Dairy farmers'’ profit margins are under pressure due to the downward trend of EU commodity prices for fluid milk and the increasingly powerful retail sector, in combination with increasing production costs. A likely solution to counter small margins is to add value to raw milk. This paper...

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...

Accumulating shocks and long-term stresses, such as trade conflicts, climate change and deteriorating public trust in agricultural practices have raised concerns about the resilience of Europe's diverse farming systems. The SURE-Farm approach aims to systematically assess the resilience...

This chapter aims to synthesize key findings from the SURE-Farm project. We first discuss possible amendments to the framework to assess the resilience of farming systems. We then review why many of Europe's farming systems face a formidable and structural resilience crisis. While emphasizing...

This chapter aims to formulate principles and recommendations for an enabling environment that fosters resilience of farming systems. Principles have been derived from archetypical patterns identified in the various case studies on how actions in the enabling environment tend to constrain the...

The new individual firmers face the necessity to decide on how much of their assets should be allocated to the individual firm, i.e. what should be the size and scale of operation. Starting from the Jovanovic's (1982) learning model we develop a theory an implication of which is that individual...

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...