3. |
- Milestad, Rebecka, et al.
(författare)
-
Building farm resilience through farmers´ experimentation
- 2010
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of the 9th European IFSA Symposium. ; , s. 770-778
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper discusses how farmers’ experimentation can be a building block for resilience at theirfarms. A core challenge in natural resource management is to enhance resource users’ learning and capabilitiesso that they can make informed decisions and adaptively manage the land. In other words, resource users, suchas farmers, need to develop their capacity to manage for resilience of agro‐ecosystems so that the ecosystemservices from agriculture (like food, fibres, cultural values, etc) can be sustained and enhanced. One way todevelop this capacity may be through experimentation on the farm. Experimentation is one way for farmers tolearn about and manage their environment. Farmers’ experiments can be described as the activity ofintroducing something totally or partially new at the farm and to evaluate the feasibility of this introduction.We use literature about farmers’ experiments and resilience theory to build the arguments of this paper. Theoutcome of experiments can be management changes, new insights, or technology. These can be passed on toothers in the farmers’ social network and potentially be built into institutional memory at higher scales. Wecontend that farmers’ experiments have a strong relation to learning and resilience building in farming systems.
|
|