Image credit: Gjertrud Byfuglien.
By Andrea Byfuglien, Mark Hirons, and Anna Birgitte Milford.
Individual farmers’ decisions, such as their choice of cultivation methods and use of agricultural inputs, have important implications for food production and environmental sustainability. In their decisions farmers are continually responding to changes in weather, seasons, and climate, and interact with various other actors in dynamic socio-political contexts. We need to understand more about how these interactions influence farmers’ opportunities for action.
Our paper aims to understand farmers’ decisions by focusing on relational values, which has emerged as an important concept for understanding such complex interactions between humans and nature. Past research has shown how relational values such as care, respect, and pride are important for farmers and linked to their relationships with their farmland and other relationships that are only possible through interactions with nature.
We draw on interviews with Norwegian horticultural farmers focusing on their motivations, opportunities, and challenges in their farming. A diverse set of influences on their decisions could be conceptualised as relational values, and how these values were acted upon was influenced by other actors in the agricultural value chain. Farmers, through relationships with their farmland, with nature, and with their communities, derive and practice the relational values of care, respect, joy and pride, cooperation, and intergenerational thinking. Actors including grocers, farm advisors, and consumers influence the ways in which farmers could enact these values. By considering other value-chain actors we could thus examine not just which relational values farmers hold, but how different actors present various barriers and opportunities that taken together influence farmers’ decisions.
Relational Thinking 