Thematic scope

Here, we provide several focal themes including exemplary highlights directly referring to particular themes. However, such connections are not inclusive. As the themes themselves are interconnected, also highlights may fit more than a single theme. We suggest referring the session proposals and presentation abstracts to the best-fitting highlights (please feel free to extend the list).

Agricultural landscape and ecosystem services: precious side effects of good farming

  • Agricultural landscapes: identity and tradition; structural and cultural urbanisation
  • Contemporary agricultural (rural) landscape: what does it mean?
  • Preserving/restoring rural landscapes regardless of farming or through farming?
  • Agroforestry: a mere combination of farming and modern forestry, or an integrated use of variegated rural landscapes?

Conservation focus

  • Land sparing vs. land sharing?
  • Farmlands' working treescape: a better option to land afforestation
  • To eat or not to eat animals: this is the ecological question
  • Wild nature habitats in a farming context (e.g. old-growth islands, peatlands, marshes, brooks)
  • Wildness and development sprawls: the two aspects of farmlands loss
  • Global environmentalism vs. ecology of local landscapes and farming: cohesion or conflict?

Farming: nature-culture mutualism

  • Traditional ecological knowledge for future farming
  • Man and nature: a biocultural legacy of multifunctional farming systems
  • What is the use of subsistence farming in the 21st century?

Multifunctional subsistence and semi-subsistence farming in global economy

  • The holistic economy perspective: is smallholder multifunctional farming less efficient than industrial farming?
  • From global economy to global climate policy from a smallholder farm perspective: a life-saving opportunity or a road out of the frying pan into the fire?
  • Ecological agriculture, organic farming, regenerative farming - a meaningful and helpful distinction or sophistic alternatives to traditional farming?
  • Coping with food security crisis: amplifying the existing system of global food production and market or giving way to local, sovereign models?

Food focus

  • What is a sustainable food system: efficiency and sufficiency
  • Urban and peri-urban farming
  • Vertical farms, artificial meat, robots in the fields, and conservation schemes protecting a diversity of former farmlands: does it make any sense?
  • Small-holder family farms: do they contribute to the safety of the food supply?
  • Community Supported Agriculture (CSA model) - Responding to the needs of society, local food security, or farmers' production security?

Under cultural pressures

  • Protecting ethnic, and cultural diversity without traditional farming?
  • Top-down policies: how do they respect traditional, smallholder farming?
  • Being a farmer: just a job?
  • Farming in the media and pop culture: bringing the public closer to real farmers or making up a new farmer role model? (e.g. “The Archers” and the like)
  • How does the society’s respect for traditional values contribute to a farmer's quality of life?
  • Do farmers fit into the culturally urbanised countryside?
  • Agricultural education (from high schools to unis): identifying gaps

Other issues

  • Mainstream advisory vs. alternative learning methods: how do they contribute to resilience of smallholders?
  • Conflict resolution strategies in rural communities - what works, what does not work.
  • Energyscapes - energy and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes
  • Water - energy - food nexus for sustainable provision of ecosystem services by agroecosystems