Mire jó egy fás legelő? – Esettanulmányok a Dél-Dunántúlról

In recent decades, traditional forms of close-to-nature farming have gradually been pushed into the background with the development of agriculture. This is also true for Hungarian wood pasture farming, despite the fact that wood pastures can bring benefits from both environmental and economic perspectives, especially in an area that has been little or not used at all. For this reason, our study deals with the benefits provided by wood pastures. The backbone of the reviewed literature is the wood pasture case studies implemented and documented in practice in Europe. In the other half of the paper, we present primary case studies from a region rich in wood pasture traditions, South Transdanubia. In the processing of the case studies, in addition to economic factors, we also dealt with other motivating factors. This allowed us to form a more accurate picture of the reasons behind the establishment of farms. The evaluation of the processed case studies made it possible to map the opinions of farmers in southern Transdanubia who utilize wooded pastures along appropriate criteria. The results of our in-depth interview research show that in addition to the profit-maximizing rationality assumed by neoclassical economics, other motives may also drive farmers to operate livestock farming based on wooded pastures, the most important of which is a close-to-nature, peaceful lifestyle. It is an important observation that none of the farms examined was able to use available incentive support, which can be attributed to the strict and very specific obligations – according to the farmers, the expected tree density was not feasible in these tenders.