Article

Developing a framework to assess the sustainability of farming systems

Abstract

A growing number of economic, ecological, and social challenges are placing more pressure on the resilience of European agricultural systems. Farm systems must be aware of the local environment and agricultural functions of their operations in order to address these challenges, since farms, farmers' organizations, service providers, and actors in the supply chain all have roots in their local communities. In an era of increasing complexity and accumulating stress, farming systems are characterized by robustness, adaptability, and transformability. In our paper you describe your efforts to develop a framework that will be used to measure the resilience of various agricultural systems in Europe, along with your efforts to develop an operationalization method for the framework. In order to evaluate farmers' ability to handle challenges that are specific (specialized resilience) as well as handling uncertain conditions and unexpected surprises (general resilience), this tool was developed.

Keywords: agriculture, farming, economy, farmers, farmer organizations