary expertise in the agro‐food domain. It investigates the openness of this domain to the expertise of the agro‐food social sciences particularly when challenge‐led research programmes require collaboration across disciplines. A case study is provided by the multi‐discipline field of food security research in the UK involving interviews with key stakeholders. The article examines how this research field's disciplinary diversity is understood by key stakeholders. Interview data are analysed thematically in terms of the current and potential contribution of social science disciplines, the different ways in which stakeholders imagine social science research, and whether social scientists themselves recognise and align with these different imaginaries. The article concludes by arguing that the field of food security research in the UK is open only selectively to agro‐food social science knowledges and that this is likely to have negative implications for addressing the challenges of food security. Further, if the promise of collaborative working between disciplines in agro‐food research fields is to be made good then the emphasis of agro‐food knowledge politics scholarship and the governance of knowledge‐making needs to change.

This paper explores a form of knowledge politics played out within and between universities and research institutes as sites of certified disciplinary expertise in the agro-food domain. It investigates the 'openness' of this domain to the expertise of the agro-food social sciences particularly when challenge-led research programmes require collaboration across disciplines. A case study is provided by the multi-discipline field of food security research in the UK involving interviews with key stakeholders. The paper examines how this research field's disciplinary diversity is understood by key stakeholders. Interview data are analysed thematically in terms of the current and potential contribution of social science disciplines, the different ways in which stakeholders imagine social science research, and whether social scientists themselves recognise and align with these different imaginaries. The paper concludes by arguing that the field of food security research in the UK is only 'selectively open' to agro-food social science knowledges and that this is likely to have negative implications for addressing the challenges of food security. Further, if the promise of collaborative working between disciplines in agro-food research fields is to be made good then the emphasis of agro-food knowledge politics scholarship and the governance of knowledge making needs to change.

Cover -- Half Title -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Chapter 1: Moralizing the Environment: Understanding Farm Pollution -- Introduction -- Methodology: Following Actors, Following Pollution -- Methods -- Outline of the book -- Chapter 2: Changing Dairy Farming and the Pollution Problem -- Processes of Change on Dairy Farms -- Effluents in the Environment -- Conclusions -- Chapter 3: Farm Pollution as a Non-issue -- Tackling an Emergent Problem -- Agricultural Exceptionalism -- Farm Pollution Regulation in the 1970s and Early 1980s -- Conclusions -- Chapter 4: The Politicization of Farm Pollution -- Introduction -- The Politics of Water Privatization -- Farm Pollution Incidents -- Defining the Problem -- Making Sense of the Data -- Local Investigations: The Torridge Report -- Challenging Agricultural Exceptionalism -- Devising a Solution -- A New Regulatory Framework -- Conclusions -- Chapter 5: The Pollution Inspectors' Accounts of Farm Pollution -- Introduction -- The Regional Organization of Farm Pollution Control -- A Day in the Life of Bob: The Field Culture of a Rural Pollution Inspector -- Perceptions of Pollution and Farming -- The Regulation of Farm Pollution -- The Threat of Prosecution -- Conclusions -- Chapter 6: The Dairy Farmers' Accounts of Farm Pollution -- Introduction -- Life on a Dairy Farm -- The Environment and the Ethos of Production -- Farmers and Farm Pollution -- Pollution Control and the Logic of Farm Improvement -- Farmers and the NRA -- Conclusions -- Chapter 7: Pollution Control and Social Networks -- Introduction -- ADAS, Farmers and Farm Pollution: The Technical Discourse -- Local Environmentalists and Farm Pollution: The Moral Discourse -- The NRA, Pollution Inspectors and Farm Pollution: Negotiating the Moral Discourse -- The Farmers' Networks.

This Programme investigated the relationship between science, politics and publics in the aftermath of an influential 2000 UK House of Lords Science and Society report. We conceptualised top-down initiatives promising greater transparency around the use of scientific evidence in policymaking and opportunities for public engagement around research and innovation agendas, as well as bottom-up instances of public mobilisation around science as an effort to make science public. In principle, such a movement seemed to speak directly to wider arguments for 'opening up' controversial domains of evidence and research to public scrutiny of framing, tacit assumptions, and alternative forms of expertise. Yet, these promises raised a number of dilemmas that we sought to examine in a range of cases.