Exploring multi-scale flexibility to design resilient cropping systems

Farmers have to face long-term predictable trends : new market context and new public policies aiming at limiting the environmental impact of agriculture, like the reduction of pesticide use or water saving. They also have to face rapid unforeseen and unpredictable events such as extreme climatic events, inter-annual climatic variations. In face of changes, transitions toward adaptive resilient cropping systems are needed because current practices cannot ensure sustainability on the long term. In this paper, we present a multi-scale point of view on the design of flexible and more resilient cropping systems based on a multi-domain approach from plant-soil scale to the farm scale. We adapted the framework ‘Resilience of what? Resilience to what? How to assess resilience? What are the sources of flexibility to enhance resilience?’ to analyze resilience of multi-functional cropping system, i.e. being able to ensure on the long term a target compromise between provisioning and environmental services. Thisframework was tested in projects aiming to design Multi-functional Vineyard Cropping Systems (MVCS).Three cases study were analyzed related to different ways of dealing with resilience and flexibility. They covered biophysical, technical, organizational and economical resilience from field to farm scales integrating various sources of flexibility : operational, tactical and strategic flexibility (figure 1). Throughout these applications, we showed that there was no appropriate scale to assess the resilience of a cropping system but a specific combination of scales depending on the driving processes and target services. Multiple sources of Flexibility explored were a way to develop intrinsect capacity to persist in time through changes without any loss of productivity and services provision and consequently enhance resilience. Finally, this analysis helped to assess what the concept of resilience could bring to agronomic research most particularly when dealing with the design of cropping systems in face of global changes.