Abstract ID: 3.17954 | Accepted as Talk | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

Routine and rhythm characterise farming. But everyday is also different, because food producers are entangled with the living world. Even more so in mountain farming, the only constant here is change. Through a multi-year collaborative ethnography and narrative inquiry four main themes emerge as central to resilience (capacity to change) as a mountain farmer. 1) Creativity in the face of crisis; 2) Sufficiency as an underlying principle in farming practices; 3) Freedom and autonomy over time and resources, and 4) Liveliness: the capacity to become differently in relation to policy, landscape and climate. Part of a larger philosophical and creative work, this paper contribution focuses specifically on the farming practices that enable these capacities and problematizes policies that enable or constrain co-author and mountain farmer Sepp’s farming resilience. We will specifically focus on sufficiency as resilience capacity, value and principle in mountain farming, working with examples of milking technology and alpine cheese-making, meadow management and barn construction. Through narrative inquiry we elicit how these practices interact with subsidies for mountain farming, critically investigating how policy support mechanisms enable or constrain sufficiency in mountain farming.