Lifestyle farming: countryside consumption and transition towards new farming models - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 74

are, or have been until recently, part of a community, a village with intense social relations
amongst members.
Several sub-regimes constitute the three main regimes: (i) food production, processing
and marketing; (ii) rural housing (farms as places to live) and the real estate market; and
(iii) consumption of countryside amenities and rural lifestyle. Some of these sub-regimes
overlap, and not all are equally important in each case. Moreover, other sub -regimes are
important in the different cases. Examples include cultural heritage from agriculture in the
case of Bulgaria; traditional exploration of wild resources in the case of Portugal; or the
horse industry in the case of Scotland.
Fig. 5.2. Key actors and processes at the niche, regime and landscape levels, and their
interactions in transitions to lifestyle farming (Source: authors).
The dominant regime with which the niche interacts is agriculture. Modernization in
agriculture is a critical trend in the dominant regime. In Scotland, the process of
modernization started earlier and this means that a number of farmers have shifted from
full-time to part-time farming. This change is generally due to high capital investment and
agricultural specialization, as well as to the increasing size of plots, machinery and
buildings and the need to compete in globalized markets. Individuals who grew up on farms
often cannot afford to start their own farms and may work elsewhere, adopting small-scale
lifestyle farming as a way of maintaining their heritage (but without the need to make a
living from it). Commercial farming tends to focus on large farm units, while there is an