Farmers' adaptions and strategies within conventional and alternative dairy farming: case studies from the outermost regions of Eastern Finland and Southern ...
Farmers’ adaptions and strategies within conventional and alternative dairy farming: case studies from the outermost regions of Eastern Finland and Southern Italy Fulvio Rizzo Department of Geographical and Historical and Studies University of Eastern Finland XIV WORLD CONGRESS OF RURAL SOCIOLOGY 2016, 10-14th of August, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Introduction
Agricultural systems are Social-Ecological Systems (SES), which consist of the coevolution and interaction of a socio-economic system, and an eco-system at various levels and scales.
It is necessary to understand how spatial, temporal, and cultural variation, complexity and uncertainty are reflected both at the farm level, and at the farmers’ decision-making level.
Against the multi-dimensional background of socio-economic, political and environmental dynamics, adaptations and strategies increasingly appear to be very important factors in any approach to promote the transition towards sustainable farming.
Global concerns over sustainable food production, combined with decreasing and volatile farm incomes in Europe, highlight the importance of new research to inform policies on how to increase the viability of farm enterprises, and support wider rural sustainability objectives.
Research aims and questions
The overall aim of the research is to both identify and contextualise practices of dairy farmers’ adaptations and strategies, and how these support wider sustainability objectives. 1) How dairy farmers adapt their farming practices and strategize their responses to bio-physical/social changes (as the abolition of milk quotas, the Russian import ban, animal diseases, droughts)? 2) How and to what extent material structures (social, cultural, and ecological dynamics) affect dairy production practices? 3) In the light of their cultural and environmental beliefs, what are the farmers’ interpretations of sustainability?
The research seeks to understand the interplay between the revised terms of dairy production and farmers’ decision-making, and how such interplay reveals farmers’ resilience and, to a broader extent, promotes sustainability.
Dairy farming: changing policies and markets
In the EU, the dairy sector is of significant economic, social, and territorial importance, and it accounts for 15% of the agricultural output (2014). As well, as the leading exporter of many dairy products, the EU is a major player in the world dairy market.
The abolition of dairy quotas in the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2015 “represents an economic but also socio-cultural disruption for a sizeable cohort of farmers, requiring adaptation to more market-driven production strategies” (McDonald et al., 2014, 21).
The recent Russian embargo (the EU-28 has lost almost €5 billion in agri-food exports to Russia in the past year) has further increased market uncertainty, at least in the short term.
The European Commission has presented in July 2016 a new package of measures worth €500 million from EU funds to support dairy farmers in the face of ongoing market difficulties.
T h e o r e t i c a l
f r a m ework
S u s t a i n a b i l i t y Deleuzian
becoming
Relational approach Material structures (bio-physical/social)
Expert knowledge
Farming culture and knowledge
Resilience
Conventional agriculture
Farmers’ decision-making
Normative View of Multifunctionality
Alternative agriculture
EU dairy farmer development model, 2015–2020 Survivors
Source: Promar International, 2015
Entrepreneur/Leaders
Hands-on role, day-to-day focus Focus on leadership/team Limited, often inherited building and innovation knowledge Innovation and value creation for Higher prices seen as way to customer recognised as solutions improve profit to improve profit Limited engagement with supply Intense engagement with supply chain chain and beyond
Doers
Managers
Hands-on role, day-to-day focus Evolving focus – skilled cow Rely on suppliers i.e. feed reps managers, then finance etc. for advice managers then people managers ‘Working harder’ seen as solution Professional advice – vet, to improving profitability breeding, etc Some engagement with primary Increasing scale and efficiency buyer seen as solution to improve profitability High engagement with primary buyer
Study areas Sicily
North Karelia
Distretto Produttivo Lattiero-Caseario Siciliano
Itä-Maito Cooperative
Methodology and data
Conventional and alternative farming. The former is typically capital-intensive, the latter include in this case both organic agriculture, and agriculture based on tradition, and subsitence strategies.
Qualitative data will include 20-25 semi-structured interviews per case study with both conventional and organic farmers. These are supplemented by interviews with key informants from farming organizations (both advisory and lobbying), dairy cooperatives, and academics (at the time of writing, interviews with key informants have been collected in North Karelia).
These data will be supplemented both by reports relating to the design and implementation of dairy farming policies in the respective case studies, and by the analysis of key statistics concerning dairy production structure in Sicily and North Karelia.
Regional settings and multifunctionality
In the regions of Southern Italy, whose underdevelopment has often been claimed as pathdependent (see for instance Putnam 1993), multifunctional trends take place within a tension that sees on the one hand phenomena of resilience which are based on the persistence of those traditional characteristics that had been once considered an obstacle to modernization and the expression of an economy of marginality (Meloni and Farinella 2013), and on the other hand negative phenomena of environmental degradation as the exploitation of migrants in rural areas, and the growing interest of organized crime in environment management (Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto 2014).
In the regions of Eastern Finland, with its dual nature of economic/geographic periphery and strong cultural traits (Häyrynen 2003), multifunctional patterns lie between the concentration and specialization of agricultural production on the one hand, and powerful rural development discourses on the other (Rizzo 2012; Rizzo 2013).
Source: ProAgria, Pohjois Karjala (2016)
Source: ProAgria, Pohjois Karjala (2016)
Source: ProAgria, Pohjois Karjala (2016)
Italian Regions
Piemonte
Source: ISTAT, 2012
Percentage of Cattle farms of the total amount of farms 29,4
Valle d'Aosta/Vallèe d’Aoste
41,6
Liguria
12,6
Lombardia
40,6
Bolzano / Bozen
49,2
Trento
14,5
Veneto
16,8
Friuli-Venezia Giulia
15,0
Emilia-Romagna
17,2
Toscana
13,6
Umbria
13,8
Marche
14,5
Lazio
14,8
Abruzzo
11,6
Molise
15,3
Campania
10,7
Puglia
3,3
Basilicata
11,3
Calabria
7,4
Sicilia
7,0
Sardegna
33,8
Italia
13,4
Type of cattle raised by geographical area in Italy, 2012
Source: ISTAT, 2012
Regions
Total number Total number Number of Of cattle Of livestock beef cattle farms farms
Number of dairy cattle
SICILIA
15.308
9.153
336.152
47.480
Nord-ovest
45.823
30.223
2.347.732
711.756
Nord-est
48.329
32.021
1.580.884
528.021
Centro
35.897
17.964
422.122
84.356
Sud
51.542
26.997
653.848
194.324
Isole
35.858
17.005
588.114
80.985
ITALIA
217.449
124.210
5.592.700
1.599.442
Source: ISTAT, 2012
Concluding remarks
At the core of many changes towards a more sustainable agriculture is the individual decisionmaker, the farmer.
The decisions by each farmer have impacts on sustainability, and they are made in a complex world of contradictory interests and values (Lindblom et al., 2014).
This is why it is important to have a better understanding on how decisions are made in agriculture, at both the operational and strategic level (Lindblom et al., 2014).
On the one hand, it is anticipated that more Stage 3 (Managers) (Entrepreneurs/Leaders) farmers will be located in the North Karelia case study.
On the other hand, farming systems less integrated in the industrialized food networks, which, to a certain extent, are more a characteristic of the Sicilian farming landscape may be more compatible for the fulfillment of the policy paradigm of sustainability.
and
Stage
4
