Why has farming in Europe changed? A farmers' perspective on the development since the 1960s.

Farming in Europe has been the scene of several important socio-economic and environmental developments and crises throughout the last century. Therefore, an understanding of the historical driving forces of farm change helps identifying potentials for navigating future pathways of agricultural development. However, long-term driving forces have so far been studied, e.g. in anecdotal local case studies or in systematic literature reviews, which often lack context dependency. In this study, we bridged local and continental scales by conducting 123 oral history interviews (OHIs) with elderly farmers across 13 study sites in 10 European countries. We applied a driving forces framework to systematically analyse the OHIs. We find that the most prevalent driving forces were the introduction of new technologies, developments in agricultural markets that pushed farmers for farm size enlargement and technological optimisation, agricultural policies, but also cultural aspects such as cooperation and intergenerational arrangements. However, we find considerable heterogeneity in the specific influence of individual driving forces across the study sites, implying that generic assumptions about the dynamics and impacts of European agricultural change drivers hold limited explanatory power on the local scale. Our results suggest that site-specific factors and their historical development will need to be considered when addressing the future of agriculture in Europe in a scientific or policy context. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-023-02150-y.

Farmer surveys in Europe suggest that specialized, intensive farms were more likely to perceive negative impacts from COVID-19.

It has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic affected some agricultural systems more than others, and even within geographic regions, not all farms were affected to the same extent. To build resilience of agricultural systems to future shocks, it is key to understand which farms were affected and why. In this study, we examined farmers' perceived robustness to COVID-19, a key resilience capacity. We conducted standardized farmer interviews (n = 257) in 15 case study areas across Europe, covering a large range of socio-ecological contexts and farm types. Interviews targeted perceived livelihood impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on productivity, sales, price, labor availability, and supply chains in 2020, as well as farm(er) characteristics and farm management. Our study corroborates earlier evidence that most farms were not or only slightly affected by the first wave(s) of the pandemic in 2020, and that impacts varied widely by study region. However, a significant minority of farmers across Europe reported that the pandemic was "the worst crisis in a lifetime" (3%) or "the worst crisis in a decade" (7%). Statistical analysis showed that more specialized and intensive farms were more likely to have perceived negative impacts. From a societal perspective, this suggests that highly specialized, intensive farms face higher vulnerability to shocks that affect regional to global supply chains. Supporting farmers in the diversification of their production systems while decreasing dependence on service suppliers and supply chain actors may increase their robustness to future disruptions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13593-022-00820-5.

Farming practices and biodiversity: Evidence from a Mediterranean semi-extensive system on the island of Lemnos (North Aegean, Greece).

The management of agroecosystems affects biodiversity at all levels from genetic to food-web complexity. Low-input farming systems support higher levels of genetic, species and habitat diversity than high-input, industrial ones. In Greece, as in other Mediterranean countries, the role of traditional farming practices has been underlined in studies concerning conservation in agricultural landscapes. With this study, we aim to provide evidence for the potential of semi-extensive farming for biodiversity conservation at landscape-scale, focusing on Lemnos, a medium-sized island in the North Aegean. Evidence was gathered by species- and community-level local-scale surveys on various trophic levels (vascular plants, arthropods, birds). The surveys took place in 2018 and 2019 in 25 sampling areas comprising 106 plots of 100 m2 (vascular plants, arthropods) and 57 points where bird species were recorded. The plots were classified into three landscape types: mosaic agriculture, mixed rangelands and uniform rangelands. The relevés of Lemnos farmlands were assigned to plant communities of 18 phytosociological alliances, grouped into 12 classes. The most abundant arthropods were Coleoptera, Chilopoda, and Hymenoptera, followed by Opiliones and Isopoda, while 133 different bird species were recorded in total, including the recording for the first time on the island of five species. Farming on Lemnos is rather extensive compared to most agricultural landscapes of Europe. Our approach has demonstrated that, given the geographic characteristics of the area, the measured data reveal very high biodiversity. Our explorative findings suggest that moderate seasonal grazing, the mixed habitat mosaic with ecotones, fallow and stubble fields at the landscape scale, and the small size of fields, the kinds of crop, and farm-scale crop diversification, like mixed cultivation and crop rotation, are key practices supporting this diversity. These explorative findings are considered as a first step providing the baseline for future assessments. A wider effort, for systematic evaluation of the impacts of farming practices to biodiversity, is required, as part of a subsidized agri-environmental scheme and/or through a market-oriented product certification system for the area.

Landscape products for sustainable agricultural landscapes.

Landscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment. Co-management strategies and information policies, such as certification, labelling, product information and raising of awareness could accelerate, incentivize and catalyse actions to support landscape products in the context of sustainability strategies.