Social Farming and Czech Social Farms (A Case Study)

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of social farming; its aim is to describe this phenomenon, understand it and critically discuss it in the context of social economics and social entrepreneurship. The text also proposes other frames of thought - social integration and social work, multifunctional agriculture, the Green Care concept and the social entrepreneurial theory in which social farming can be considered. The thesis also gives insight into foreign and Czech socio-agricultural practice. It uses methodology based on the principles of exploratory and descriptive case studies since it focuses on a small sample of a phenomenon not yet described in which context and content are observed. The study is divided into two sections: a theoretical part and a research part, each of which draw on professional literature, semi-structured in-depth interviews with representatives of social farms, other primary data and documents and secondary sources. The analysis of the research results displays an assessment of Czech social agriculture, which can be described as delayed when compared to western Europe, mainly due to the historical development of agriculture and social arenas of the last seventy years, while also serving as a reaction to certain contemporary social trends. The outputs suggest typology of..