WS1.2 ‐ Care Farming: Challenges in innovations across the domains of agriculture and social care 9 th European IFSA Symposium, 4‐7 July 2010, Vienna (Austria) 287 Stabilizing a care farming project: Challenges and importance of supporters Renate Renner University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria, renate.renner@boku.ac.at Abstract: Innovation always means combining old and new practices. In the case of care farming, this means that the daily necessities of the agricultural business need to be in accordance with clients’ needs. This paper focuses on “emotional stress” that was observed to be a possible problem for care farmers when implementing the new practice. The attention is on from whom care farmers obtain certain forms of support, respectively how they profit from being affiliated with a group of care farmers. Therefore a qualitative personal network approach is combined with an innovation theory in order to focus on challenges and problems that occur in the implementation period. As a result, this research proved the advantages of being affiliated with a group of care farmers and it has also shown that continuing contact between care farmers and clients’ key care givers and care experts is indispensable in order to stabilize a care farming project and to decrease emotional stress. Keywords: Qualitative Social Network Analysis, Care Farming, Innovation Introduction In the present time farmers are forced to find new income possibilities beside food production in order to maintain their business, meaning they have to change their previous practice because the traditional form of farming does not stand the test of time. As a consequence, some farmers follow the idea of multifunctional farming, whereas the innovative practice of care farming is part of it. Care at farms is an increasing phenomenon in Europe, a new practice that provides people with special needs with meaningful work and offers new forms of therapy and care. In this research I use the term care farming, which is defined by the SoFar‐research group (2007) as follows: Social farming (or ‘care farming’ or ‘green care’) is a term used to describe a wide range of diverse farming practices aimed at promoting disadvantaged people’s rehabilitation or care and/or contributing towards the integration of people with ‘low contractual capacity’. (SoFar‐ research‐group, 2007, 88). The fact that farmers are looking for new income possibilities with the consequence of the development of multifunctional agricultures in general and care farming in more specific terms, is strongly connected to the demand for this offer in contemporary time. On one hand, care farming offers possibilities to enhance rural development because it is a new income alternative for farmers and it produces new working places for other professionals in the countryside. It offers possibilities to connect urban and rural areas, as in the case of the Netherlands where drug addicts or homeless people from Amsterdam do meaningful work on care farms near the city. On the other hand there are many developments in contemporary times that demand new forms of rehabilitation, long‐term care etc. For instance, one third of all economically active Austrians were “exposed to at least one mental factor at work that can have adverse effects on health, suffering most frequently from time pressure or overload of work” (Statistik‐Austria, 2007, 12). Demands of the professional world do often not accord with the capacity of individuals. Subsequently burn‐out or drug abuses for instance accumulate within the time of individualization because one has to be able to cope with having multiple options. Another typical development of contemporary time is that we face a superannuation of the population. Currently Austria has about twenty‐two percent of inhabitants older than 60, but it is expected that this number will increase by about one third until the year 2075 (cf. Statistik‐Austria, 2008, 16ff). Subsequently, there will be an increasing need for new forms of