Further consideration of working conditions is needed in farm resilience assessment.

Farm general resilience, i.e. capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise, is increasingly considered a must in today's uncertain and changing context. To measure this resilience, assessments against predefined resilience properties (e.g. diversity, connectivity) are gaining currency. We posit that these assessments neglect a key dimension of farming activity: working conditions of farmers and other farm workers. Our objective was to verify whether farm general resilience always matches good working conditions. We adopted a mixed approach combining structured and semi-structured interviews with participant observation on four contrasting organic dairy family farms located in Aveyron, France. We applied a resilience assessment based on predefined properties and an assessment of working conditions (e.g. availability of suitable infrastructures and equipment, workforce, work organization) and compared their outcomes. Farm D and B had the highest mean resilience scores (2.4 and 2.1 respectively, on a 1–3 scale). They outperformed other farms on several properties, especially diversity and connectivity, which was maximized by interactions between productions to recycle nutrients. Farm A had the least resilient profile (1.4) with, among other things, limited autonomy. Farm C shared some of these weaknesses, but it outperformed other farms regarding profitability (3.0). Assessment of working conditions provided very different patterns. Farm C had the best working conditions (2.7) and a well-balanced profile across those conditions. Farm A displayed overall good working conditions (2.4). Farm D (2.1) was impaired by highly centralized decision-making processes and limited free time. Farm B had the worst working conditions (1.5) due to a lack of planning and an excessive workload that wore out workers and degraded their relations. There was no clear relation between farm general resilience and working conditions. Still, the cases of farms B and D illustrate the criticality of working conditions on farm general resilience. Poor working conditions may lead farmers to cessation or burn out and affect these farms' ability to remain over the long term. This work raises the issue of working conditions in farm general resilience assessments. It clearly shows the need to improve assessment frameworks used by agricultural scientists to further take into account working conditions of farmers and other farm workers as a cornerstone of farm general resilience. Another challenge lies in the identification of farm configurations enabling the joint achievement of both good working conditions and farm general resilience. [Display omitted] • We posit that farm resilience assessments based on pre-defined properties neglect working conditions. • We compare the outputs of a resilience assessment and an assessment of working conditions on four organic dairy family farms. • We show that apparently resilient farms can offer poor and sometimes with critically low working conditions. • Poor working conditions compromise farm capacity to remain over the long term by leading farmers to cessation or burn out. • Agricultural scientists have to consider working conditions as a cornerstone of farm resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]