Understanding the diversity of European rural areas - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 34

there is a diverse range of farming and rural land use systems. Northern European
agriculture hinges around grassland and ruminant livestock systems with grain production
where conditions permit (more to the east than the west). In southern Europe, tree (and
vine) crops on farms assume greater importance in shaping what remains a more regionally
grounded set of systems of farming and food production, although grassland, grain crops
and ruminants are still of great importance. Pigs and poultry are found throughout Europe,
with highly variable systems of production from extensive systems in the dehesa and
montado of Iberia (under silvo-pastoral Quercus ilex and Quercus suber systems) to
intensive indoor systems in Denmark.
In some regions, agriculture has a lengthy history of long-distance trade; in others,
agricultural output has delivered primarily to local and regional economic demands. Even
in the pre-industrial period there was trade in agricultural products over considerable
distances. Wine was exported across Europe; as was wool, particularly high-quality wool
which produced great prosperity in both production and manufacturing areas. Even where
agricultures were predominantly subsistence-based innovation still occurred; such as the
slow but eventually widespread adoption of the potato across northern and western Europe
(Salaman, 1965); and the selection of regionally adapted varieties of crop and animal. The
nature and extent of major changes in farming - the so called 'agricultural revolutions' -
have been much debated. Technical innovations of various types, including mechanization,
land drainage techniques, feeding and breeding have occurred with varying levels of uptake
over space but have tended to occur in pulses which some have labelled revolutions. Some
might argue that contemporary science built around genetic manipulation and cell biology
places us on the threshold of yet another revolution. Notwithstanding such pulses of
innovation, by the mid-20 th century livestock breeds were still highly concentrated
regionally and European agriculture retained an intensely regional character, evidenced in
the wide variety of regional foods found in the more southern, peripheral and disadvantaged
parts of Europe. It may be pertinent to think in terms of a core area, in which new
technology is readily adopted, and a periphery where more complex processes of
deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge take place to shape farming practices and
products (van der Ploeg and Long, 1994). Indeed, innovations involved in deconstruction
and reconstruction of core knowledge are often the means of developing sustainable
agricultures in more biophysically compromised areas (Ortiz-Miranda et al. , 2013). In such
areas, what may have been lacking are the multiple processes of social and institutional
innovation required for technical innovations to break through (Moragues-Faus et al. ,
2013).
Over the last thousand years, a continent which had been characterized by a largely
feudal agricultural structure has undergone considerable but uneven change with multiple
consequences. In some regions, the small peasant farm structure remains, often replaced on
better land by more capitalist forms of farming. However, in the relatively fertile areas of
Europe, especially in the regions surrounding the triangle from Frankfurt to London to
Paris, capitalist farming replaced peasant farming at a relatively early stage - certainly by
the early 19 th century as the transformative effects of the industrial revolution began to
increase demand for food and this, in turn, stimulated changes in the farm sector. In
contrast, large parts of central and eastern Europe experienced 50 years or more of socialist
collectivization from the early- to mid-20 th century: another form of industrial agriculture.
After the collapse of that experiment in the early 1990s, collective agriculture was often
largely 're-peasantized' by restitution policies and practices more intent on social justice