SOAR is a research school. In addition to the focus on PhD students, SOAR also includes graduates, postdocs and supervisors in the activities and networks. This is important because they also constitute the research environment, in which the PhD student is under education. SOAR wants to contribute to the professional discussions with a special focus on the organic food and farming systems.
The research interests of SOAR cover a wide range of subjects within organic agriculture and food systems:
The main scientific aim of this PhD project is to explore the main challenges and obstacles of integrative decisions making, to enhance our understanding of how knowledge, information and communication and organization around integrative decision-making can be improved.
Background
Agriculture and food production are under tremendous change these years, and the farm managers have to cope with an increasing complexity in the management and decision-making processes. For the management of future farm enterprises especially three conditions are changing: 1) The sizes of farm enterprises are increasing dramatically, which means more actors involved in the labour processes and more external actors involved in the business. 2) The surrounding society demands increasing degree of multifunctionality of the farm enterprise e.g. in terms of environmental concerns, landscape management, biodiversity, etc. 3) Proportional to the technical and scientific development the wealth of information and technical possibilities are increasing exponentially. At the same time the society introduces regulation and stimulus to obtain a certain result of the side effects of farming, but some times with less efficiency that anticipated due to a lack of knowledge on the actual behaviour of the farm manager.
