Farming in Europe has been the scene of several important socio-economic and environmental developments and crises throughout the last century. Therefore, an understanding of the historical driving forces of farm change helps identifying potentials for navigating future pathways of agricultural development. However, long-term driving forces have so far been studied, e.g. in anecdotal local case studies or in systematic literature reviews, which often lack context dependency. In this study, we bridged local and continental scales by conducting 123 oral history interviews (OHIs) with elderly farmers across 13 study sites in 10 European countries. We applied a driving forces framework to systematically analyse the OHIs. We find that the most prevalent driving forces were the introduction of new technologies, developments in agricultural markets that pushed farmers for farm size enlargement and technological optimisation, agricultural policies, but also cultural aspects such as cooperation and intergenerational arrangements. However, we find considerable heterogeneity in the specific influence of individual driving forces across the study sites, implying that generic assumptions about the dynamics and impacts of European agricultural change drivers hold limited explanatory power on the local scale. Our results suggest that site-specific factors and their historical development will need to be considered when addressing the future of agriculture in Europe in a scientific or policy context.

The study analyzed changes in surface areas of individual land use types in five administrative regions of Poland in the eastern-most part of the country. Annual time series for the following variables were used: agricultural land, forest land, built-up and urbanized land, and wasteland. The primary objective of the paper was to assess land use changes (LUC) in Eastern Poland in 2002–2016. The paper employed a Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Cox-Stuart (CS) test for monotonic trend and the autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) model. The deterministic part was selected with the Akaike criterion. The power of the tests was estimated using the Monte Carlo simulation in order to assess their reliability. The results indicate a trend in each of the four series in all the five voivodeships. For forest and built-up land, the trend was upward in each voivodeship. A downward trend was found for the agricultural land and wasteland in all the voivodeships except the Podkarpackie Voivodeship. The results can help regional and local authorities to properly monitor LUC.