Supporting the design of diversified farming systems to steer general resilience. A review

Diversification within farming systems is a central lever to increase farm sustainability and general resilience. While the potential benefits of diversified farming systems are rather well known, the design process of such systems, especially with the objective of increasing their general resilience (i.e., buffering, adaptive, and transformative capacities), has received little attention. In this article, we review the key challenges faced when looking for general resilience in the design of diversified farming systems. These challenges both relate to the structure of the system to be designed (e.g., the nature and spatio-temporal arrangement of the system’s components) and to the design process (articulating de novo and step-by-step design). Addressing these challenges requires moving beyond traditional reductionist approaches (that sought to make farming systems as deterministic as possible through standardization) to relational, adaptive methods that acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in translating abstract system representations into real-world transformations. Based on a literature review and examples from three French open on-station system experiments, we show how designing a farming system for its buffering, adaptive, and transformative capacities benefits from a combination of de-novo and step-by-step approaches, while acknowledging for the need for constant evolution of the system in response to changing objectives and environmental conditions. Key solutions include shifting to holistic perspectives and leveraging empirical knowledge by valuing visualization and prototyping, as well as integrating previously “invisible” factors, notably working conditions and work distribution across the year.