title: Agricultural Dynamics at the Farm and Landscape Level across Europe since the 1950s
Creators: name: Mohr, Franziska
Publisher: name: Universität Bern
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: 910 Geography &amp; travel

description: Agriculture in Europe has changed at an unprecedented rate during the last century. While agricultural yields have multiplied, they have come at serious environmental costs such as a decrease in biodiversity or in soil and water quality. The intensification of agriculture further led to a continuous increase in farm size and decrease in the number of farms across Europe. To address the current environmental, economic, and social challenges, there are calls for a sustainable transformation of agriculture. In the last decades different approaches have been proposed to support such transformations, for example sustainable intensification, which aims to combine intensive production with greater - mainly ecological - sustainability. Many of the practical actions toward more sustainable agriculture will take place at the farm and landscape level.
In light of current agricultural challenges in Europe, the project ’What is Sustainable Intensification? Operationalizing Sustainable Agricultural Intensification Pathways in Europe (SIPATH)’ aimed to explore pathways to more sustainable agriculture at continental, landscape, and farm scales. This thesis is part of the project and takes a historical perspective to analyze agricultural dynamics and underlying mechanisms in Europe. By considering farmers’ perspectives as well as aerial imagery in different study sites across Europe, the focus of this thesis lies on an integrative analysis of farm and landscape change for different time scales and contexts. More specifically the thesis aims 1) to analyse factors that shaped the diversity of historical agricultural trajectories across Europe, 2) to relate recent trajectories of agricultural/landscape change to longer-term past changes and to societal visions for the future, and 3) to explore necessary methodological considerations when taking into account a farmers’ perspective to assess long-term agricultural and landscape dynamics.
At the core of the thesis lie seven scientific papers that address the research aims by focusing on different aspects of farm and landscape change. All research activities are based on a set of 13 study sites defined for the SIPATH project. The study sites are distributed across Europe to cover a range of bio-physical conditions, socio-economic contexts, and farming systems. The main dataset for this dissertation is a compilation of 123 oral history interviews (OHIs) with (nearly) retired farmers which were conducted across all study sites. The goal of these interviews was to provide insights into the reasons for farm and landscape change. To take into account more recent trends, data from other interview activities of the SIPATH project was also considered. To gain insight into the impact of agricultural change on the landscape, we analyzed landscape change by comparing land cover/land use changes between different time steps based on aerial imagery of the study sites. The results of the spatial analysis were then combined with interview data in mixed methods approaches. The seven papers cover a range of time periods with some papers focusing on longer periods (from about 1950 onwards) or shorter periods (from about 2000 onwards).
In order to analyze the factors that have shaped the diversity of historical agricultural trajectories (research aim 1), the first step was to focus on the driving forces for farm change as identified by the farmers in the OHIs across all study sites. It was found that some driving forces were frequently mentioned in all study sites, mainly related to economic, technological, institutional, but also cultural aspects. However, site-specific drivers that were perceived as instrumental to farm change only in individual study sites were also identified. Pairwise comparisons of farm and landscape change in similar study sites further revealed that land tenure, antecedent land use systems, population dynamics, institutional specificities, and power relations are important factors contributing to site-specific trajectories. This suggests that historical context has an influence on current trends and future development of agricultural landscapes, such as prevailing land use and the composition of farming systems.
Relating recent trajectories of agricultural/landscape change to longer-term past changes and to societal visions for the future (research aim 2), improved the understanding of the recent trajectories. Historical narratives added the larger contexts and rationales for the observed recent change, providing insights into potential path dependencies. Comparing three different societal visions for future agriculture with observed change trajectories of the last twenty years showed the extent to which visions are already reflected in landscape and farm changes. Knowing how aspects of observed trends diverge or align with different visions can highlight both specific areas for action to steer change more toward a particular vision, and synergies between different visions that could be entry points to facilitate the envisioned change.
Regarding methodological considerations of adding farmers perspectives to assess long-term farm and landscape dynamics (research aim 3), it was found that OHIs are an unique tool for researching historical farm and landscape change. They enable a long-term local perspective on mechanism of change, including also less tangible factors such as power structures, verbal agreements or personal values. However, since OHIs are based on the reproduction of memories, which are not only subjective but also have other limitations, it may be beneficial to combine findings from OHIs with other sources. For landscape analysis, combining remote sensing data with farmers’ perceptions of landscape change proved insightful as the two data sources informed and complemented each other.
The research showed a great diversity of long-term farms and landscape trajectories, driving forces, and historical contexts. This suggests that future policies directed at making agriculture more sustainable could benefit from considering more localized solutions, moving away from one-size-fits-all policies. Furthermore, farmers’ rationales for farm change took into account many external factors, such as economic realities or political regulations that favored certain farm developments while reducing perceived autonomy. Designing policies that target all actors in the food system, and that address motivational as well as financial aspects, could contribute to wider adoption of sustainable agriculture. Finally, the research in this thesis highlights the constant change in agricultural systems, landscapes and farms in Europe that has occurred during the study period and is likely to occur in the future. Considering this, actively moving towards greater sustainability in agriculture is both an opportunity and a responsibility for farmers, policy makers and the wider food system actors.