Views from the country road: A qualitative study on the landscape aesthetic perception of dairy barns in the region of the Osnabrück Region (northwestern Germany)

Angelika Dauermann and Ulrich Enneking

No 2303, DARE Discussion Papers from Georg-August University of Göttingen, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development (DARE)

Abstract: Aesthetic enjoyment and landscape beauty are increasingly recognized as significant attributes of cultural landscapes. Agriculture is an important integral part of the cultural landscape in many places. To date, however, there has been little research into the visual quality of agricultural landscapes - particularly of farm buildings. Consequently, this qualitative study focuses on local residents' emotional reactions to the visual impact of dairy barns as well as their subjective perceptions. The interviewees in the present study looked at various images of different dairy barn designs and dairy barns embedded in the landscape. The dairy barns shown were based on real-life dairy barns in the German agricultural region of Osnabrück in northwestern Germany. All 16 interviewees lived in the region at the time the study was conducted. The interviewees answered a questionnaire to reflect their perceptions and thoughts on the dairy barns. The evaluation shows that the quality of the landscape aesthetics of dairy farms is of importance to the interviewees. Being able to see cattle is one of the key factors contributing to a positive assessment of the landscape aesthetic quality of a dairy farm. Furthermore, this study shows that visual messages have a wide influence on the general perception of a farm. In fact, the analysis of the interviews conducted shows how numerous interpretations of how a farm is run can be derived from visual perception.

Keywords: Dairy barn design; dairy farming; agricultural landscape; qualitative research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cul and nep-inv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/279909/1/1870993950.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:daredp:279909

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DARE Discussion Papers from Georg-August University of Göttingen, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development (DARE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().