Assessing Peach Farmers Technical Production Vulnerabilities and Their Perception to Climate Change

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate technical production vulnerabilities among professional groups related to peach farming in Greece under extreme biotic and abiotic environmental exposures. Peach technical productivity under a wide variety of physiological type of stresses coupled with applied farming practices and raw environmental data were taken into account. Interviews on a structured questionnaire and farmer workshops were used for data collection. Most of peach farmers understand that extreme temperature as the core problem of climate change; however, few of them realize that traditional knowledge could be used to alleviate extreme environmental conditions effect. Furthermore, very few of them use internet tools in order to find resilient and climate change resistance peach varieties. Potential use of genetic modified peach trees was found by the farmers as a resilient strategy to support their income and their local agri-food industrial networks respectively.