Resilience in Dairy Farm Businesses; to Bounce Without Breaking

European Review of Agricultural Economics, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper examines the concept of resilience and its increasing use in the face of both economic uncertainty and climate change, and applies it to farm management. Resilience is understood as encompassing buffer, adaptive and transformative capability. I argue that resilience thinking offers alternative insights into farm management and how farmers balance short-term efficiency and long-term transformability, balance exploitation and exploration. Farm resilience can be strengthened or eroded by policy measures and family dynamics. Overall resilience proposes an alternative conceptual lens to one building on equilibrium, thus highlighting complex dynamics and the role of farmer agency in navigating change.

Land Use Policy, 2020

Highlights: 1. Market liberalization and price volatility drive changes in all farming systems. 2. Price volatility results in poor adaptive capacity of dairy farms. 3. Strategies for dairy farming systems are conditioned by strategies of processors. 4. Systems respond with different strategies despite comparable regulatory framework. 5. Dairy market trends may have long-term impact on land use.

Field Crops Research, 2011

This paper examines the idea that plasticity in farm management introduces resilience to change and allows farm businesses to perform when operating in highly variable environments. We also argue for the need to develop and apply more integrative assessments of farm performance that combine the use of modelling tools with deliberative processes involving farmers and researchers in a co-learning process, to more effectively identify and implement more productive and resilient farm businesses.

Agriculture, 2021

The economic viability of dairy farms is a measure of their ability to survive and grow. Its measurement is particularly important in periods of changes taking place in the environment of these entities. The last decade of the European dairy market was characterized by significant changes in regulations, which resulted in fluctuations in farm gate milk prices and, consequently, impacts on farm income. The main objective of the research was to assess the economic viability of dairy farms located in the European Union. The research area covered the countries that have the most raw cows’ milk delivered to dairies in the EU, and FADN data from 2009 to 2018. A comparative analysis was carried out on the level of temporal viability and permanent viability of farms classified by economic size. The research results showed that better temporal viability was achieved by farms with a larger production scale. On the other hand, the permanent economic viability was lower on farms belonging to a ...

Field Crops Research, 2011

This paper examines the idea that plasticity in farm management introduces resilience to change and allows farm businesses to perform when operating in highly variable environments. We also argue for the need to develop and apply more integrative assessments of farm performance that combine the use of modelling tools with deliberative processes involving farmers and researchers in a co-learning process, to more effectively identify and implement more productive and resilient farm businesses.

Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2020

The sustainability of livestock systems can be assessed through their productive and environmental performance, the ecosystem services they provide or their resilience to hazards. We used a modelling approach to assess how key economic performance indicators respond to technical and market hazards in five different meat-sheep farms, across France and Ireland. Hazards were related to seven technical or economic variables: ewe fertility, prolificacy, lamb mortality, prices of light and heavy lambs, concentrate use and energy use. We used a mechanistic model to simulate farm functioning and assess farm performance over 3000 iterations, based on simultaneous random draws with hazards to the previously mentioned seven variables. We quantified this way (i) the compensatory effects of different types of technical and economic mechanisms that lead to more stable economic performance and (ii) the probability of economic collapse of meat-sheep farms through a diachronic analysis. We showed that variations in technical variables have larger effects on income variability than variations in economic variables. We also showed that the most resilient systems, i.e. those with the lowest coefficient of variation of net income, are those that combine a low level of inputs with at least two lambing periods per year. Short duration of pregnancy in ewes makes multiperiod lambing possible, which can buffer the variability of technical variables and enhance the adaptive capability of the system by offering the possibility to move empty ewes to a new batch for re-mating. We thus analysed for the first time farm economic resilience to combined technical and economic hazards, and highlighted the buffer and adaptive mechanisms of resilience, with a mechanistic model.

Extension farming systems journal, 2012

This paper outlines a study conducted with a regional extension committee in the dairy industry in Western Victoria, Australia. The aim was to understand experiences of crisis within the region's dairy industry and its current crisis response approaches. It also tested alternative extension approaches through applying resilience thinking and farmer segmentation. The study included interviews, a desk-top development of a resilience framework and a role-play workshop of a mock-crisis situation. The effects of crisis were influenced by the capacity farmers and their farming system developed pre-crisis. Factors affecting the capacity to respond included the farmer's personal and financial context, beliefs and expectations concerning farming itself, past experiences related to the crisis, the extent to which goals were threatened and the need for change. Farmers reported a limited ability to respond during a crisis in ways that mitigated its effects. The introduction of a resilie...

Livestock Science, 2017

Resilience is one of the three core properties of social-ecological systems, mixing adaptability and transformability. Flexibility can be defined in terms of diversity of procedures and the speed at which they can be mobilized by one organization. The analyses performed are presented in terms of levers that farmers can deploy to protect their management systems against market uncertainty. These levers differ depending on farmer standpoints, objectives, lessons learned, the collective organizations they work with, the standards and specifications they work to, etc. It is equally important to identify the interplays between overarching and underlying scale levels for the system studied and to hone in on the dynamics at work during periods of transition. Adaptive capacities of farm systems are closely linked to how the farmer perceives the situations to manage, according to his aims, to his behaviour face to risk and to his idea of what is his job. We propose to use different words to describe the properties of farming systems to cope with changes, according to the level within the system: "adaptive capacity" or "plasticity" for the animal level, "resilience" for the biotechnical level and "flexibility" for the whole system, including the manager. We think there is a real challenge working at each level on transition periods and processes, as farming systems will have more and more to adapt face to unpredic events.

International journal of agricultural management, 2012

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financial performance of five pastoral dairy farming systems through the use of financial ratio analysis in the form of the Du Pont model and to determine any differences in the drivers of financial success between systems. The differing level and allocation of resources, or organisational structure, that each farm system adopts was the basis for a test to determine superior competitive advantage. This test was on the premise that if a farm system has a competitive advantage it would exhibit above average performance. While the on-farm competitive strategy, cost leadership, is the same for all systems the organisational design and the resource configuration differ between farms. There are low-input farms which achieve low cost production through cost control (the numerator effect) and high-input farms which achieve it through improved outputs (the denominator effect). There has been significant debate in New Zealand as to which system is better with discussion focusing often on misleading metrics. The focus on competitive advantage and the rigour provided by the Du Pont model analysis enables a more balanced assessment of the benefits, or not, of intensification on New Zealand farms. The results highlight how misleading commonly used metrics can be. Despite differences in production and operating profit per hectare there is very little difference between return on assets and return on equity between the systems. Of particular interest is the consistency in operating profit margin between systems indicating no loss in operating efficiency as systems intensify. The only exception to this was the more intensive systems in 08/09 when input and output market price relativity was extremely unfavourable. Further research is required to determine if farms switch between systems as input and output market prices change and to explore those farms that are more resilient to such changes.

Revista Brasileira de Zootecnia, 2009

This paper aims at exploring what is covered by « adapting to last » with a farming systems approach. Long term dynamics can be analysed as adaptive cycles, the system being permanently exposed to disturbances and shocks. Mobilizing the concept of resilience, we analyse the factors that differentiate the principles for long term action the livestock farmers have, principles which give consistency to the family - farms trajectories. With the concept of operational flexibilty, we qualify the sources of flexibility the livestock farmers maintain to cope with hazards. They are internal, related to the production process regulation properties, to the technical (adaptive or rigid) specifications, to the sales policies, or external related to the information and commercial networks. Understanding the production process regulation properties require livestock farming systems models (i.e. combining decisional and biological sub-systems) that can simulate how herd dynamics operate under fluct...