Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
process. As a result, there are no well-defined boundaries of the niche or actor groups.
Although there are localized cases where formal initiatives are organized to pursue
alternative ways of life (for example 'back to the land' movements such as the Bulgarian
case studied in this research), in many cases it is simply individuals deciding that they
would like to pursue lifestyle interests, including but not limited to food production,
through a country residence (as in the British and Portuguese cases studied in this research).
This shift in cultural orientation towards land use could be considered a landscape feature,
as it exists outside of the commercial agricultural sector and, thus, the agricultural regime.
Alternatively, it could be considered a feature of the leisure and housing regimes,
interacting with the agricultural regime.
A further key tenet of the MLP is that niches require protection while they are
developed. In all three cases, the niche has developed without protection, which is perhaps
characteristic of innovations which are not technological in nature. Markard and Truffer's
(2008) work on the MLP suggested two forms of niche: technological niches and market
niches. Technological niches are most commonly described in MLP analyses, representing
new technologies which have been created by actors and thus require protection until they
become competitive. Market niches reflect 'natural anomalies' in regimes such as old
technologies which flourish under new consumer preferences or application contexts (so
that protection is not required). Lifestyle farming can therefore be considered a market
niche; the value of agricultural land for recreational purposes and the entrance of new
consumers have enabled the niche to flourish in the three sites.
Perhaps as a result of the lack of formal organization, the autonomy and diversity of
actors involved is striking (Fig. 5.2). This diversity has made this process difficult to
identify and define. What the actors of the niche have in common is the fact that their main
motivation for keeping and managing their land is lifestyle, but beyond this, they may have
little in common, even in the same local area because of their differing social status. While
some lifestyle farmers in the Bulgarian and Portuguese cases may be representatives of the
'voluntary simplicity' way of living, this is not the case with the majority of lifestyle
farmers in the Scottish case or with some Portuguese actors who retain their high urban
incomes along with expensive lifestyle farming activities (e.g. buying land and houses,
keeping horses).
The evidence seems to indicate that the more close connections there are in society
with rural life, the more diverse is the profile of lifestyle farmers, as relations established
with the countryside by individuals are multi-layered. In southern Europe, and particularly
in the Iberia peninsula, society was largely rural until a few decades ago (Pais de Brito,
1996). The majority of the population lived on family farms, often subsistence farming,
until the late 1960s, and the percentage of active population in agriculture was considerably
higher than in western Europe until the 1980s. The population today largely retains its roots
in the countryside; the close connection with the rural is just one or two generations behind.
This is also mostly the case in Eastern Europe, even though recent history there is quite
different. For example, the Bulgarian case shows that during the 1950s, production was
organized in large state farms and family farms disintegrated, while industrialization,
together with urbanization, developed. However, at the same time small-scale subsistence
oriented farms have been maintained, and since the 1970s the number of family farms on
private land has increased and become more widespread throughout the country resulting in
the indirect urbanization of rural communities. This is definitively not the case in northern
and western European areas, which have largely been urbanized for several generations. At
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