Mountain agriculture today represents 16% of utilized agricultural area (UAA) in the 27 member European Union states (EU-27) and 34% in Spain (European Commission 2013). Mountain areas are defined by their unfavorable topography, typically described by elevation and/or slope, remoteness, and more extreme climate, but this can vary significantly between...

Three women from Spain set up their own company in Galicia helping to preserve the tradition, particular to the area, of canning local fish and seafood in glass jars and selling their products in specialised gourmet shops.

Organic farming no longer serves a niche market in the European Union (EU). In spite of the global economic crisis, the mainstreaming of organic products has maintained its impressive trajectory: since 2008 there has been an average annual growth rate of 8%; annual turnover has risen to €20 billion; and more than 500...

In the world, more than 80 per cent of farms are family farms – in total more than 500 million economic and social entities. In Europe 25 million people, 172 million hectares of agricultural land and 12 million farms are involved in EU agricultural production. A vast majority of these...

This very large family farm and business near Albacete, Spain was brought together to form a Limited Company with the marriage of the parents of the current part-owner and manager. The property on the paternal side of this arrangement has been within the same family for 200 years. Today the...

Fishing is a human activity that has gone on for millennia. Nowadays, it remains one of the very few large scale economic activities that is still based on the ‘hunting and gathering’ of wild biological resources, contrary to agriculture or animal farming, where a few productive species and races were...

El documento realiza un repaso de la situación de la agricultura familiar en el mundo y destaca que de los 570 millones de explotaciones que existen en el mundo, más de 500 millones son explotaciones agrícolas familiares, que, a su vez, son responsables de más del 70 % de la...

This report presents the synthesis of case studies analysed by the action-research activity. The aim is to give a description of the practices carried out by farmers, individually or collectively, which can be considered as sustainable ways to use plant genetic resources with the purpose that these practices be spread...

In constrained environments such as mountainous and Mediterranean areas the sustainable use of forage resources by domestic herbivores has to combine production, conservation of high environmental value areas and product quality. The sustainability of animal production systems relies on their ability to reconcile economic performance based on the added value...

Small ruminants are important for income generation and security, food supply and for development in rural Mediterranean areas especially in mountainous and marginal regions. Nevertheless, the adoption of cost-effective technologies and management practices for improving flock productivity and farmers' incomes is limited. This is largely due to socio-economic factors, such...

The concept of “High Nature Value farming” developed in the early 1990s from a growing recognition that the conservation of biodiversity in Europe depends on the continuation of low-intensity farming systems across large areas of countryside (see Beaufoy et al., 1994; Bignal et al., 1994; Bignal & McCracken, 1996; 2000)....

All seven Andalusian FLAGs participated in a cooperation project to foster women entrepreneurship across the region by studying the experiences of local women and promoting successful female entrepreneurs as role models to others to turn their business ideas into reality. High unemployment levels in Andalusia and a common objective in the...

Local Cofradías (Fishermen’s associations) involving more than 500 Galician fishermen and shellfish producers teamed up to develop a pilot online sales platform. The platform aims to diversify the customer base, add value to local Galician seafood and shorten the distribution chain of local fisheries products. Facing an economic crisis hitting...

“Peix de llotja”, translated literally as “fish from the auction”, has brought local fishing organizations together to promote their production to local restaurants by developing a brand that awards stars to restaurants that commit to buying their fish directly from their local auction. In Spain, the auction is the first point of...

12 million farms, 172 million hectares of agricultural land, 25 million people involved in agricultural production – these are some of the key data for the EU farming sector in 2010; but what about the situation of individual farms and how do things differ between Member States and as compared...

Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) have established in parallel to conventional food chains, playing a key role in the emerging food networks that are continuously arising as an alternative to the globalized agri-food model. The diversities and particularities of the experiences existing all over the world (box schemes, farmers’ markets,...

Agro-food chain is the only chain in the economy that can bring together and integrate numerous of economic activities, can connect hundreds of local enterprises with thousands consumers and producers, offering a unique opportunity to rural development, which consequently can reinvigorate the region’s economy and the whole national economy. Rural...

La mayoría de las estadísticas disponibles que predicen impactos climáticos sobre la agricultura campesina son aproximaciones muy burdas que no toman en cuenta la heterogeneidad de la agricultura campesina-indígena, ni la diversidad de estrategias que los campesinos han utilizado y aun utilizan para enfrentar las sequías, inundaciones, huracanes, etc. Alrededor...

Un desafío clave para los científicos tanto sociales como biológicos es definir un marco conceptual y metodológico para poder descifrar los principios y mecanismos claves que explican la resiliencia de los sistemas diversificados, de manera de que estos puedan ser transmitidos a otros agricultores en cada región para que mejoren...

A total of 14 LAGs, led by the Dutch LAG 'Zuid Twente', from 7 Member States cooperate to exchange best practice examples of production, marketing, distribution and inter-regional trading of local / regional food products between partner countries Regional products are sold by an increasing number of farms and it has...