Perception of dairy farming from different views - results of a stakeholder discussion in the region Altmark, Germany

Path dependence is a phenomenon which can also be observed in agriculture. Especially structures in German dairy farming are very heterogeneous. The abolishment of the milk quota system in 2015 offers opportunities and challenges for dairy farmers at the same time. Our research aim is to find out to what extent a changing policy environment will affect structural change in the dairy sector. Therefore it is interesting to build different scenarios to analyse path dependence, path breaking and path craetion. In this contribution we focus on results from a first workshop in our German study region Altmark. We used participatory methods for the analysis of mechanisms, trends and policy effects in the regional dairy sector. In this first stakeholder workshop we collected different views of stakeholders on dairy farming in the case study region, discussed assumptions of the model AgriPoliS and identified hints for potential scenarios.