Cultivating biodiversity: When conservation in agricultural landscapes embodies farmers' values

Abstract Efforts to conserve biodiversity in agricultural landscapes across Europe remain insufficient, as biodiversity further declines. This is sometimes ascribed to conservation policy failing to address the meanings and values that farmers attribute to the social and ecological contexts shaping their decisions influencing biodiversity. Using a relational approach, we explore how farmers describe their relationships with their land, society, the landscapes they inhabit and the values associated with these relationships. By drawing on the literature dealing with relational values and ‘good farming’, we also examine how practices that farmers identify as integrating both farming and conservation embody those values. We conducted qualitative interviews that included farm walks and an adapted photovoice activity with 15 farmers in 2022. The farmers were purposefully selected to represent diverse farming systems in Saxony, Germany. We analysed interview transcripts for relational values, while photos were clustered into categories representing practices that integrated both farming and conservation. In addition to relational values commonly mentioned in the literature, such as sense of belonging, longtermism, circularity, and autonomy, our findings suggested that frugality, reciprocity between farmers and society, holism, joy, gratitude, and humility were equally or even more important. Practices that were in line with both ‘good farming’ and ‘good conservation’ emerged as belonging to four categories: hedges and trees, diverse crop rotations, integrating animals and set‐aside fallow and flowering areas. These practices embody a range of relational values, based on farmers' individual contexts comprising their relationships with their land, landscape and society. By thinking through farmers' values and practices, researchers might support a deeper investigation to how conservation goals may be better aligned with farming in specific contexts and how they together may be used to change or uphold norms regarding ‘good land use’. Further research should explore how practices can support valued relationships between farmers, society and landscapes. With future developments in the European's Common Agricultural Policy, it will become even more important that policymakers understand which norms of land use they may be perpetuating through incentivizing certain practices and how these norms nurture farmers' relationships or not. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.