Agriculture e Who cares? An investigation of ‘care farming’ in the UK Chris Leck a , Nick Evans b, * , Dominic Upton c a Department of Psychological Sciences, Institute of Health and Society, University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester WR2 6AJ, UK b Department of Geography, Institute of Science and the Environment, University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester WR2 6AJ, UK c Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia Keywords: Care farming Connective agriculture Co-production Humaneanimal relations Transition abstract ‘Care farming’ (variously ‘green care in agriculture’, ‘farming for health’, ‘social farming’ and ‘therapeutic agriculture’) in the UK has grown rapidly over the last five years from the low base identified by pre- liminary scoping studies conducted at that time. In countries where the activity is most widely practised, the research focus has been primarily upon the care provided by farms, leaving a paucity of knowledge about the farms providing care. However, such care is ‘co-produced’, meaning that insights from both agricultural geography and the geographies of care deserve to be unified. In the British context, an agricultural perspective has seldom been applied; where done so, it has dismissed care farming as merely ‘hobby farming’ or conceptualised it as a minor economic activity helping to diversify the farm business and illustrating ‘multifunctionality’. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to either its relationship with productive ‘core’ farming activities or the consequences for farmers themselves. Using questionnaires and interviews, the express purpose of this paper is to identify and explicate the char- acteristics of care farms and farmers. Analysis reveals that it is not easy to pigeon-hole care farmers according to their age, motives, size of farm or land tenure. The paper moves on to discuss the trans- formative nature of care farming on the way in which farmers live their lives. In particular, symbiotic humaneanimal relations emerge regardless of whether livestock are kept as pets or commercial en- terprises. Also revealed is the altruistic satisfaction of farmers as they provide ethical care and see positive changes in their service users. The paper concludes by suggesting how the multiple connections that are found to result from the interaction of agricultural practises and care provision might be more accurately conceptualised and articulated as ‘connective agriculture’. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Aligning agrarian production and consumption through ‘care’ The development of agriculture in the European Union (EU) since the political farm crisis of the mid-1980s, when budgetary, overproduction and environmental problems came to the fore, has relied increasingly upon the utilisation of assets associated with the farm for purposes not entirely focused on food production (Evans and Ilbery, 1992). Although the extent of this shift away from food-producing activities has been overplayed by proponents of a (fictitious) ‘post-productive transition’ in agriculture (for a sup- portive critique, see Evans et al., 2002a), there is little doubt that farm businesses provide additional services associated with the touristic, recreational and environmental consumption of the countryside (Burton and Wilson, 2006; Crouch, 2006; Brandth and Haugen, 2011; Hassink et al., 2012; Dessein etal., 2013). This phe- nomenon has been popularised as representing ‘multifunctional’ agriculture (Wilson, 2007), even though this term is becoming progressively more chaotic and problematic due to the many ways it is interpreted (for example, see the introductory text by Woods, 2011 for three initial possibilities; and Renting et al., 2009 for a review of conceptual approaches). However, it is overly simplistic to consider such consumption of farm resources in isolation from the neo-liberal agrarian project within which they are situated. The post-World War Two changes in agricultural practice that were implemented to facilitate low cost, profitable and intensive systems of production across the EU have been recognised as having had a negative overall impact for many farmers in relation to increased financial pressures, social isolation and erosion of tradition (Gray, 1996; Fjeldavli, 2006; Di Iacovo and O’Connor, 2009; Price and Evans, 2009; Vik and Farstad, 2009). Indeed, such ‘productivism’ has led to more deeply ingrained cultural constructions of ‘proper farming’ amongst farmers as exclusively productive (Morris and * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 (0)1905 855187. E-mail addresses: c.leck@worc.ac.uk (C. Leck), n.evans@worc.ac.uk (N. Evans), dominic.upton@canberra.edu.au (D. Upton). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.01.012 0743-0167/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Rural Studies 34 (2014) 313e325