Agricultural production systems should evolve fast to cope with risks induced by climate change. Farmers should adapt their management strategies to stay competitive and satisfy the societal demand for sustainable food systems. It is therefore important to understand the decision-making processes used by farmers for adaptation. Processes of adaptation are in particular addressed by bio-economic and bio-decision models. Here, we review bio-economic and bio-decision models, in which strategic and tactical decisions are included in dynamic adaptive and expectation-based processes, in 40 literature articles. The major points are: adaptability, flexibility, and dynamic processes are common ways to characterize farmers' decisionmaking. Adaptation is either a reactive or a proactive process depending on farmer flexibility and expectation capabilities. Various modeling methods are used to model decision stages in time and space, and some methods can be combined to represent a sequential decision-making process.

Farmers' production decisions and agricultural practices directly and indirectly influence the quantity and quality of natural resources, some being depleted common resources such as groundwater. Representing farming systems while accounting for their flexibility is needed to evaluate targeted, regional water management policies. Farmers' decisions regarding investing in irrigation and adopting cropping systems are inherently dynamic and must adapt to changes in climate and agronomic, economic and social, and institutional, conditions. To represent this diversity, we developed a typology of Indian farmers from a survey of 684 farms in Berambadi, an agricultural watershed in southern India (state of Karnataka). The survey provided information on farm structure, the cropping system and farm practices, water management for irrigation, and economic performances of the farm. Descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis (Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering) were used to analyze relationships between observed factors and establish the farm typology. We identified three main types of farms: (1) large diversified and productivist farms; (2) small and marginal rainfed farms, and (3) small irrigated marketing farms. This typology represents the heterogeneity of farms in the Berambadi watershed.

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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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