Economic, Social, and Environmental Factors Impacting Resilience and Disturbances of Lithuanian Family Farms

Abstract

Climate change, changes in the natural environment, changing markets, price volatility, etc. pose tension and threats to the future of European Union farms. The uncertain future of family farms requires farm resilience—the ability to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change. The limited resilience of family farms has become an important concern for rural and agricultural policy. The main goal of this work is to identify disturbances affecting Lithuanian family farms, assess their influence, investigate the general resilience of Lithuanian family farms, propose measures to reduce the vulnerability of farms, and increase the general resilience and sustainability. We used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to conduct the research. Survey research was conducted using a semi-structured expert interview in which various types of variables were collected. The survey questionnaire, consisting of 38 groups of questions, was sent by email to 500 randomly selected family farmers in January 2024 and collected in the same month. The statistical analysis of the data from the 205 duly filled-out questionnaires was carried out using correlation analysis. In this article, we apply the concept of general resilience of the family farm in the direction of robustness, adaptability, and transformability. We identify the main factors influencing the general resilience of the family farm and study the main attributes of the resilience of family farms. We find some links between family farm characteristics, vulnerability factors, and general resilience capabilities, and we make several proposals to increase family farms’ resilience. The obtained results prove that higher education, larger farm sizes, higher agricultural sales, and employment of permanent workers are associated with better resilience. Furthermore, increasing environmentally friendly practices positively impacts resilience. Older farms and farmers, longer durations of farming activity, and risk-averse behaviors tend to decrease resilience. Due to local and global circumstances, economic and social changes have occurred very quickly in recent years, so the results obtained in the study may not be valid in the long term. Similar surveys after several years will be necessary to study the resilience of Lithuanian farms, including deeper economic analyses that evaluate factors such as price sensitivity, the level of farm debt, and market access.