Do public policies enhance the resilience of farming systems and enable transformative innovations? A comparative analysis of three grassland farming regions in Germany

Enhancing the economic, ecological and social resilience of Europe’s farming systems in the face of accumulating shocks and long-term stresses has become a major concern in agricultural policy and is one of the stated aims of the Common Agricultural Policy 2022-2027. Resilience entails three capacities: robustness, adaptability and transformability (Meuwissen et al., 2019, 2021). The resilience discourse might therefore open a policy window for novel farming systems. However, the dominant farm income support policies focus on compensating a lack of (economic) robustness but hinder transformability (Meuwissen et al., 2022). Grassland herding systems have been particularly vulnerable to low profitability, loss of ecological functions and lack of skilled workers and prospective successors. This paper uses the case of novel precision technology for livestock farming to assess the current and potential role of agricultural policy for the resilience of farming systems. We are particularly interested whether the policy framework enhances or hinders transformative innovations towards more resilience and sustainability. The comparative analysis comprises three different German grassland farming systems as contrasting cases. It builds on an inter- and transdisciplinary analysis of the state of each farming system and focuses on workshops with farmers and actors from value chains, public administration, nature conservation and animal welfare. The results include a participatory definition and longitudinal evaluation of indicators representing system functions, as well as a joint identification of external shocks and stresses and the system’s coping strategies. The latter were evaluated regarding their contribution to the system’s overall resilience, compared across the three study regions. In particular, we assess the potential of precision grassland farming technologies to enhance the resilience of grassland farming systems. Finally, we evaluate the current and potential role of public policies, and in particular the CAP, in enabling or hindering the resilience of the three farming systems and their potential transformation through precision technologies. References Meuwissen, M. P. M., Feindt, P. H., Garrido, A., Mathijs, E., Soriano, B., Urquhart, J., & Spiegel, A. (Eds.). (2022). Resilient and Sustainable Farming Systems in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meuwissen, M. P. M., Feindt, P. H., Slijper, T., Spiegel, A., Finger, R., de Mey, Y., . . . Reidsma, P. (2021). Impact of Covid-19 on Farming Systems in Europe through the Lens of Resilience Thinking. Agricultural Systems, 191, 103152. Meuwissen, M. P. M., Feindt, P. H., Spiegel, A., Termeer, C. J. A. M., Mathijs, E., Mey, Y. d., . . . Reidsma, P. (2019). A Framework to Assess the Resilience of Farming Systems. Agricultural Systems, 176, 102656.