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.

Making sense of breaks in landscape change.

Context: The paper studies the possibilities of how the cultural explosion theory and path dependence approach could be used for exploring landscape (change). The former is an approach (not theory) used in humanities and social sciences to study the processes that happen when culture changes rapidly-how new cultural processes are created and how the past ones are integrated or forgotten. The latter is an approach developed also in social sciences, mostly economy, to study how the current decisions are dependent on the past decisions. Objectives: To demonstrate the possibilities the two theoretical approaches might offer. Methods: We discuss the ways landscape change could be analysed using, first, cultural explosion theory and, second path dependence approach, and demonstrate this on the example of the post-Soviet military areas. Results: Both approaches are indeed useful in understanding landscape change. The demo case on military landscapes allows for distinguishing three different development paths for the future of the areas: set-aside, active use, and neglect. Similarly three different ways of relating with the past are found: ignorance and oblivion; acknowledging the past; and making use of the past. Conclusions: Landscapes have time boundaries and these two analytical tools in fact help us to navigate through these boundaries, understand better the trajectories of change and the importance (or the lack of it) of the past.