Accumulating shocks and long-term stresses, such as trade conflicts, climate change and deteriorating public trust in agricultural practices have raised concerns about the resilience of Europe’s diverse farming systems. The SURE-Farm approach aims to systematically assess the resilience capacities of farming systems, i.e. regional constellations of farms and other actors that provide a range of private and public goods, using local resources and traded inputs. This chapter introduces the key concepts and outlines the SURE-Farm approach to assess the resilience challenges and capacities of farming systems. It sets the scene for the empirical analyses and synthesizing assessments presented in the following chapters.

This chapter aims to synthesize key findings from the SURE-Farm project. We first discuss possible amendments to the framework to assess the resilience of farming systems. We then review why many of Europe’s farming systems face a formidable and structural resilience crisis. While emphasizing the diversity of resilience capacities, challenges and needs, we formulate cornerstones for possible resilience-enhancing strategies. The chapter concludes with critical reflections and suggestions for resilience-enhancing strategies that comprise the levels of farms, farming systems and enabling environments. We identify limitations of the research and suggest avenues for future research on the resilience of farming systems.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy appears essential for farming systems’ resilience, but its resilience-enabling effects in practice remain underexplored. We assessed how farming system actors perceive the CAP’s effects on resilience. The CAP contains a robustness-oriented approach, which actors expect to buffer stress and shocks, while adaptation receives less support and transformation is neglected. Policies need to a take a broader, integrated approach towards farming systems’ resilience.

Cooperation in this farming system mainly occurs amongst processing industry and supply chain actors who have an interest in maintaining milk production, which means investing in robustness at the sector level. Additionally, the current policy environment mostly enables robustness. Yet economies of scale associated with robustness might render the sector more susceptible to shocks and stresses. In the future, supporting adaptive and transformative capacity should be encouraged to assure resilience in the long term.

This chapter aims to formulate principles and recommendations for an enabling environment that fosters resilience of farming systems. Principles have been derived from archetypical patterns identified in the various case studies on how actions in the enabling environment tend to constrain the resilience of farming systems.