Home Volume 2, Issue 2 Unfolding Farm Practices: Working Toward Sustainable Food Production in the Netherlands and Spain

Related Papers

Content Visible to Subscribers Only

 

If you do not see a PDF on each article's webpage, you are not a subscriber to JAFSCD. (If you are a subscriber, please log in on the Home page to see the PDFs.) While the contents of the inaugural issue (volume 1, issue 1) are open to the public, the contents of issue 2 and beyond are provided for our subscribers only. Please subscribe to have access to this and any other JAFSCD content.

 

Some "Open Access Content" will be posted from time to time that is available to all viewers.

ISSUES

Not Ready To Subscribe Yet?


Sign up here to receive notification of new papers and other content we post. You won't be able to see full-text PDFs like subscribers can, but you'll be aware when new content is available.

Email*
 Prefix
 First Name
 Last Name
 Affiliation
 City
 State
 Country
  * = Required Field
 
Print E-mail

 

Unfolding Farm Practices: Working Toward Sustainable Food Production

in the Netherlands and Spain

Paul Swagemakersa,b,*, M. Dolores Domínguez Garcíaa,b, Xavier Simón Fernándeza, Johannes S. C. Wiskerkeb

http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2012.022.001, pp. 129–145

 

Abstract

The modernization of agriculture has caused and continues to cause an increasing disconnection between farming, nature, and society, which has also created a series of social, economic, and ecological crises in the food chain. Case study research of farmers responding to this situation can show us what changes are required to encourage a reconnection between farming, nature, and society. This paper provides ethnographic case study research of two farms: one situated in a productive polder in the Netherlands, and the other in a disadvantaged mountainous area in Galicia, Spain. They both employ "novelty production," farmer-driven adaptations to the farm, seen as a socio-ecological system. These novelties change the input-output relations on farms and result in adaptations in different farming domains (technical, economic, and socio-organizational), which we see as "unfolding" farming practices. This paper examines how these farmers have sustained and improved the socio-ecological performance of their farms and how these changes have led to a shift in the farm as a socio-ecological system and changed the configuration and boundaries of the farms. In conclusion we look at prospects for this approach being supported at a wider level.

 

Keywords 

case study research, farming, food production, novelties, novelty production, farm labor

 

Affiliations

a Grupo de Investigación en Economía Ecológica y Agroecología, Universidad de Vigo, Ciencias Económicas y LADE, Lagoas Marcosende s/n 36310 Vigo, España.

 

b Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 8130, NL-6700 EW Wageningen, the Netherlands.

 

* Corresponding author: Paul Swagemakers, +34662038696 / +31618883568 / +34986814005;

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 

 

        DONATE TO JAFSCD

 

Banner photos include a Cape Cod cranberry bog; a cranberry “screen house” used to grade fresh cranberries; farmland near Lake Placid, NY, in the Adirondack Mountains; Montmorency cherry trees on the Mission Peninsula of northern Michigan; the historic Round Barn in the South Mountain Apple Belt of Adams County, Pennsylvania; the “Sea of Grapes” district of the Lake Erie Concord Grape Belt, near Erie, Penn; a field of cabbages near Shortsville, NY, home to one of the world’s largest sauerkraut factories. All photos copyright by Duncan Hilchey.

 

Developed by  CyberSense.US