A practical approach to assess the resilience attributes of livestock farms

Abstract

There is a growing interest in studying farm resilience. Typically, resilience assessments focus on crisis outcomes, with less attention paid to assess the system characteristics that contribute to building resilience, i.e. resilience attributes. This is partly due to a lack of practical approaches to assess these attributes. The objective of this paper is to develop a practical approach to assess and compare the status of livestock farms’ resilience attributes in different farming systems. We identified 21 resilience attributes that generally contribute to farm resilience based on a literature review. We operationalised resilience attributes into 85 indicators quantifiable through primary farm data, such percentage of feed produced on the farm. We assessed three small ruminant case studies in Spain: (i) meat sheep farms in Aragón; (ii) dairy sheep farms in the Basque Country and Navarre; (iii) dairy goat farms in Andalusia. We conducted farmer surveys (n = 144) to measure the indicators, and organised three workshops with farmers and other local stakeholders (n = 20) to assess the importance of the resilience attributes in the three case studies. We aggregated indicators into resilience attribute scores using a minimum–maximum normalisation procedure. Using stakeholders’ assessments, we calculated attribute weights by a budget allocation process. Attribute scores and weights were then used to calculate an overall resilience score (ranging from 0 to 100). The comparison of attribute scores revealed strengths and weaknesses for resilience in each case study. In the meat sheep system, honours legacy was a major strength, while work and quality of life was a weakness. In the dairy sheep system, sector organisation was a major strength, while the redundance of productive alternatives was a weakness. For dairy goat farms, the infrastructure of the areas where farmers live was a major strength, but feed autonomy and the attributes related to the access and use of natural resources were weaknesses. The perceived importance of attributes (weights) differed across cases. Particularly, human capital emerged as one of the most relevant ones across case studies. Farms’ overall resilience scores were significantly lower in the dairy goat system. Our approach allows to find what attributes build resilience in farms and to highlight areas of improvement to strengthen their resilience. Our findings are of importance to farmers, technicians and policymakers who are interested in assessing resilience as we provide a practical approach to quantify and compare resilience of farms.