Ambivalence and Contradictions: A Case from Mountain Agricultural Landscape Conservation

ABSTRACT

Loss of biodiversity stands out as a serious environmental challenge worldwide. Old mountain farmland is unique in this respect, as animal husbandry with summer grazing has created a rich ecosystem. Mountain farming usually takes place in relatively remote areas with scattered populations and marginal food production in terms of quantity. Outmigration and changes in agriculture result in overgrown pastures and thus a loss of biodiversity. To conserve biodiversity, politicians worldwide have put conservation of the mountain agricultural landscape on the agenda. The conservation policy includes traditional farming because nature in this cultural landscape depends on human activity. This article explores how policies have questionable effects on the landscape and shows how farmers choose various types of farming based on individual perspectives and goals. Several futures are conceivable, but under the circumstances of global environmental challenges, these are all fraught with uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape
• conservation
• rural communities
• farming
• Norway

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Elisabeth Schober and Thomas Hylland Eriksen for their input, encouragement and efforts. Also, I would thank Ethnos’ anonymous reviewers for their useful and constructive comments. This article is based on my postdoctoral project at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. The project was a part of the project ‘Cultures of Biodiversity: Perceptions and Practices’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The fieldwork started in summer 2004 and is still ongoing. In the summers of 2004–2006, I lived with the milkmaid and the farmer at their summer farm where I participated in everyday life, visited other summer farms in the region and participated in various meetings of dairy farmers in Hallingdal. This fieldwork was part of my doctoral research. I still have regular contact with the informants. I have also conducted fieldwork at summer farms for three months in Leksvika, Nord-Trøndelag (summer 2011), at summer farms in Krn, Slovenia (summer 2003), in France (autumn 2005, autumn 2012), Switzerland (autumn 2005, summer and autumn 2012). These fieldworks are a part of my project European Summer Mountain Farming. A Comparative Study which was a part of a larger project: ‘Cultures of Biodiversity: Perceptions and Practices’, see acknowledgements.

2. E.g. Cohen 1976; Jackson 1995; Basso 1996; Ingold 2000; Gray 2000; Howell 2002; Crate 2008.

3. The first transformation was when the agricultural business turned into a monetary economy in the late eighteenth century. The second transformation was the period after World War II when tractors, new technology, and fertilisers entered the agricultural business (Lysgård & Berg 2004).

4. Wolf (1966) distinguished farmers from peasants. The divide is not relevant to this article. The farmers in Hemsedal were small-scale farmers with a subsistence economy including production (butter) for the market. Today, they are multifunctional men and women with a broad range of economic activities who identify themselves as farmers.

5. In the following empirical examples, I use pseudonyms. Sometimes, I also put the words of other farmers from the same group into the named farmer’s speech.

6. One illustrative example is from Leksvik in Nord-Trøndelag, where farmers have traditionally practiced goat herding. There, the goat milk production competed with forestry and decreased during the last decades. The state pressed the last ‘goat-farmer’ to sell his milk quotas back to the state a few years ago. He discovered that the national dairy TINE had destroyed his goat milk for the last two years. This news shocked the farmer. Producing garbage and not food challenged his identity and value as a farmer. He changed his production to sheep, but missed his life with the goats. When the department advertised new quotas, he tried to buy them. The plan was to process the milk himself, but he was unsuccessful. The department earmarked the quota for a northern region, where the farmers had no tradition with goats nor wanted to develop such.

7. Both A-team and B-team farmers get official economical support. The subsidies are per animal, per kilogram of meat or litre of milk. This means farmers who run large industrial farms get more money from the state than the B-team farmers. This is the reason why subsidies have increased despite the decreasing numbers of farms (Løkeland-Stai & Lie 2012).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council [Project no. 204370].