#105 - Resilience in Agriculture – Part 2: Choosing the Right Kind of Resilience?

In my previous post, I tried to paint a picture of the external forces impacting agriculture - climate change, geopolitical pressures, economic instability. These challenges are overwhelming and often beyond the control of individual farmers.

But a key practical question remains: how can farmers respond to these mounting challenges?

The obvious answer seems to be: build resilience. But as we dig deeper, it becomes clear that resilience isn’t a single, simple quality. It takes many forms, and each form involves trade-offs.

Resilience is not a fixed set of capabilities. It means different things depending on the context: bouncing back from a shock, adapting to new conditions, or transforming completely in response to a changing world.

Prof. Katarzyna Zawalinska and her team from the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) illustrated this beautifully using animal metaphors [1]:

• Robustness is like a turtle. With its hard shell, the turtle is well-protected from immediate threats. It’s difficult to damage, but also slow and inflexible.

• Adaptation resembles a chameleon. Constantly adjusting, changing its colours, blending in - always ready to pivot.

• Transformation is best described by the butterfly - once a crawling caterpillar, now a completely different creature. Lighter, freer, but also more fragile.

Each of these animals embodies a different type of resilience, with its own strengths and limitations. The turtle will never fly, and the butterfly will never have the turtle’s armor.

This raises a provocative question: Do we have to choose what kind of resilience we want - for ourselves, for our farms, for our organizations? If we build for robustness, are we sacrificing our ability to adapt or transform? These trade-offs aren’t easy to reconcile [2].

One such trade-off lies in our value systems. During the panel discussion, Vitaliy Krupin raised an important point: if we are too deeply invested in our current principles and operating models, we may be resistant to the kind of radical change transformation requires. Confidence can become rigidity.

Some resilience experts even question whether transformation can be actively cultivated by organisations or individuals. They see it as a higher-order phenomenon - not something organizations or people do, but something that happens to them. Evolution, they argue, will simply favor those who are best suited to survive in a new environment [3].

These are open questions. Thought-provoking, unresolved, and important. And they invite us to keep searching.

Is there an animal that embodies all three kinds of resilience - robust, adaptable, and transformative? The mythical phoenix comes to my mind: able to endure, adapt, and be reborn entirely. But of course, it’s not real.

Going down from a dream world to reality, the PAN team offered some key strategies to build adaptive resilience in Polish horticulture. These included:

• Increasing vertical and horizontal cooperation among farms and food producers.

• Expanding knowledge, through educational campaigns—especially those aimed at improving dietary habits and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption.

• Growing ecological and horticultural exports into new foreign markets.

These strategies, especially cooperation and knowledge expansion, while focused on horticulture, seem relevant across many models of farming.

For example, vertical and horizontal cooperation is central to the biodynamic approach. Juchowo Farm stands out as a high-functioning model of an integrated food enterprise. And when it comes to knowledge, the topic is both vast and vital. It was widely discussed during the seminar, and I’ll be writing more about it in next week’s post.

Until then, the search continues - for the balance between turtle, chameleon, and butterfly. Or perhaps, for a new metaphor altogether.

Notes

1. A lecture from the Polish Academy of Science team summarised key finding of SURE Farm project, which investigated resilience of the agricultural systems in Europe. The detailed findings of the project are available as an open access book: Meuwissen, M. P. M., Feindt, P. H., Garrido, A., et al. (Eds.). (2022). Resilient and sustainable farming systems in Europe: Exploring diversity and pathways. Cambridge University Press.

2. According to PAN, the current food system in Poland has a relatively high capacity for buffer resources (robustness) and medium for adaptability and very low for transformability This trade-off was also indicated among other by: Sauer, J., & Antón, J. (2023). Characterising farming resilience capacities: An example of crop farms in the United Kingdom.

3. #86 - Does a Resilient Society Need Resilient Organisations?