Farming system models for supporting farm resilience: Research needs, gaps and promising approaches

Abstract

It is important to increase the resilience of food production systems in the face of a changing climate, land scarcity, and changing demographics and market conditions. As farm resilience is a high-level system property emerged from social-ecological interactions, its direct measurement is difficult because it requires measuring the thresholds or boundaries that separate alternate stability regimes of the farm system. However, systems' modeling for supporting agricultural resilience is still in an early stage. Through critical review of state-of-the art literature, this study aims at highlighting the new requirements of agricultural system modeling as they apply to management for farm resilience, limitations of contemporary agricultural systems modeling approaches, and promising directions for future research on the field.