Farms and farmers facing change: The adaptive approach

Abstract

In the last decades, there have been profound changes in the understanding of farming systems: farms are no longer seen as facing a stable environment, thus allowing a focus on optimising production systems. Rather, farms are conceptualised as evolving and adaptive, so as to be able to respond to an ever-changing environment. The adaptive approach in Farming Systems Research focuses on ensuring sufficient room to manoeuvre, identifying transition capabilities and extending the degrees of freedom. The concepts of resilience, diversity and flexibility help in understanding how to make constructive use of unforeseen change. Understanding farmers’ rationalities; the interactions between the farming family’s activities; diverse approaches to production management; farm trajectories, and options to increase farmers’ autonomy are central issues of research. Farmers face the triple challenge of ensuring liveability, making ef fi cient use of their resources, and keeping their farms adaptive so as to find responses to both external and internal drivers of change.

Published in

Title: Farming Systems Research into the 21st Century: The New Dynamic
Publisher: Springer

SLU Authors

• Milestad, Rebecka

  • Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Business Administration
Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4503-2_16
• ISBN: 978-94-007-4502-5
• eISBN: 978-94-007-4503-2

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/132300