Demographic trends affect EU farms' availability of successors and hired labour. If a potential successor is available, generational renewal on family farms occurs in stages: the successor's identity formation, the farm transfer, and the farm development. If generational renewal on the farm level is not possible, adaptations of other farms can ensure the future provision of private and public goods on the regional level if there is a sufficient supply of hired labour.

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.