Mobility Patterns of Swedish Farming Households

This paper deals with the mobility patterns of Swedish farming households sampled in the course of a survey of three areas in Southern Sweden, Mid- and North Sweden. Built around the concept of the notional family farm, the paper investigates three pairs of mobility strategies: (i) professionalisation–pluriactivity, (ii) specialisation–diversification, and (iii) intensification–extensification. The data stress the multi-directionality of movements over the life course of farming households. Although care should be taken in inferring macro-processes from micro-level data, there are grounds to conclude, among other things that pluriactivity is a stable reproduction strategy for a substantial part of the farming population. However, it has also been a generational phenomenon, with older farmers sometimes preferring pluriactivity to continued intensification. Although partly a means of tax-planning, diversification is to a large extent an alternative to intensification as a means of farm reproduction. It is further concluded that intensification is a structural process involving the vast majority of the farming population. Both young and old farmers tend to have intensified almost at the same rates, but tend to differ in their rates of extensification and stability, respectively. Overall, the conclusion is that this dynamic, far from being an endogenous development, is spurred by and implies an increased dependence on exogenous factors, especially on political regulation of reproduction conditions in agriculture.