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Summary Many farming systems in Europe are struggling to respond to accumulating economic, environmental, institutional and social challenges. From a resilience perspective, they need three distinct capacities to continue delivering products, income and public goods: robustness, adaptability and transformability. Based on a structured assessment of the resilience capacities of 11 farming systems across Europe we conclude that three mismatches likely contribute to their struggles. First, while farming systems comprised many non‐farm actors, resilience strategies largely focused on farms and their robustness, neglecting other options and opportunities. Second, while the delivery of public goods such as biodiversity and attractive landscapes was seen as a major concern, most resilience strategies focused on the delivery of private goods. Third, while in many farming systems actors expressed the need for transformation, farming systems’ capacity to transform was perceived as low. Building on the differentiated concept of resilience, findings can guide policymakers, farming system actors, consumers and societal interest groups to identify pathways towards more resilient agricultural systems in Europe.

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Summary In facing future challenges, risk management (RM) is essential for European farming systems (FS). This article synthesises lessons learned on RM based on a farm survey, interviews with farmers, and focus groups involving a range of FS actors. In contrast to previous literature, we broaden the definition of RM to include strategies that target long‐term structural challenges, as well as expanding the level of analysis from the farm to the FS level. The results were consistent across the different methods. We found that farmers mainly worry about economic challenges: in particular long‐term pressures. We also found that European farmers have implemented diverse RM strategies in the past five years, and that no single strategy has been applied by the vast majority of farmers. In line with perceptions of future challenges, there is a demand for the reorientation of RM strategies towards long‐term pressures, rather than short‐term shocks. FS actors were found to perceive RM as enhancing resilience capacities, especially adaptability. The results of interviews distinguished between major learning strategies and the attributes of farmers for enhancing robustness, adaptive or transformative capacities. Focus group discussions revealed that the future development of RM strategies requires contributions by all FS actors.

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Risk and risk preferences belong to the key determinants of investment-based technology adoption in agriculture. We develop and apply a novel approach in which an inverse second order stochastic dominance approach is integrated into a stochastic dynamic farm-level model to quantify the effect of both risk and risk aversion on the timing and scale of agricultural technology adoption. Our illustrative example on short rotation coppice adoption shows that risk aversion leads to technology adoption that takes place earlier, but to a smaller extent. In contrast, higher levels of risk exposure lead to postponed but overall larger adoption. These effects would be obscured if technology adoption is not analyzed in a farm-scale context or considered as a now-or-never decision ⸺ the still dominant approach in the literature.

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