Caring agricultural and food practices

We explore and analyse caring regenerative agricultural practices using care ethics as a valuable tool. We define care as the ability to being responsible for, attending to, being concerned for or about, and paying watchful attention to the object of care. Following Tronto, caring includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it, looking for the needs not only of ourselves but also of our environment. We focus on potentially promising caring practices like community supported agriculture, urban agriculture, care and social farming, and organic and biological-dynamic farming. The empirical cases in the Netherlands and Italy described are guided by social justice, cooperation, respectful relationships, inclusion, and education. We describe how care for the community, vulnerable citizens, the environment, farm animals, and food is practised. Challenges farmers are facing are related to access to land, budgets, and dealing with the conventional system. An important question is to what extent these caring practices can influence the dominant agricultural and food systems and help to stimulate the transition towards regenerative agricultural and food practices.