Abstract
Life quality is an important indicator of sustainable development. Farmers’ quality of life strongly affects the farm’s viability. The main goal of this study was to identify the relationships between three main components of farmers’ quality of life: economic situation, living conditions, and mental comfort. In the first phase of the study, the theoretical model representing potential relationships between quality of life components was constructed, and in the second phase the relationships were verified with the use of the structural equation modelling method. The sample consisted of 600 farmers participating in the Polish Farm Accountancy Data Framework (FADN). In the analyses, data from the FADN database and data obtained during supplementary interviews with farmers were used. The analyses revealed that living conditions are significantly and positively correlated with the economic situation and mental comfort, while mental comfort turned out to be negatively correlated with the economic situation. It was concluded that future agricultural and rural development policies should be more focused on the social dimension of sustainable development than before, particularly considering the fact that a farmer’s higher engagement in the improvement of their family’s economic condition might result in lowering their mental comfort due to the stress and work overload.
Highlights
According to the most popular definitions, sustainable agriculture is a farming system based on three basic rules: ecological soundness, economic viability, and social acceptability [1,2,3]
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Some scholars have underlined that using pure income as a measure of the economic side of life quality is not enough [51], while assessing the economic situation of the farmer we included, aside farm income, the subjective perception of the socio-economic situation of the household
Summary
According to the most popular definitions, sustainable agriculture is a farming system based on three basic rules: ecological soundness, economic viability, and social acceptability [1,2,3]. The three-dimensional structure of the sustainability concept allows and understanding of the interdependencies occurring between differing aspects of life in the course of economic and social development, putting an emphasis on the need to find a balance between obtaining various, even contradicting, goals [13,14,15,16,17]. The theory of sustainable development is still discussed, and authors dispute differing approaches In this context, it is especially important to consider what was suggested by Daly [18] on the division of strong and weak sustainability, which differ especially in the understanding of the key sustainability element presented in the Brundtland report [4], that is, keeping the natural environment for the future generations. The more rigorous approach, named strong sustainability, is focused mostly on the environmental level, while in the weak sustainability approach it is allowed to substitute the natural capital with the capital created by humans
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