Programme: framework&scope

Framework timetable

Sep 15^th, 2025

Afternoon: members registration

Sep 16^th, 2025

Conference sessions with keynotes, presentations, and posters

Dinner party

Sep 17^th, 2025

Conference sessions with keynotes, presentations, and posters

Sep 18^th, 2025

Conference field study trip with presentations and debates

Peasant’s dinner

Sep 19^th, 2025

Optional sightseeing tours in Southern and Eastern Poland (e.g. Przemysl, Bieszczady, Podhale, Krakow and the Wieliczka salt mine).

Thematic scope sessions and example topics

• Farming ecology

1. Bio-cultural diversity: a complex attribute of traditional farming
2. Subsistence traditional farming vs. ecological agriculture
3. Land sparing vs. land sharing
4. Farmland’s working treescape vs. planting new woodland
5. To eat or not to eat animals: this is the ecological question
6. Wild nature habitats in a farming context (e.g. old-growth islands, peatlands, marshes, brooks)
7. Expanding wildness or developmental sprawl on abandoned farmland: the only choice?
8. Does “ecological agriculture” substitute traditional farming?

• Integrated use and stewardship of rural landscapes

1. Agriculture and forestry: time for convergence?
2. Agroforestry: how, when and where it may offer a valuable option to conventional farming?
3. (Silvo-)pastoralism: just a romantic extravagance?
4. A fear of livestock: should European forest be sealed-off against domestic grazers?
5. Timber: the farmers’ commodity, not only the foresters’
6. Do. top-down policies help integrated landscapes’ stewardship?

• Agricultural landscape and its ecosystem services

1. Contemporary agricultural (rural) landscape: what does it mean?
2. Agricultural landscapes: identity and tradition; structural and cultural urbanisation
3. Preserving/restoring rural landscapes regardless of farming or through farming?
4. Should traditional agricultural landscapes be valued in the global “carbon currency?”

• Economics of multifunctional farming: the role of small and semi-subsistence farms

1. Pros and cons of eco-schemes
2. Land use conflicts and their impact on farming and farmers
3. Land distribution inequalities
4. Subsistence farming from an economic perspective: just a hobby?
5. Getting agriculture out of the global crisis: patching up top-down policies or restoring farming’s sovereignty and resilience?
6. Ukrainian post-war agriculture: a threat to European farming or the way out of top-down governance of agriculture?

• Local farming systems in times of the global crisis

1. Combating or adapting to climate change? Should local husbandry be conscripted to global climate war?
2. Supporting nature-friendly farming systems: going vege or eating locally grown food?
3. Food supply and security: fixing up global solutions or restoring local farming systems?
4. Agrotourism and other alternative farmland usage: helping or destroying farming?
5. Global environmentalism vs. ecology of local landscapes and farming: cohesion or conflict?

• Deagrarianisation and cultural severance: social, cultural and ecological consequences

1. Deagrarianisation an irreversible trend?
2. Excluding peasants
3. Can one substitute disappearing mutual help and social bonds of the vanishing traditional farming systems?
4. Farmers’ sense of identity vs. cultural urbanisation
5. Traditional ecological knowledge - an elusive legacy or valuable guidelines?
6. How will Europe’s cultural diversity deal without traditional farming?
7. Farming presence in education

• Urban interfaces: effects of food policies on agriculture

1. What is a sustainable food system: efficiency and sufficiency
2. Urban and peri-urban farming
3. Community Supported Agriculture - Responding to the needs of society, local food security, or farmers' production security?
4. Do farmers fit into the culturally urbanised countryside?

• Being a farmer - a panel discussion of active farmers, answering the audience’s questions

• Shaping agriculture - a panel discussion of policy makers and activists