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Retirement generally marks the end of working life and the start of a new life-stage, providing the potential for new contents and opportunities, while requiring adaptation of existing roles. Retired Swiss farming men and women usually continue working and living on the farm, but their roles change. Drawing on conceptual approaches from gerontology research, we first aim to comprehend how farming men and women experience and understand retirement by describing major aspects of adaptation during their transition to retirement. Second, we appraise the relevance of the retirement concept for the farming population. Qualitative-empirical evidence shows that retired farming men and women continue to devote time and energy to the farm for the sake of farm continuity and to maintain the farmers' work ethic, while transferring financial and managerial responsibility. Poor health and the inability to contribute physically to the family farm appear as major threats for 'ageing' farmers.

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Many Swiss farming families face socioeconomic disadvantage despite Switzerland being a wealthy country with instruments of agricultural policy financially supporting almost all farmers. However, official poverty statistics exclude Swiss farmers and scientific knowledge is rare about how such situations are experienced. This article scrutinises the situation of Swiss farming families living in poverty or material deprivation by intertwining qualitative and quantitative methods to enrich both types of data and interpretations. By statistically comparing farmers with the self‐employed in other economic sectors, it uses a novel way of comparing the farming with the non‐farming population. The article shows that the poverty among farmers resembles that of the self‐employed with no or few employees in other economic sectors and describes the lived experiences of poverty and material deprivation. It concludes that adaptive preferences make farming families resilient to socioeconomic disadvantage, while possibly leading to a loss of their livelihood in the long run.

No abstract