A framework linking farming resilience with productivity: empirical validation from Poland in times of crises

Farming sectors’ resilience has been built over decades with the aid of policies and institutions. However, its actual standing can be assessed in times of crises when farms have to overcome particular challenges. We use a large-scale farming sectors dataset FADN spanning 2006–2015 in which two major economic crises occurred—the global economic crisis of 2008 and the Russian embargo of 2014—to exemplify our approach to resilience’s assessment based on the Polish farming sectors. We introduce a distinction between “potential resilience” versus “revealed resilience” where the former is assessed based on resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability and transformability), while the latter is assessed based on the observed decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) changes in response to the adverse economic shocks. Hence, the proposed framework directly links productivity with the two types of resilience. We applied the Färe-Primont method of TFP decomposition, into technological change and various types of efficiency changes and a detailed farm survey to distinguish between the drivers of technological changes in each farming sector such as specific innovations and ecosystem services. Our findings show that farms differ in their revealed resilience both among the sectors and between two different shock events. Only field crop farms and granivores farms (pig and poultry) maintained their resilience to both crises, staying robust and/or adaptable. The former had the most productive technology and were leaders in applying innovations while the latter were second best in innovations and fairly good in their application of ecosystem-based services into their technology. Other farm types failed to be resilient to the first crisis but proved robust during the second. The outcomes of the study have implications for sustainability oriented policies.