SURE-Farm (Towards SUstainable and REsilient EU FARMing systems)

The CCRI is part of a newly approved EU Horizon 2020 “Towards SUstainable and REsilient EU FARMing systems (SURE-Farm)”.

SURE-Farm website

Amid concerns about the viability of EU farming systems, the 4-year SURE-Farm project will build on concepts of resilience thinking and aims to develop a comprehensive framework to identify the conditions that enable farming systems to become and remain resilient to a broad range of current and imminent stressors.

It will address determinants of resilience, potential improvements of risk management strategies, drivers of farm demographics, and strengths and weaknesses of the existing policy framework. Its overall ambition is to develop a novel, comprehensive resilience-enabling framework that can be supported, adopted and implemented by key actors in the sector (e.g. upstream and downstream value chain actors and insurance companies) and by policy makers in their attempts to enhance the sustainability and resilience of the EU agricultural sector.

The research of SURE-Farm will be organised into three phases: Phase I will address the resilience framework and challenges; Phase II will examine the capacity of farming systems to adapt and transform; Phase III will provide an integrated impact assessment and explores its role in promoting an enabling environment.

The work programme has three expected impacts:

1: Improve the delivery of the policy framework to agricultural activity thus fostering its sustainability. Particular attention will be paid to the delivery of the CAP

2: Provide farmers with better risk management tools

3: Improve the resilience of the agricultural sector in coping with the risks it faces.

The CCRI is one partner of a 16 pan-European consortium (from 13 countries), led by Wageningen University, with a strong transdisciplinary approach. See an interview in Resource with the project coordinator.

The CCRI team is led by Mauro Vigani and includes Rob Berry, Damian Maye, Paul Courtney and Julie Urquhart. The CCRI team is involved in Work Packages 1,2,6 and 7, and it is task leader of tasks 2.2 and 3.3. Team members will build on their research work for the EU projects SUFISA, GLAMUR, SOLINSA and VALERIE.

The work of the CCRI team will focus on farmers’ adaptive behaviour and learning capacity, the enabling environment for farms demographics and farm labour and the assessment of the capacity of the Common Agricultural Policy to enhance resilient and sustainable agriculture. A mixed quantitative and qualitative analytical approach will be used and large corporate farms in the East of England will be used as a case study. SURE-Farm started on the 1st June, 2017. Updates:

To coincide with the meeting, the  project has launched its official website, which gives full information about the project and which will be updated as the project progresses.    

A video about the work and aims of the SURE-Farm project was launched in April 2018.

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