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.

This chapter assessed sustainability and resilience of eleven farming systems in their current situation, as well as in hypothetical future systems, using qualitative and quantitative methods. The assessment shows that current farming systems address sustainability dimensions in an unbalanced way and are characterized by poor resilience. Future resilient systems are imagined to promote environmental and social functions in the long term.

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.