Psychology and family researchers have identified individual, adult resilience recovery characteristics and skills present after individuals experience tough times such as traumatic events and setbacks in business, personal, and family life (American Psychological Association, 2012). These recovery characteristics and skills include:
• Self-compassion (positive adaptation to a crisis or stress)
• Hardiness (the belief one can get through tough times)
• Self-control (the belief that you have some control — if only of your response) and
• Managerial skills (organization, decision-making and establishing priorities (Danes, 2014).
Though there is no single resilient type of person or family, a capacity for healthy functioning and positive emotions is part of a pattern. Resilience can help protect individuals from a variety of mental and emotional health conditions such as depression and anxiety and can help offset their impact when present. Positive emotions promote adaptive flexibility and teach proactive responses to opportunities during less stressful times (Fetsch, 2012). Relationship resilience is particularly relevant to understanding risk and resilience from a multi-system perspective (Darnhofer, 2014; Darnhofer et al., 2010; Darnhofer et al., 2016). Relationship resilience requires that professionals and the farming population acknowledge and draw on reciprocal relationships between and among people who work on, or for, the farm to reduce risk and develop resilience prior to and during, times of intense stressors. Relationships include multiple family members, people in communities, beneficiaries of the farm’ productivity, and those making policy decisions abo ut farming. Relationship resilience acknowledges that getting through tough times is not just an issue for each farm and farm family, but also for rural areas, their communities, and the broader society. It is about availability and the accessibility of community support. Public policy can be a cause of stress and a contributor to resilience. For example, farmers cite changing government regulations as a source of stress. They also benefit from policy that provides protection (e.g., crop insurance) or subsidies. The policy arena affects farming enterprises, communities, and farming populations.
Farming System Resi l ience
Specific farm and agriculture stress and resilience literature is limited. Some key concepts are found in the literature on sustainability and agricultural generativity described as a system of applying principles and practices that improve the physical environment, yield, resilience, and vitality for farming communities (Soloviev & Landua, 2016). Farming systems are accumulating economic, ecological, and societal challenges (Meuwissen et al., 2019). These are challenges to resilience and need to be addressed by multiple systems in which they are embedded.
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