“I do not understand how I became a farmer”: The small-peasant path to family farm enterprise in post-socialist rural Hungary

Abstract

Family farm enterprises emerged in the transition to capitalism following the reprivatization and decollectivization of agriculture in Hungary. This paper explores the generative processes of capital accumulation. It focuses on the intergenerational transfer as well as the life time generation of material and immaterial resources that were mobilized for the creation of the family farm enterprise. The life stories of six family members belonging to three generations of a successful enterprise of low peasant origin were selected from fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 exploring the specificities of the genesis of farms with small peasant roots. Immaterial capital assets were the most important for the expanded reproduction of the farm, while reprivatized land had mostly symbolic importance. The farm relied on traditional peasant cultural heritage, such as striving for autonomy, self-sacrificing work mentality and traditional forms of bonding social capital, in the form of kin and local community reciprocal work relations. Meanwhile, the farm needed nontraditional cultural capital, such as entrepreneurial mentality and bridging social capital to find suitable markets for the products. These later emerged through education, by learning from experience, establishing trust relationships and with the help of mentors.

Factors Explaining the Interest of Adult Offspring in Succeeding Their Parents as Forest Owners

“…The parent's influence on the childhood was identified by Chan and Elder [27] as a factor influencing the offspring's interest in farming activities. Becker [28] and Asztalos Morell [29] also discussed the socialization process during childhood as being crucial for the choices that the child makes in later life and based their discussions on Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital. Together with Karppinen's [22] argument that the objectives of forest owners might change when a new generation takes over, this study is therefore focusing on the impact of demographic characteristics on the willingness to take over, the impact of offspring's attitudes to benefits that owning a forest offer, as well as the impact of aspects in their childhood as a member of a forest owning family.…”

Economic and Social Impacts of Promoting Cultural Heritage Protection by the Czech Rural Development Programme 2007–2013

“…These jobs were divided into tourism -55 jobs, craft -22 jobs, retail -16.2 jobs, and 48.5 jobs in other branches. 3 The total number of newly created jobs may seem to be relatively small. However, the character of supported projects was focused more on the improvement of the overall village appearance and cultivation of its environment.…”

“…Therefore, it can be concluded that the majority of implemented projects did not have significant economic impacts on municipalities and business entities in localities. 3 Total of 67 respondents answered this question, of which only 55 respondents gave a concrete number of jobs created. Others were unable to assess whether jobs had been created, or they indicated that there was no job.…”

“…With respect to these initial conditions, countries of Central and Eastern Europe had a similar political and economic development (see more e.g. Sarris, Doucha, Mathijs, 1999; Asztalos Morell, 2014;Sokol, 2001;Chaplin, Gorton, Davidova, 2007;Čapkovičová, 2016). Therefore, this paper has a strong Central European dimension as it is focused on the evaluation of the cultural heritage support in the countryside of the Czech Republic.…”