Social Farming is a global phenomenon with heterogeneous approaches, different shapes, and intersector relationships, but also common characteristics and activities. Social Farming includes social services in rural areas such as education, healthcare, and work inclusion, as well as products to meet modern society demand. Despite the global diffusion and impact today, social farming in agriculture still lacks an adequate legislative and operative definition to support it. The diffusion of social farming and its economic and social impact have therefore increased the need to esteem the “value” it produces from a model of “welfare” to a model of “welfare society”. The need to evaluate the “social value” of social farming is related with the European Community’ needs (CESE 2013), to develop a model able to: “…measure the social effects and the impact on the society determined by specific activities of a social enterprise…” and “…he must be elaborated beginning from the principal results gotten by the social enterprise, he must favor the activities of it, to be proportionate and he must not hinder the social innovation…”. Social farming value creation has four dimensions: 1) Social value, developing social capital and relationships able to facilitate a tangible positive change within community wealth; 2) Cultural value, through the promotion of animation actions within the community; 3) Institutional value, through the strengthening of the principle of subsidiarity to different institutional levels; 4) Economic added value, through the increase of material, economic, and financial wealth that an organization or an enterprise produces through its activities. To value the change of social enterprises, the framework to assume is related to the so-called “impact value chain”, which is complex to measure. In recent years, proposals of new measurement methodologies of impact produced by the social farms have grown. The target to measure the social farming impact is even more complex, therefore setting the objective to define theoretical approaches and methodologies of survey, evaluation, and case studies to give evidence of benefits produced from social farms and of the effectiveness of their actions in terms of sustainability. The present call is set, therefore, to admit, also at interdisciplinary level, models to evaluate the impact produced by social farming in its different dimensions (economic, social, etc.). Abstracts are going to be valued based on their originality and the coherence with the objective of the Special Issue with the purpose to collect the contributions on an actual topic that will contribute in the future to the sustainability of the economic, agricultural, and social systems and to activate an interdisciplinary comparison internationally.
Topics covered in this Special Issue include: Emerging trends in social farming; Social farming: a new paradigm of local development; Method of economic and social evaluation of social farming; Healthcare and social farming; Economic social farming as a new frontier of agriculture; Role of urban e peri-urban agriculture; Social responsibility.
Keywords: Social farming; Value; Agriculture.