Abstract

In this paper, we define the resilience of agricultural systems and farms as their ability to ensure the fulfilment of their essential functions while facing increasingly complex and volatile economic, social, environmental and institutional challenges. Measuring resilience can be done by objective and subjective methods, each with varying degrees of accuracy and comprehension, and combining them can provide a complex insight into the resilience of a system or farm, with the benefit of complementing each other and eliminating many shortcomings and limitations of both categories of methods. The paper presents an assessment of the resilience of the agricultural system of small mixed farms by subjective methods, more precisely by an empirical research using qualitative tools, in this case a survey based on a questionnaire, conducted in 122 farms in the Nord-Est region of Romania. Farmersʼ opinions on the farm functions in providing private and public goods are being investigated, as well as how farmers perceive the resilience of their farms to the main challenges that today’s agriculture is facing.