Assessing a farm's sustainability: insights from resilience thinking

TLDR

Sustainability research in agriculture typically targets environmental impacts, yet such measures alone may not secure long‑term economic and social viability because farm subsystems interact within complex dynamics. The study aims to demonstrate that applying resilience theory to farming offers a more comprehensive route to sustainability and provides practical guidelines for building farm resilience. The authors conceptualize a farm as part of multi‑scale agro‑ecological, economic, and political‑social systems and apply resilience thinking to analyze their interdependence. Farm sustainability in a complex adaptive system requires adaptability, diversity, redundancy, transformative capacity, alignment with local carrying capacity, and learning/innovation, and resilience theory offers practical rules for building such resilience.

Abstract

Research on sustainability in agriculture often focuses on reducing the environmental impacts of production systems. However, environmentally friendly production methods may not be sufficient to ensure the long-term economic and social sustainability of a farm. Taking a systems approach to sustainable farming, we turn to resilience thinking with its focus on the interdependence of social and ecological systems. We apply this approach to farming by conceptualizing a farm as being part of a set of systems spanning several spatial scales and including agro-ecological, economic and political-social domains. These subsystems interact and are subjected to their own complex dynamics. Within such a complex adaptive system, farm sustainability can only be achieved through adaptability and change. To be ready for the inevitable periods of turbulent change, a farmer needs to retain diversity and redundancy to ensure adaptability. Resilience is thus more likely to emerge when farmers hone the capacity to transform the farm, when farm production is attuned to the local ecological carrying capacity, and when learning and innovation are targeted outcomes. This article shows how resilience theory applied to farming may provide a more comprehensive route to achieving sustainability and offers rules of thumb as guides to building farm resilience.