The term Social Agriculture encompasses different approaches that combine agriculture with social, healthcare or educational objectives. Following the English terms Green Care, Social Agriculture or Social Farming indicate any kind of social, therapeutic, educational or nursing activity of enterprises in the field of agriculture, forestry or horticulture. They integrate people into everyday farm work with the objective to improve or to promote physical or mental health and well-being, by offering meaningful activities or therapeutic tasks (Wiesinger et al., 2013). In addition, agri-cultural enterprises offer child- or elderly care structures. Social agriculture serves as a source of additional income for small farmers and has an important impact on the economic, social and cultural development of the rural territory. It is part of multifunctional agriculture (Wilson, 2007) as a precondition of maintenance of small farms. The Italian law (September 2015) recommends the development of integrative and community-based approaches of social agriculture es-pecially in remote rural areas. This combination can offer the possibility to unlock social and economic capacities and to generate synergistic effects as well for users as for suppliers and for the community in general. Possible offers of social agriculture are f. i. for families, children or youngsters as adventure holidays connected with experiences in cultivating plants, cooking, caring for pets or farm animals, understanding ecological circles and biodiversity, for regeneration and care of elderly and care-dependent people and their relatives or for people with special needs and migrants, searching for meaningful work. Social agriculture can meet the general trend to more authenticity in touristic experiences (Sempik, Hine and Wilcox, 2010), to stronger life-world integration of social services and for a life more in harmony with nature and less alienated. Social agriculture in several world regions has demonstrated its potential to prevent rural depopulation, to stimulate repopulation of abandoned mountain areas (Varotto, 2013) and to foster social cohesion in rural communities (Haubendorfer, 2010). It has the additional effect, that local people profit directly also by necessary infrastructure development like information points, mobility structures or cultural events.

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