Functional farm household typologies through archetypal responses to disturbances

Abstract

Methods to construct farm household typologies may differ in their approach but they share a common feature: they rely mostly on structural farm data. Methods to build functional typologies are far less abundant. Households or communities are complex social-ecological systems that often exhibit patterns in their response to disturbances (e.g., droughts, floods, price shocks, policy change). We propose building functional typologies -classifiable´behaviours´of rural actors -using archetype analysis to categorise such responses and identify salient behaviours. We illustrate this approach by examining the response of rural households to recurrent droughts in northern Patagonia, Argentina, as revealed by 23 in-depth interviews about perceptions and strategies concerning droughts. Using the algorithm from Mørup and Hansen (2012), and the corrected Akaike decision rule, we identified three archetypes (A-C) that represented three distinct aggregated responses of households to droughts. Archetype A presented variable degrees of resistance to droughts (production losses < 40%), avoidance and diversification, whereas archetype B exhibited tolerance (higher losses) and some degree of transformability (off-farm income). Archetype C farms exhibited high levels of vulnerability, if some degree of tolerance to high losses, but no real adaptive strategy to speak of. Such pattern could not have been identified through the more commonly used typology building methods such as using multivariate and clustering techniques. By allowing to combine qualitative and quantitative information, and to deal with a relatively small number of observations, archetype analysis appears as highly suitable to delineate functional farm household typologies.

Climate change, hunger and rural health through the lens of farming styles: An agent-based model to assess the potential role of peasant farming

“…Previous farm household modelling has utilised sophisticated methods to represent real producer-consumer communities, including the consideration of empirically-derived farm typologies based on statistical methods such as principle component and archetypal analysis [e.g. 34,36,37,38]. Our style-based approach differs in that it considers theoretically-derived generalizations (based on empirical research) that are potentially applicable across countries regardless of their income level [32,48] (cf.…”

“…producer-consumer households and farm typologies, are a central focus of the long-established tradition of 'farm household modelling', which has specifically considered questions about food security under climate change [e.g. [33][34][35][36][37]. Our perspective has many similarities to this tradition but differs to previous work in three important ways.…”

“…When assessing farm heterogeneity, farm household modelling has tended to use empirically-derived typologies based on site-specific structural and functional features [e.g. [34][35][36][37][38]. In contrast, styles of farming arise from empiricallyderived theory based on observations in a range of locations and aim to identify 'patterns of coherence underlying this heterogeneity' [39].…”

Survey data on European organic multi-species livestock farms

“…co-grazing, sequential grazing or grazing on separate pastures). This diversity can eventually be simplified using structural and preferably functional farm typologies 27 .…”

Targeting Irrigation Expansion to Address Sustainable Development Objectives: A Regional Farm Typology Approach

“…Typologies have generated important insights into the diversity, complexity, and underlying structures of agricultural systems [43]. However, recent studies stress the need to move beyond characterization and towards making typologies more topic-or hypothesis-driven, policy-relevant, and actionable [40,44,45]. This paper develops a typology-based framework for targeting irrigation interventions in southern Mexico, a region long considered to have strong potential for sustainable irrigation development.…”