European agriculture is facing increasing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges, from changes in demographic trends to the effects of climate change. In this context of high instability, the agricultural sector in Europe needs to improve its resilience and sustainability. Local assessments and strategies at the farming system level are needed, and this paper focuses on a hazelnut farming system in central Italy. For the assessment, a participatory approach was used, based on a stakeholder workshop.
The framework is designed to assess resilience to specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as a farming system's capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience). The framework provides a heuristic to analyze system properties, challenges (shocks, long-term stresses), indicators to measure the performance of system functions, resilience capacities and resilience-enhancing attributes. Capacities and attributes refer to adaptive cycle processes of agricultural practices, farm demographics, governance and risk management.
The challenges faced by agricultural systems call for an advance in risk management (RM) assessments. This research identifies and discusses potential improvements to RM across 11 European Union (EU) farming systems (FS). The paper proposes a comprehensive, participatory approach that accounts for multi-stakeholder perspectives relying on 11 focus groups for brainstorming and gathering suggestions to improve RM.
The project Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) intends to assess the role of small farms and small food business in terms of food production and food security. One important first step in doing this is to test and develop methods and tools able to produce accurate and useful information about small farms.
This deliverable is a report on the main methodological steps implemented in the framework of the Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) project in task 2.3 of Work Package 2 (WP2) to produce the Output 3, which is a crop type map in small farms context in each reference region (see D.2.4 report pag. 5).
This deliverable is a report of the work done in the framework of the Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) project in task 2.3 of Work Package (WP2) as defined in the description of work (DOW) of the SALSA project. The title of the task according to the DOW is Task 2.3 - Small farms characterization in the reference regions.