Processes of adpatation in farm decision-making models. A review

Agricultural production systems are facing new challenges due to an ever changing global environment that is a source of risk and uncertainty. To adapt to these environmental changes, farmers must adjust their management strategies and remain competitive while also satisfying societal preferences for sustainable food systems. Representing and modeling farmers’ decision-making processes by including adaptation, when representing farmers’ practices ,is therefore an important challenge for the agricultural research community. Bio-economic and bio-decisional approaches have addressed adaptation at different planning horizons in the literature. We reviewed approximately 40 articles using bio-economic and bio-decisional models in which strategic and tactical decisions were considered dynamic adaptive and expectation-based processes. The main results of this literature survey are as follows: i) adaptability, flexibility and dynamic processes are common ways to characterize farmers’ decision-making, ii) adaptation can be a reactive or a proactive process depending on farmers’ flexibility and expectation capabilities, and iii) different modeling approaches are used to model decision stages in time and space, and some approaches can be combined to represent a sequential decision-making process. Focusing attention on short- and long-term adjustments in farming production plans, coupled with sequential and anticipatory approaches should lead to promising improvements for assisting decision makers.