What a Wooden Pasture is Good For? - Case Studies from South Transdanubia

Bérces, Bence - Tóth, Katalin - Csonka, Arnold

Keywords: forestry, agroforestry systems, silvopastoral, Q23, Q26, Q50

Multifunctional forms of farming are gradually being pushed into the background by the development of agriculture, despite the fact that there are many benefits that may seem trivial, both from economic and environmental point of view, such as the establishment and maintenance of wooded pastures, especially in areas with little or no utilization. The backbone of the reviewed literature is the analysed case studies implemented and documented in Europe, which list a number of examples of wooded grazing in practice. The dissertation also addresses other motivating factors beyond economic benefits. In this way we can get a closer picture of the “why” behind the formation of such farming. The evaluation of the processed case studies made it possible to map the pastures some of the South Transdanubian farmers operating in wooded pastures of the economic sector in the form of an in-depth interview. After analysing the interviews and summarizing the results, it turned out that there are reasons to maintain grazing on wooded pastures other than the income maximization: calm lifestyle, being closer to nature. An important observation is that none of the farms surveyed was able to benefit from available incentive support, which can be attributed to the strict and very specific obligations - the development of the expected tree density was not viable.

Full article