By Bartosz Bartkowski, Marieke Cornelia Baaken, Mansi Nagpal, Jan Sodoge, and Mariana Madruga de Brito.
Agriculture is very important for achieving sustainability. However, it is unclear what “sustainable agriculture” means for different groups of people, including farmers, the broader society or scientists. These different interpretations are important for societal debates about how to make agriculture more sustainable. To better understand these differences, we analysed articles related to “sustainable agriculture” in German newspapers and agricultural magazines. Furthermore, we contrasted these with scientific articles on the topic. For this, we used a tool for automatized identification of topics in large bodies of text. Thus, we identified various topics discussed in relation to sustainable agriculture in the three types of print and online media. The presence of these topics varies over time. For instance, topics related to sustainable agriculture in the context of agricultural policy usually become more prominent when agricultural policy reforms are being discussed (mainly reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union). We found limited overlaps in topics across the three media types. It seems that in Germany, agricultural magazines convey quite a different understanding of sustainable agriculture than newspapers. Among other differences, we found that climate change is largely absent from agricultural magazine discussions on sustainability. In newspapers, while not among the most discussed topics, it is still quite present. Meanwhile, in scientific articles, this topic is dominant. We see a need to bridge the gaps in understanding and to improve the communication on sustainable agriculture across different societal groups.
Relational Thinking 