Let Nature be your teacher: Caring for agricultural landscapes through a sense of place

While the global agri-food system has fed a rapidly growing global population, industrialisation of agriculture is contributing to negative ecological and social outcomes. Strengthening humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the natural world has potential to address these negative outcomes. This paper focuses on the relationships a group of interviewed farmers have with the landscapes they farm and the responsibilities and actions that arise in care of these landscapes. We use an abductive approach to draw from the sense of place and care of place literatures in exploring interviews with these sheep, beef and deer farmers in the Upper Clutha of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Sense of place are the meanings and attachments held by these farmers toward the landscapes they farm. Care of place is who and what farmers feel responsibilities to and their motivations to care for agricultural landscapes.

The analysis highlights a diversity of place meanings and attachments, and responsibilities in care of place among the farmers. The ndings provide insights into how farmers’ different understandings of the relationship between nature and humans shape their place meanings when interacting with agricultural landscapes, and the actions they take in care of place. The few farmers who talked about sense of place as emergent through their interactions with the landscape referred to listening to landscapes to understand if the land was healthy. In care of place these farmers described activities and enterprises that contribute to the healthy ecological functioning of the landscape.