Agro-social landscapes

Agro-social landscapes are the working countryside understood as a social arrangement rather than a scenic one. Farmland, grazing, orchards, fisheries and the ground between them are produced by labour, tenure, subsidy, markets and habit, and they change when any of those change.

Research in this theme covers agriculture and food systems, rural livelihoods, and the socio-ecological relationships that hold a farmed landscape together. It takes in soil and its management, the commons and who holds rights in them, the pressures of consolidation and land price, and the position of tenants, growers and farm workers in decisions about land use. Food is a recurring route into these questions, since where food is grown, by whom and on what terms is one of the clearest expressions of how a society organises its land.