Open Access

Angelika Dauermann, Ulrich Enneking

• Aesthetic enjoyment and landscape beauty are increasingly recognized as significant attributes of cultural landscapes. Agriculture is an important integral part of the cultural landscape in many places. To date, however, there has been little research into the visual quality of agricultural landscapes – particularly of farm buildings. Consequently, this qualitative study focuses on local residents’ emotional reactions to the visual impact of dairy barns as well as their subjective perceptions. The interviewees in the present study looked at various images of different dairy barn designs and dairy barns embedded in the landscape. The dairy barns shown were based on real-life dairy barns in the German agricultural region of Osnabrück in northwestern Germany. All 16 interviewees lived in the region at the time the study was con- ducted. The interviewees answered a questionnaire to reflect their perceptions and thoughts on the dairy barns. The evaluation shows that the quality of the landscape aesthetics of dairy farms is of importance to the interviewees. Being able to see cattle is one of the key factors contributing to a positive assessment of the landscape aesthetic quality of a dairy farm. Fur- thermore, this study shows that visual messages have a wide influence on the general per- ception of a farm. In fact, the analysis of the interviews conducted shows how numerous in- terpretations of how a farm is run can be derived from visual perception.