A-9/14 Diversification and re-feminisation of Norwegian farm properties

Female potential successors of farm properties are increasingly choosing not to take over the farm, with the result that rural areas are becoming masculinised. The question asked in this article is, how will the current shift in European and Norwegian agriculture towards increased diversification affect the recruitment of young women to rural areas? This study…

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A-7/14 Product strategies for growth in niche food firms

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of growth processes of speciality food firms and how these processes influence the producers’ perception of quality demands of the products. Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach was chosen covering four specialty food companies in Norway. This explorative study was conducted…

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A-8/14 Exclusion and inclusion of women in Norwegian agriculture: Exploring different outcomes of the ‘tractor gene’

Forty years after the Norwegian Allodial Law was amended to give firstborn girls and boys equal rights to succeed their parents as farmers, only 14 percent of Norwegian farmers are women. Gender relations on farms are still shaped by adherence to patriarchal inheritance practices and the masculine designation of the occupation ‘farmer’. This article draws…

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A-6/14 Embodying the rural idyll in farm tourist hosting

This article is concerned with service work conducted on farms, and it explores how men and women’s bodies are involved in producing and mediating positive aspects of the rural. The main question is whether the two types of work, farming and tourist hosting, are represented by compatible or conflicting bodies. The analysis is based on…

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A-4/14 The influence of farmer demographic characteristics on environmental behaviour: A review

Many agricultural studies have observed a relationship between farmer demographic characteristics and environmental behaviours. These relationships are frequently employed in the construction of models, the identification of farmer types, or as part of more descriptive analyses aimed at understanding farmers’ environmental behaviour. However, they have also often been found to be inconsistent or contradictory. Although…

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A-5/14 Crisis? What Crisis? Marginal Farming, Rural Communities and Climate Robustness: The Case of Northern Norway

Does it make sense to talk about a crisis in agriculture in one of the world’s wealthiest economies when significant quantities of public money are invested in the agricultural sector? Moreover, should one worry about the robustness of food production if it takes place at the margins of economic efficiency and where, consequently, importing food…

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A-2/14 Market liberalisation and drought in New Zealand: a case of ‘double exposure’ for dryland sheep farmers?

Market liberalisation/globalisation and climate change are two great global political/economic challenges of our time. Researchers have noted that the coincidence of these events has resulted in ‘double exposure’ where the positive or negative effects can overlap creating a pattern of winners and losers, particularly in the agricultural sector. However, existing research has been focused on…

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A-18/14 The Western European Countryside From An Eastern European Perspective: Case Of Migrant Workers In Norwegian Agriculture

In the wake of the EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007, large numbers of migrant workers from Eastern Europe in-migrated to the Western European countryside. In this paper I discuss how these migration streams in important ways challenge the dominant perspectives in contemporary rural studies, in particular their focus on lifestyle-related rural in-migration, on the…

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A-17/14 Norske verneområder: kulturpåvirkning, avskoging og gjengroing

The conservation of nature in Norway has mainly been grounded on the idea of preservation of wilderness areas, while the cultural influence within many of these areas often has been overlooked. The present study shows that many of these conservation areas hardly can be defined as undisturbed nature. GIS methods have been used to evaluate…

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A-13/14 Morality, mobility and citizenship: Legitimising mobile

In this article, we examine articulations of mobile citizenship produced through the discursive practices of state agencies, drawing in particular on a study of the contested reconfiguration of outdoor citizenship in Norway. Whilst increased participation and diversity in outdoor activities is highly valued and encouraged because of its social benefits, moral landscapes of the outdoors…

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A-11/14 Landscapes of transhumance in Norway and Spain: Farmers’ practices, perceptions, and value orientations

The mountain areas of Europe have been of vital importance in the system of summer farming whereby the movement of livestock between different altitudinal levels is a key element. However, summer farming has been downscaled considerably during the 20th century. The article describes two areas where summer farming is still practised: Forollhogna in Norway, and…

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A-10/14 Understanding farm succession as socially constructed endogenous cycles

European agriculture is experiencing a recruitment crisis that threatens the continuation of both family farming and associated rural communities. Conventionally, researchers and policymakers see farm succession as driven by discrete factors such as education level, farm size, profitability, enterprise type, and so on. This article offers an alternative perspective. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 22…

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A-1/14 Drivers of change in Norwegian agricultural land control and the emergence of rental farming

Norway represents one of the last countries in Europe where the structural development of agriculture is strongly state regulated through legislation and economic instruments. The result is an agriculture dominated by very small farms while, in most of the rest of Europe, farming has been rationalised into much larger units – thus improving the structural…

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