Cooperative offering daycare for children on farms with the objective of providing childcare by women farmers or other family members and encouraging the interaction with nature. Thus, the farm has been expanded to a place of learning, offering a complementary and alternative setting for environmental education. Away from the classical environmental and nature education towards a direct integration of agricultural resources and the environment as teaching elements, the farm aims at stimulating the curiosity of children in learning, as well as developing their awareness of environmental, sustainable and rural resources. The childcare service includes individually adapted care accommodating up to six children, flexible care hours, the integration into the family structure, the transmission of traditional and cultural values, environmental education, and summer care as well as care for children at different events.

The service offers daycare for children on farms; educational services, responds to the aging society, addresses the growing concern about the efficiency of the institutionalized and available public services; it allows old people to receive family orientated care and be actively integrated into farming life. Social farming contributes to social and economic wellbeing as it stimulates vulnerable people’s independence and their personal development based on active collaboration and help on the farm. It promotes women farmer’s empowerment. It provides an additional income in peripheral rural areas as women can directly practice their pedagogical, health, care or therapeutically profession on the farm. So the practice has social, cultural and environmental impacts on peripheral mountain areas. • Outcomes: The currently active 106, daycare mothers, who are organized in the social cooperative, offer effective, childcare services in South Tyrol. Some of the social cooperative members also offer educational farm activities for school children, were they spend a few hours on the farm and practically get to know the cultural environment of the farm life. In 2014, the social cooperative expanded its social farming services offering elderly care due to a pilot project.