Lifestyle farming: countryside consumption and transition towards new farming models - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 68

Marsden (2013) recently identified the emergence of a renewed interest in production
functions in farming areas in Western countries, particularly after the food crisis of
2007/2008, suggesting a further shift taking place from post-productivism to sustainable
intensification (bio-economic productivism).
Countryside consumption can thus be understood as a driver of farm and farmland
management grounded in quests for a rural lifestyle, and healthy food and leisure, which
may or may not be closely linked to production. Countryside consumption definitively
changes the way in which the actors concerned deal with farming, or involves the
introduction of new actors into the farming sector. This particular form of farm
management can be defined as 'lifestyle farming', where the rural landholder does not
derive his/her income primarily from production (in other words the income generated from
agriculture is not the main driver of land use and the value of agricultural production tends
to be less of a determinant than other factors for farmer choices). Yet the lifestyle farmer
may be, and often is, a producer and since he/she manages agricultural land, countryside
consumption also has an impact on the management of the physical landscape.
In this analysis, lifestyle farming is conceptualized as forming a socio-technical niche
(see Darnhofer, this volume), since it introduces novel land uses. The concept relates to
new beliefs and values, new technologies and practices, new configurations of actor groups,
new networks, and it may lead to new policies, or to a renewed use of the existing polic y
framework. In essence, lifestyle farming represents a mismatch with existing commercial
farming structures and practices (the 'regime') and it also deviates from the emerging push
towards sustainable intensification. Although the shift towards lifestyle farming has been
growing for several decades, most often there has been no collective or shared intention to
enable radical change at the regime level; it is a change that originated among local actors,
taking place at local levels in various locations throughout Europe. However, niche actors
or groups of actors engage with organizational structures at regime level in increasingly
significant ways. Here in particular, because of its fuzzy character, relations with relevant
regimes including housing and conservation are complex and require a detailed analysis
within an updated conceptual framework, in order to be disentangled. Lifestyle farming
thus presents an opportunity to further develop and challenge the concepts within the multi-
level perspective (MLP) in assessing change processes surrounding transition in the
agricultural sector. In turn, the complexity of the processes of countryside consumption and
its multiple dimensions require new analytical tools and conceptual grids from, among
others, the agronomy and rural community perspectives (Renting et al. , 2009; Milone and
Ventura, 2010). Using the MLP as an analytical framework therefore provides us with a
tool to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of these processes.
Characterizing lifestyle farming as a transition in progress
The case studies
In order to assess the transition to lifestyle farming evident in specific European regions,
three case studies were selected (Fig. 5.1). The Bulgarian case focuses on the Trinoga
Association, included in a formally organized initiative which, since 2005, has promoted
the idea of community-supported agriculture for healthy and locally grown food. The
association is located in the village of Zhelen, situated 50 km north of Sofia, a depopulated