Sustainability is out, resilience is in

Agriculture is a battle with nature. Not 'against' nature, because you can also make ecological principles work for you. However, even then there are viruses, animals, plants and people that constantly adapt to changes. Sometimes that results in beautiful things, and sometimes diseases, weeds or fraud.

Resilient systems are not only robust (they can take a beating or recover from a blow), but they also adapt well to new conditions. This is partly due to exhibiting different behavior or being structured differently.

Brabant livestock farming
An example of what I myself come across is livestock farming in Brabant. About 120 years ago, it showed itself very resilient to changing circumstances. Demand for products from the United Kingdom and Ruhr area picked up, fertilizer came on the market and the production of butter disappeared to the factory. The farmers developed the multi-storey system of a mixed farm, with internal cycles.

Some 60 years ago, livestock farming showed its resilience again by taking the above apart and setting up specialized companies. These were better able to absorb rising labor costs, partly through mechanization and economies of scale. And now there is a need for resilience again. It is there, but can we measure and manage it?

Tipping Points
Tipping points play an important role in resilience. A system then suddenly goes through a lower limit and collapses. To get that right again, you are not there with recovery until the lower limit† You have to do much more. Below is an example of this situation.

If the number of farmers in an area falls below the critical limit, all kinds of functions are lost. For example, there are not enough people for the management of the organization and the area is no longer so interesting for the establishment of a mechanization company. However, if you want to provide an area with these functions, you often need a larger number of farmers than the number at which such a company closes its gates.

Scale levels
Another insight is that various scale levels also play a role in resilience. If all farms in an area are so resilient that no one stops, there will be no growth opportunities and they will become too small with continued technical developments. The companies may be resilient in that situation, but the sector is not. This is because it loses its competitive position and that ultimately affects the resilience of individual farms.

In the same way you can ask yourself whether a herd of animals is resilient enough when you only breed on the resilience of 1 individual animal. After all, there is interaction in a group of animals, so the behavior of individual animals could lead to less desirable behavior of the entire group.

Resilience
You can think with resilience in the same way to apply on many problems. If you know the idea, you see it everywhere: does strip cultivation in arable farming provide more resilient cultivation systems than larger fields with monoculture? Is a forest with robust trees more resilient than a forest with fewer of those trees? What makes an ecosystem so resilient to climate change that it repels or accommodates invaders (fish, weeds and insects) or, on the contrary, perishes?

What makes resilience research so relevant is that we have been studying sustainability for a long time. That taught us where the problems are. However, it is a static concept, even if from time to time a new aspect of unsustainability (with accompanying indicator) comes on the radar. Resilience is a much more dynamic concept. We need that when designing new systems.

The future
It is currently increasingly about designing systems for the future. This is due to rising labor costs, the energy transition, climate change, the loss of biodiversity, precision agriculture and circular agriculture. And the authorities are also busy outlining the future of the countryside, agriculture and nature in the Environmental Visions.

These systems must be designed in such a way that the problems surrounding sustainability are not only solved, but also that they are resilient enough to prevent new dependencies and unsustainable behavior.

On Tuesday 13 November, WUR will present research into resilience at a symposium in Klarenbeek. You can register via: www.wur.eu/resilience2018.

Krijn J. Poppe

Krijn Poppe worked for almost 40 years as an economist at LEI and Wageningen UR and now holds a number of advisory and management positions. For Boerenbusiness he dives into his bookcase and discusses current developments on the basis of studies that have become classic.

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