The French Ministry of Agriculture has called for agro-ecological transitions that reconcile farming and the environment. In this review, we examine the transformations of farmers and AKIS (Agriculture Knowledge Innovation System) actors’ work during agro-ecological transitions, and argue that the content, organization, and aim of farmers’ work are influenced by agricultural training, agricultural development, and discussions between peers, research, and regulations. Our main findings concern those transformations.
The challenges faced by agricultural systems call for an advance in risk management (RM) assessments. This research identifies and discusses potential improvements to RM across 11 European Union (EU) farming systems (FS). The paper proposes a comprehensive, participatory approach that accounts for multi-stakeholder perspectives relying on 11 focus groups for brainstorming and gathering suggestions to improve RM.
According to the literature on regime tran-sition, niches are sources of innovation that may lead to the transformation of the dominant regime, if pro-cesses at other level of the system –the landscape and the mainstream regime -are supportive. A focus on actors involved in the transition process and the analysis of their specific role in knowledge networks can help assessing the robustness of a specific niche and its growth potential. Knowledge systems, and in particular the dynamics of local and expert knowledge, have in fact a key role in innovation mod-els.
The aim of this article is to show the relevance of the sociology of market agencements (an offshoot of actor-network theory) for studying the creation of alternative agri-food networks. The authors start with their finding that most research into alternative agri-food networks takes a strictly informative, cursory look at the conditions under which these networks are gradually created. They then explain how the sociology of market agencements analyzes the construction of innovative markets and how it can be used in agri-food studies.
The important role that small farms play in supporting rural livelihoods, conserving biodiversity and maintaining traditional landscapes, rural traditions and cultural heritage is widely accepted. Nevertheless, they are often under the radar of the agriculture policy mechanisms, which tend to focus on the very large farms and globally driven food chains.
Es ampliamente aceptado el importante papel que desempeñan las pequeñas explotaciones agrícolas en el apoyo a los medios de vida rurales, la conservación de la biodiversidad y el mantenimiento de los paisajes tradicionales, las tradiciones rurales y el patrimonio cultural. Sin embargo, a menudo pasan desapercibidos para los mecanismos de política agrícola, que tienden a centrarse en las explotaciones agrícolas muy grandes y en las cadenas alimentarias impulsadas a nivel mundial.
The EU-funded SALSA project set out to examine a potentially very important role of small farms – their contribution to food security.
Small farms in Northern Europe are found alongside some of the largest - and in some cases, most industrialised - farms in the whole of Europe.
SALSA is an EU Horizon 2020 project that set out to assess the current and future role of small farms and related small food businesses (suppliers, processors, distributors) in achieving sustainable Food and Nutrition Security (FNS). SALSA studied small farms in 30 reference regions in 20 countries - 25 regions (at the so-called NUTS3 administrative level) in Europe and 5 regions in Africa.
This document collects a series of fact sheets realized under the EU-funded SALSA project, which is aimed to understand how small farms and food businesses contribute to sustainable food and nutrition security (FNS).
The research findings in the fact sheets concern 30 reference regions from countries in Europe and Africa. For each region, we present:
● The regional indicators on the concentration and spatial distribution of small farms (SF), obtained also with support of the Sentinel-2 satellite data