Scales and cross-scales in ecosystem services in agriculture and organic farming

Venue: Tingvalls Eko, Sweden
Year: 2007
Credits: 4 ECTS
Responsible: Lennart Salomonsson 

 

Core group of teachers

Professor John Porter, KVL.

Prof. Jan Bengtsson, SLU,

Prof. Juha Helenius, HU,

Associate Prof. Torbjörn Rydberg, SLU.

 

The aim of the course

The course will describe the dependency of the agricultural systems on their surrounding ecosystem. The agricultural systems are also influenced by trade rules and decisions made by EU and other international as well as national institutions. The possibility for the agriculture systems to develop in a sustainable way is connected to changes in other ecosystems and decisions made by other institutions than agricultural. Those systems operate on different scales in time and space. The course will focus on the interactions between those scales levels, with agriculture in the centre.

The course will use a concrete organic farming situation in an area in western Sweden as a case, and interpret ecosystem services from different scales (soil, field, farm, landscape, municipal, region) on the production system.

The aim of the course is to introduce PhD students to how, and analyse in what way, agriculture is dependent on ecosystem services from processes in surrounding biological and geological system, at different scales. But also how these ecosystem services are influenced by human decision systems across scales.

 

The course will also raise the issues of:

• goal conflicts at different scales
• scaling up research results made at one scale to bigger scales

 

Background

A farm is a functional whole, but at the same time one has to understand the interdependence of the subsystems it is composed of as well as its relation to the systems of which it is a part. This means that the farm ought to be considered as an open system, inseparable from its natural and social environment.

Today society is facing problems such as large-scale negative consequences of industrialised food production, increasing land use conflicts and an increased pressure in farmers’ working conditions. As sustainability is a multi-faceted concept, including aspects of human society as well as ecological aspects, it indicates a need of involving social science and the humanities in its research.

Those interactions, within the biological/ecological systems, as well as within social systems, and between those inter-connected open systems, are operating at different scales, in time and space. It must be of most important for PhD students that do research on organic farming systems, at different scales, to be able to see and understand cross-scale interactions and dependences.

 

Structure

In line with positive experiences from previous years the course will consist of:
1. reading and written reflections on literature before the intensive course week (about one week work load)
2. a one week’s intensive course at a conference place,
3. processing of course learning in a pots-course assignment (about one week work load).

 

A small group of course teachers will supervise and facilitate the learning throughout the course.

The course will take advantage of a conference place in western Sweden, close to an organic farm, and with good connections to farmers and other entrepreneurs in the region who can interact with course participants in both excursions and in interview exercises. Good connections also exist to different administrative personal at different institution scales (“kommun” and “landsting”), and will also be used in excursion around the region, when students will process the influence and goal conflicts at those regional scales and it’s institutions.