Farming and Landscape Management: How French Farmers are Coping with the Ecologization of Their Activities

Abstract

In Europe, an increasing share of public subsidies for food production is being transferred towards the production of goods and environmental services.

Refining perception-based farmer typologies with the analysis of past census data

“…Profit-oriented farmers on the other hand have a poor consideration towards environmental issues and a strong production orientation, although they have fully exploited AES, and demonstrate the highest level of voluntary subsidies relative to income. Deuffic and Candau (2006) have described two groups of French farmers who seem closely related to the traditionalists and multifunctionalists found in this study. In the first case, traditionalist farmers claimed that low levels of maintenance (e.g.…”

Creating culturally sustainable agri-environmental schemes

“…This enables farmers to disown personal responsibility for scheme areas while concentrating on production (and the accumulation of productivist symbolic capital) in the remaining areas of the farm (Wilson and Hart, 2001;Deuffic and Candau, 2006;Burton et al, 2008). Again, this is likely to limit the extent to which the behaviours become integrated within the local knowledge culture as all of the focus can remain on the skills applied to productive land.…”

Farm diversity, classification schemes and multifunctionality

“…In this respect, a farming style provides a specific model for decision-making, one where the strategic notions are repeatedly shared by groups of farmers. Hence, it is possible to refer to the networks in which these notions circulate and are discussed (the French research tradition building on the work of J.-P. Darre refers to this as groupement professionel local; see for instance Beaudeau, 1994;Deuffic and Candau, 2006).…”