The socio-cultural sustainability of animal farming : an inquiry into social perceptions of dairy farming in the Netherlands and Norway

De afgelopen 50 jaar is de veehouderij in schaalgrootte toegenomen en geïntensiveerd. Tegelijkertijd zijn Westerse samenlevingen meer verstedelijkt en hebben minder mensen familieleden in de landbouw. Als gevolg daarvan hebben weinig burgers kennis van of directe ervaring met de landbouw. Duurzame ontwikkeling is een omstreden concept en wordt in veel gebieden bediscussieerd en op verschillende manieren gedefinieerd. Deze studie richt zich op burgerpercepties van de veehouderij om inzicht te krijgen in de sociaal-culturele aspecten van een duurzame veehouderij

Met burgers de boer op : Input voor een maatschappelijk debat over een gewaardeerde en duurzame veehouderij

Dit boekje behandelt de opmerkelijkste resultaten van het kwalitatieve deel van het promotieonderzoek over de beelden, wensen en zorgen van burgers over de melkveehouderij. Deze uitgave is gebaseerd op promotieonderzoek van Birgit K. Boogaard, getiteld "Sociaal-culturele duurzaamheid van de veehouderij", uitgevoerd bij de leerstoelgroepen Dierlijke Productiesystemen en Rurale Sociologie van Wageningen University

The sociocultural sustainability of livestock farming: an inquiry into social perceptions of dairy farming.

Over the past 50 years, the scale and intensity of livestock farming have increased significantly. At the same time, Western societies have become more urbanised and fewer people have close relatives involved in farming. As a result, most citizens have little knowledge or direct experience of what farming entails. In addition, more people are expressing concerns over issues such as farm animal welfare. This has led to increasing public demand for more sustainable ways of livestock farming. To date, little research has been carried out on the social pillar of sustainable livestock farming. The aim of this study is to provide insights into the sociocultural sustainability of livestock farming systems. This study reviews the key findings of earlier published interdisciplinary research about the social perceptions of dairy farming in the Netherlands and Norway (Boogaard et al., 2006, 2008, 2010a and 2010b) and synthesises the implications for sociocultural sustainability of livestock farming. This study argues that the (sociocultural) sustainable development of livestock farming is not an objective concept, but that it is socially and culturally constructed by people in specific contexts. It explains the social pillar of the economics/ecological/social model sustainability in terms of the fields of tensions that exist between modernity, traditions and naturality – ‘the MTN knot’ – each of which has positive and negative faces. All three angles of vision can be seen in people's attitudes to dairy farming, but the weight given to each differs between individuals and cultures. Hence, sociocultural sustainability is context dependent and needs to be evaluated according to its local meaning. Moreover, sociocultural sustainability is about people's perceptions of livestock farming. Lay people might perceive livestock farming differently and ascribe different meanings to it than experts do, but their ‘reality’ is just as real. Finally, this study calls for an ongoing collaboration between social and animal scientists in order to develop livestock farming systems that are more socioculturally sustainable

The multi-functionality of goats in rural Mozambique: Contributions to food security and household risk mitigation

It is widely acknowledged that goats in developing countries fulfill multiple functions and can contribute to improved livelihoods of smallholders. The multi-functionality of goats in rural Mozambique however is fairly unknown. The objective of the paper is therefore to identify and create a deeper understanding of the multiple functions goats currently play in the smallholders sector in Mozambique. The paper takes a sociological approach by advancing the thinking that the functions of goats are socially and culturally constructed, and not ‘given’. Qualitative data were collected by means of historical timelines in six communities and individual in-depth interviews with 18 smallholder goat keepers (three per community) in Inhassoro district, Inhambane province. In addition, findings of the quantitative baseline household survey (n=83) were used. Results showed four categories of goat functions in Inhassoro district, based on respondents’ perspectives: 1) sale in times of need, 2) exchange for services and products, 3) social life, and 4) consumption. Based on these findings, the paper discusses implications of the multi-functionality of goats for development projects, in which goats can function as financial saving and insurance, as contributors to food security, as contributors to social capital, and as commercial production commodities. Subsequently, the paper addresses a few fundamental questions about projects aiming to commercialize smallholder goat keeping, i.e. linking smallholders to markets

Visiting a Farm: An Exploratory Study of the Social Construction of Animal Farming in Norway and the Netherlands based on Sensory Perception

