Exploring farmers’ perceived resilience: A profiling of the Flemish farming system

CONTEXT: European farms face social, economic, institutional and environmental challenges that often intermingle and impose cumulative pressures. The capacity of farmers and farms to deal with these challenges is determined by three types of resilience capacities: robustness, adaptability and transformability. OBJECTIVE: This study empirically investigates perceived resilience capacity levels on Flemish farms. Furthermore, we explore whether differences in these perceived levels of robustness, adaptability, and transformability across farms can be linked to resilience attributes at farm and farmer level. METHODS: Both the perceived resilience capacity levels and the farm and farmer indicators for resilience attributes were operationalized based on resilience theory from the literature. Our conceptual framework distinguished resilience attributes to be relating to either farm characteristics (such as farm size and typology) or farmer characteristics (such as risk behaviour and entrepreneurial profile). The dataset was representative for professional farming in Flanders (the Northern half of Belgium) and created by coupling survey data with data from the Flemish Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). Analytical methods encompassed factor analysis, cluster analysis, and inference statistics.