What is resilience?
The beginning of a new year is always a good time to consider ways to improve a farm for greater long-term success. A way to improve long-term success is to consider how to make a farm more resilient. In the constant pursuit of increased production, resilience is often overlooked, undervalued, and perhaps misunderstood. But what exactly is resilience?
Resilience is a kind of strength that goes beyond power, toughness, and durability. It is the ability to bend but not break and to endure in the face of adversity.
Adversity is common in farming. With so many uncontrollable risk factors, the ability to respond to adversity ultimately dictates the success of a farm. Having the ability to withstand extreme weather, low prices, disease outbreaks, and family crises makes a farm more resilient.
How can resilience be achieved?
Nature provides an excellent model. Nature functions as an adaptive, integrated system with multiple redundancies. When a disturbance occurs, some components may not survive, but the system itself remains healthy. It doesn’t maximize productivity but rather maximizes stability by optimizing productivity.
Resilience is influenced by the interactions between a host of physical, biological, financial, social, and cultural factors. These interacting factors determine how well a system responds to adversity. As agriculture has become specialized and less diverse, farming operations have become less resilient and more vulnerable to disruptions. However, there are many ways to build resilience into a farming operation.
These five ethics of resilience can serve as a foundation: sustainability, optimization, diversification, redundancy, and adaptability.
- Sustainability has three pillars: economic, environmental, and social. By setting goals that address these three things, a farm’s financial goals are likely to be in balance with family, emotional, and mental needs. This balance keeps farms stronger in the face of adversity, while also providing a sense of satisfaction and protecting the natural resources on which farms and families depend.
- Optimization is also foundational. As experts in their fields, advisors often compartmentalize enterprises based on their area of focus. Advice should be analyzed in the light of the whole system. While a specialist’s goal is to maximize what they specialize in, a farmer’s goal should be to optimize it with respect to the whole system. For example, a shorter-season corn hybrid may result in sacrificing some yield while allowing for the establishment of cover crops for fall grazing. There are many examples of this tension between “good and the best” that must be navigated on a case-by-case basis to optimize each aspect of a farming operation.
- Diversification of a farming operation can lead to increased complexity and more challenging management, but diversity and stability go hand in hand. As natural systems move toward a steady state, they become more diverse because diversity optimizes energy use and nutrient cycling throughout the system. For example, crop rotations that include three or more crops have been shown to be more profitable long-term because they capture both the up-cycles and down-cycles of multiple commodities, resulting in more stable income from year to year.
- Redundancy may seem counterintuitive and even unprofitable in an agricultural setting, but in the natural world, all stable ecosystems have redundancy. They have multiple components with similar functions, so when one part fails, another fills that role. For example, having multiple sources of winter feed lined up ensures that you’ll have enough feed to get your herd through the winter. Redundancy can be overdone and too much can become costly, but making sure key components of the system are backed up can be extremely valuable.
- Adaptability is perhaps the most important factor for a resilient system. Enacting the other four principles enhances the ability to adapt. Regardless of what happens, being able to adapt ensures a farm will be able to survive adversity. Adaptability is equal parts mindset and management. Setting up a system for diversity and redundancy ensures there will be multiple options for adapting when the chosen approach isn’t working.
