Exploring farmers' perceived resilience: A profiling of the Flemish farming system

CONTEXT

European farms face social, economic, institutional and environmental challenges that often intermingle and impose cumulative pressures. The capacity of farmers and farms to deal with these challenges is determined by three types of resilience capacities: robustness, adaptability and transformability.

OBJECTIVE

This study empirically investigates perceived resilience capacity levels on Flemish farms. Furthermore, we explore whether differences in these perceived levels of robustness, adaptability, and transformability across farms can be linked to resilience attributes at farm and farmer level.

METHODS

Both the perceived resilience capacity levels and the farm and farmer indicators for resilience attributes were operationalized based on resilience theory from the literature. Our conceptual framework distinguished resilience attributes to be relating to either farm characteristics (such as farm size and typology) or farmer characteristics (such as risk behaviour and entrepreneurial profile). The dataset was representative for professional farming in Flanders (the Northern half of Belgium) and created by coupling survey data with data from the Flemish Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). Analytical methods encompassed factor analysis, cluster analysis, and inference statistics.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Some farmers seem to make a trade-off between robustness on the one hand and adaptability and transformability on the other hand, while other farmers rate the presence of all three capacities similarly. This suggests that the relation between the three resilience capacities appears more complex than has been previously reported in the literature. Overall, higher perceived robustness was mainly associated with farm attributes such as better economic performance and increased farm size. At the same time, higher perceived adaptability and transformability were associated with farmer characteristics such as willingness to experiment and connectivity with external actors.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study enhances the understanding of how perceived farm resilience capacity levels are linked to both farm and farmer resilience attributes. By integrating survey data with FADN data, it offers a novel approach to assessing farm resilience, combining both subjective and objective indicators for resilience attributes at farmer and farm level respectively.