Most citizens in modern societies have little personal knowledge or experience of animal farming. This study explores the social construction of animal farming by studying how citizens perceive and evaluate modern farming after visiting a farm in real life. We wanted to understand how (non-farming) citizens develop an opinion of modern dairy farming when experiencing dairy farming in real life and practice, and how they translate what they see, smell and feel into an evaluative perception and mental image. We therefore conducted dairy farm visits with citizen panels in Norway and the Netherlands and asked the panel members to register what they saw, heard, smelled and felt and what they appreciated (or not) on the farm. The aspects that respondents registered could be grouped into four themes: the animals and their products, the rural landscape, farm practices and the farmer. When respondents described their experiences of these aspects on a specific farm, they appeared to look at them from three angles: modernity, tradition and naturality. Most respondents wanted farms to be modern, traditional as well as natural, but they were ready to negotiate and to accept compromises. Many respondents considered the farmer to be responsible for reconciling modernity, tradition and naturality. By taking different topics and issues into account and looking at animal farms from multiple angles, the respondents’ developed a balanced and nuanced opinion of animal farming. The image that they constructed was not dualistic (arcadia versus factory) but pluralistic, thus at the same time more complex but also more flexible than expected. We expect that the development of a pluralistic image and balanced opinion was facilitated through the direct experience of dairy farming and farm life. The article starts with a theoretical analysis and aims to contribute to recent debates in rural sociology in two ways: 1) it studies how material experience and mental perception interact in the construction of an evaluative image of animal farming; and 2) it explores the social construction of animal farming as embedded into to the construction of nature, rurality and human-animal relationships. It concludes by discussing the contribution of the findings to the ongoing theoretical debate in this fiel

Met burgers de boer op

Campagnes en informatieverstrekking zijn eenrichtingsverkeer en kunnen de kijk van de burger op de melkveehouderij zelfs averechts beïnvloeden. Begin liever met onderwijs aan kinderen en ga met burgers de boer op, stelt onderzoeker Birgit Boogaar

Basis van Burgerwaarden: Studie naar de wenselijkheid van het ontwerpen van een dataset van burgerwaarden voor onderzoek aan Systeeminnovaties

Landbouw en burger staan tegenwoordig verder van elkaar, het ministerie van LNV wil deze relatie graag herstellen. Daarvoor is het van belang voor projecten die zich binnen (en buiten) systeeminnovatieprojecten bezighouden met burgerwaarden vooraf scherp te beschrijven in welke rol zij de burger bij het project willen betrekken. Dat is de conclusie uit het onderzoek ‘Basis van burgerwaarden. Studie naar de wenselijkheid van het ontwerpen van een dataset van burgerwaarden voor onderzoek aan systeeminnovaties' voor de koepel Systeeminnovatie van PPO en Wageningen UR Livestock Research. Het is daarbij belangrijk bewust onderscheid te maken in de verschillende niveaus van burgerwaarden, omdat deze de manier van onderzoek beïnvloeden

Goat value chains as platforms to improve income and food security: The case of imGoats in Inhassaro District, Mozambique

Innovation platforms are increasingly used as spaces for interaction between actors in value chains to overcome barriers to development. It involves continuous learning and capacity building – both in terms of innovation capacity and specific technical or organizational capacities. Despite the increased use of Innovation Platforms in the context of value chains, there are several questions regarding their practical implementation. This paper aims to gain some insight in their formation and management by sharing experiences from an Innovation Platform for a goat value chain in Inhassoro District, Mozambique. Since the first meeting in May 2011, some of the main lessons include: an Innovation Platform can provide an important mechanism for communication and information exchange to enhance collective action; however, its establishment takes time and needs a lot of facilitation by the project team in the initial stages to ensure proper functioning; moreover, the design and implementation needs to be adapted and negotiated with intended beneficiaries to accommodate seasonality aspects of goat production and marketing, as well as local physical, social and cultural conditions, such as travel distance and literacy rates, gender inequality, and the role goats play in people’s livelihoods

Reflection on innovation processes in a smallholder goat development project in Mozambique

There is an increasing interest among researchers, practitioners and donors in using agricultural innovation system approaches to reach development outcomes. Limited practical experiences have been shared on the dynamics of these innovation processes and how project partners have dealt with that. The objective of this paper is therefore to share experiences from a smallholder livestock development project – the imGoats project in Mozambique – by reflecting on the dynamics of innovation processes in the project. The paper focusses on three intervention domains of the imGoats project: improving access to animal health services, improving market access and developing communal grazing areas. For each area, the innovation process was analysed by looking at the following elements: the local context, innovation type, actors involved, people taking the initiative, changing context, flexibility of project partners, pace of the process, and results. The findings demonstrate that the innovation processes of the three intervention domains varied considerably in terms of participation of actors, predictability of the process, expected and unexpected results and degree of experimentation. Hence, different innovation processes coexisted in the same project context, but were closely interrelated. Each addressed a particular constraint, which together contributed to the overall development objective of the project, though each innovation process was different. These findings and challenges have implications for research, practice and policy. For example, the dynamics of innovation processes may vary and depend on the intervention domain; this asks for a critical reflection on the role of research, facilitation and brokering in each of these cases. Hence, innovation processes require flexible management and should allow for joint experimentation and learning among project partners, stakeholders and decision makers; it also requires flexibility in project design and donor funding so that not only ‘obvious’ interventions are catered for, but also unforeseen developments