Abstract
Social farming is a typical bottom-up initiative of ambitious farming families within the green care movement. This development was a practical and innovative response to address societal needs and to complement institutionalized social services. Social farming supplies precautionary and health promoting interventions by the means of animals, plants and a-biotic nature for people. Its target is to support and to enhance people’s social, corporal and mental well-being. These kind of very personally applied social services concentrate on therapeutic, pedagogic, care taking and social-inclusive measures.
At present, in South Tyrol (ST) pedagogic and care taking offers of social farming prevail. Until 2012, not any study about social farming in ST existed. To fill this research gap and to further develop this on-farm activities in the North-Italian province, different investigations on the topic have been done by the Institute for Regional Development of Eurac Research. The present study summarizes the results of the different surveys with the following aim: to analyze the different framework conditions throughout Europe, to give an overview of social farming in ST and to investigate the potential of social farming in the province.