Lifestyle farming: countryside consumption and transition towards new farming models - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 69

mountain area with small-scale farming. The initiators are young people with higher
education and urban backgrounds who settle in the village, producing their own food and
developing new activities of public benefit for the local community . Farm structure is
determined by the terrain and natural conditions. The ownership of the land is fragmented ,
as the average size of the farms is 0.4 ha. The British initiative concerns lifestyle farmers in
Aberdeenshire, Scotland: households living on and managing land holdings of less than 10
ha for recreational and life quality purposes. Although small-scale self-provisioning has a
lengthy heritage in Scotland, dating back to the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the initiative
described relates to recreational small-scale land use which evolved primarily since the
1970s, with the arrival of the oil industry (and associated wealth) in Aberdeen. This
occupation of agricultural land for lifestyle purposes experienced a boom from 2003 to
2008, but was negatively impacted by the post 2008 recession. Finally, the Portuguese
study also reflects a spontaneous, non-organized process: rural small farms (from 2 to 20
ha) in the area surrounding Montemor-o-Novo in the Alentejo region, are increasingly
occupied by lifestyle farmers with an urban background. Montemor-o-Novo has a beautiful
landscape and is located 100 km east of Lisbon, at the axis between Lisbon and Madrid.
The replacement of former local inhabitants and farm families by newcomers started in the
late 1980s, continued into the 1990s, and has clearly been increasing in the last 10 years.
The Aberdeenshire and Montemor-o-Novo cases thus represent on-going processes,
whereas the Zhelen case represents a formally organized initiative.
The temporal scale of the three initiatives is not the same, with the Scottish case dating
from the 1970s, the Portuguese from the late 1990s, and the Bulgarian from only the past 5
years. The spatial scale also varies: a small village in Bulgaria, a surrounding area to a
small town in Portugal, and the whole of Aberdeenshire in Scotland. The studied processes
are thus in different phases, with correspondingly different scaled impacts at regional level.
Nevertheless, in all three cases there is an expansion of lifestyle farming, both in the
number of farms and in the acknowledgement of this new type of land management by
local communities. The drives associated to this new type of farming range from life
quality to proximity to nature and to a search for healthier food, differing from those of
conventional commercial farmers.
Lifestyle farming as a transition in progress
The basis of the MLP is the idea that systems (regimes) are 'locked-in' to a steady
trajectory. Innovations emerge inside and outside of regimes, requiring development and
protection from mainstream regime market trends by niche actors. These niches can lead to
regime change when a shift occurs in the external context (i.e. landscape), which
destabilizes the regime and opens a 'window of opportunity' for niche expansion, typically
in the form of an increased demand for the technology lodged within the niche (for further
details, see Darnhofer, this volume). In this section we explore the development of lifestyle
farming in the three study sites utilizing MLP.
Niche development
As discussed by Darnhofer in Chapter 2 of this volume, niches are conceptualized as being
created and protected by small groups of actors, working on innovations that deviate from
existing regimes. These actors develop norms and expectations which are less stable than