Bingjie SONG, University of Adelaide, Australia
Guy ROBINSON, University of Adelaide, Australia
Douglas BARDSLEY, University of Adelaide, Australia
Facing challenges posed by climate change and urban development, and opportunities such as the growth of tourism, many agricultural systems and farming businesses have been transforming slowly, often restricted by geographical inertia. Some systems have survived long after initial conditions for their creation have changed. This reflects a path dependence or self-reinforcing economic development in which dependency refers to how historical events and circumstances can lock-in development pathways. To understand how farmers cope with risks and to assess possibilities for sustainable development, it is important to investigate how individual farmers make decisions, the nature of their decisions and associated farming pathways. Employing a sequential mixed methods approach including questionnaire survey, interviews and two-step cluster analysis, this paper elucidates the evolving character of farm businesses in the context of an emergent multifunctional peri-urban fringe landscape in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia. It analyses farmers’ choice of farming trajectories and further illustrates relationships between individual farming pathways and agricultural and landscape multifunctionality under pressures from the changing local socio-economic and environmental milieu. It shows that the labour force and farmer type are key distinguishing characteristics in the farming system. Nearly half of the commercially-oriented farmers have developed a stable business through diversifying on-farm activities more than five years ago and by intensifying and specialising. Less commercially oriented and non-commercial farmers showed conservative attitudes towards farming management in the past, and reflected a large degree of uncertainty about the future, though a minority planned to expand their business. There were strong pro-environmental decisions made across the farming community, enhancing agro-ecology and contributing to biodiversity.
Mots clés : Geographical inertia|farm businesses|decision making|trajectories|Adelaide Hills
A103161BS