Sweden

The Living Lab

Sweden is an industrialised and urbanised country with a population of 10 million inhabitants, and covering 450 000 km2, with large, sparsely populated rural areas. About one third of the population live in rural areas, and many rural regions in Sweden experience out-migration particularly of young women, moving to major towns or the capital Stockholm (Rauhut and Littke, 2016).

A notable feature of the Swedish context is the publicly-funded child care, health care, elderly care and social care. Parents can take 18 months paid parental leave financed through the tax system, out of which three months are earmarked for each parent and equal sharing of the parental leave is encouraged. However, fathers in Sweden still in 2002 took only 30% of the total parental leave.

The Living Lab is focusing on Jönköping County, characterised as a region having a ‘traditional gender contract’ (Forsberg, 1998), and is close to the bottom of ‘gender equality lists’ in Sweden (SALAR, 2016). It has a comparatively low share of women in municipal political bodies, a high degree of gender segregation in the labour market, and a large gender pay gap (Länsstyrelsen, 2017). Men own four out of five farms, while forestry is more evenly distributed among women and men, and around 9 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men in rural areas are self-employed, corresponding to the national numbers (Sköld et al., 2018).

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Meet our women innovators

Ulrica Björnhag

Cattle farmer

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Ulrica Björnhag
Cattle farmer

Ulrica and her husband produce climate certified beef from retired grass-fed milk cows, on their farm. These cows are a forgotten resource and their product is unique. They also run a farm shop with products from small-scale food artisanal producers, as well as several different products based on their cows, such as tallow, leather, bone-charcoal and skin care products.

Emma Hartelius

Cattle farmer

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Emma Hartelius
Cattle farmer

Emma is a farmer producing ecologically certified beef from natural pasture-fed cattle. She sells the beef partly through a ’box system’. She took over the farm from her parents and is the seventh generation in the family farming the land and forest. The cattle keep the landscape open and prevent forest encroachment.

Lisbeth Karltorp

Entrepreneur

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Lisbeth Karltorp
Entrepreneur

Lisbeth has taken over a horse stables on her mother’s farm, which was bought by her grandfather in the end of the 1960s. She offers riding lessons, courses and camps for children and adults. She also rents out accommodation for tourists. Lisbeth has 35 horses, and has constructed new pastures organising the horses in novel ways. The manor includes forests, fields, a riding track and a terrain track.

Sara Lantz

Farmer

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Sara Lantz
Farmer

Sara and her family produce meat on the island Visingsö in Sweden’s second largest lake. They have around 840 pigs and 110 beef cattle, and grow fodder on 350 hectares. Sara sells the meat and sausages made according to Sara’s recipe from their own meet through local markets called REKO-rings (‘own consumption rings’), where producers are connected to consumers with no intermediaries through Facebook. They also sell to restaurants and hotels.

Sandra Levinsson

Entrepreneur

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Sandra Levinsson
Entrepreneur

Sandra runs a farm café with her two sisters on their parent’s farm in a converted farm building. They also produce a vegetarian protein burger retailed in grocery shops, based on lupin beans produced on the farm by their father. The café also contains a farm shop, selling the burgers and crafts from other artisanal producers.

Olivia Nylundh

Dairy farmer

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Olivia Nylundh
Dairy farmer

Olivia and her partner produce artisanal cheese in their on-farm cheese production facility, which they built in 2022. They contribute to reviving traditional cheese production in Sweden. The cheese is sold in a web-shop. On the farm they also practice small-scale farming with Swedish Unique Mountain cows, pigs and chickens. They are self-sufficient in traditional wheat grain production.

Annika Palmér Werthén

Dairy farmer

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Annika Palmér Werthén
Dairy farmer

Annika and her partner produce ecologically certified milk. They took over the farm from her partner’s father. The milk is sold to the local Falköping’s Dairy and they also sell meat. The farm has 160 cows of the Swedish Red-and-White breed (SRB). They have three milking robots, and the cows are kept in an open barn where they can move freely and also go outside to pasture. They produce most of the feed on the farm, and as a way to tackle the challenges with climate change, they recently invested in a ‘laying silo’ to store a larger amount of feed at the farm.

Elin Skörde

Forester

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Elin Skörde
Forester

Elin runs a forestry with her partner and they are developing the forest in innovative ways by creating a ‘forest-garden’, planting berry bushes and fruit trees on old arable land (former spruce plantation) in the forest. In addition, they run a pitch for motorhomes in the forest. Elin also runs her business called ‘forest hangout with Elin’ where the focus is on recovery and forest experience.