Abstract
Resilience is a property of agricultural systems that enables them to face disturbances. A type of agroforestry – mixed fruit tree-vegetable system (MFVS) is gaining interest regarding its potential to improve resilience. However, research has yet to be done on the resilience of farms that include a MFVS. Analyzing farmers' point of view makes possible approaching this complex resilience process. Our hypothesis is that different decisions about MFVS management can be made to reach farmers’ satisfaction goals in the face of disturbances. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with farmers who have adopted a MFVS in the French Mediterranean area. We found that two types of levers confer resilience to MFVSs: piloting and structuring the system. Regarding the ranges of resilience levers, farmers either adopted multidimensional levers that combine agronomic, ecological, economic and social levers, or that mainly rely on ecological levers. The satisfactory states that farmers are looking for in their MFVSs are described according to five components: (i) global organization of the farm; (ii) agroecological management of the plot; (iii) economic performance; (iv) provision of ecosystem services; and (v) belonging to a knowledge producing community. Our work also showed that the relative importance and hierarchy of these components partly reflect the weight that farmers give to the different levers they choose to mobilize in order to be resilient. This work emphasizes the multiple choices of resilience levers of farmers and the diversity of identities of MFVSs, calling for research to adapt the evaluation of resilience to farmers’ specific objectives.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are very grateful to the farmers who accepted to share their valuable knowledge and time with us. We also would like to thank Emma Decayeux for her contribution to the design of the interview outline and Aurélie Cardona for helping us deepen the qualitative analysis of the survey results. We thank the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on the manuscript.
Funding
This study was supported by the PRIMA TRANSITION project (InnovaTive Resilient fArmiNg Systems in MedITerranean envIronments). Project Number: PCI2021-121959.
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Conceptualization: LG, RS and MT; methodology: LG, RS and MT; validation: LG and RS; formal analysis: LG; investigation: LG; data curation: LG; writing – original draft preparation and editing: LG; writing – review and editing: RS and MT; visualization: LG; funding acquisition: MT.
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Garreau, L., Sabatier, R. & Tchamitchian, M. How to make my mixed fruit tree-vegetable systems resilient? Types and ranges of resilience levers used by French Mediterranean farmers. Agroforest Syst (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-024-00980-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-024-00980-1