Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms,...

Obwohl technischer Fortschritt die Basis der Wohlstandsentwicklung unserer Gesellschaft bildet, ist der Terminus „Agrarstrukturwandel“ in der politischen Diskussion negativ belegt. Ein Grund ist, dass struktureller Wandel nicht notwendigerweise zum Vorteil für alle Beteiligten führt,...

During the last two decades an increasing amount of large-scale farming operations have emerged all over the world: from (Eastern) Europe, to South America, China and the countries of the Former Soviet Union. These agribusinesses go under the name of mega-farms or agroholdings: horizontally or...

Economic development of transition and developed countries is associated with increasingly unhealthy dietary habits among low-income population segments. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s sociological theory of risk society, the present research note calls attention to the positive relation between...

The strong political support for biogas production in Germany over the past decade has greatly affected agricultural production, farms and land markets. This paper analyzes the effects of Germany's biogas policies on agricultural development by using the agent-based simulation model AgriPoliS....

Russia is a major player in the global wheat market, but extensive unused land resources and large yield gaps suggest that wheat production can be substantially increased. We combined time series of cultivated cropland, abandoned cropland and yield gap estimates to assess the potential...

This paper shows how agent-based stochastic approaches can provide a complementary and more flexible approach to study investment incentives and price dynamics in a real options framework. We particularly study the case of two-stage production chains in which one sector produces an intermediate...

Many farming systems in Europe are struggling to respond to accumulating economic, environmental, institutional and social challenges. From a resilience perspective, they need three distinct capacities to continue delivering products, income and public goods: robustness, adaptability and...

Farm succession is a key policy concern of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and the European Commission's proposals for the future. This article uses the agent-based model AgriPoliS to study the effects of the availability of potential successors in two agricultural regions, one in Belgium...

Context: Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid-19 crisis. Objective: This paper assesses (i) how different farming systems were exposed to the crisis, (ii) which resilience capacities were revealed and...