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 efficient use of their resources, and keeping their farms adaptive so as to find responses to both external and internal drivers of change.
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Notes
- 1.
This term is a translation from the French term ‘vivable’ and has no equivalent term in English. It means ‘acceptable living conditions at work’. Some researchers distinguish between ‘working conditions’ and ‘living conditions at work’, which is more specific to the farm, which is both place of work and the homestead of the farm family.
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Milestad, R., Dedieu, B., Darnhofer, I., Bellon, S. (2012). Farms and farmers facing change: The adaptive approach. In: Darnhofer, I., Gibbon, D., Dedieu, B. (eds) Farming Systems Research into the 21st Century: The New Dynamic. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4503-2_16
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