**Author details**

**•** The interplay, or rather the fitting of abilities between production system components (system entities) and the type of system environment. This standpoint leads to a subsequent issue of whether there are advantages to be drawn from preserving certain specific animal or plant genotype characteristics that are underrepresented or tend to pale in comparison when balanced against the yield capacities of different breeds and the so‐called improved

**•** The advantages of mixed farm systems combining different animal breeds/plant species, where the farmer is hedging on complementarity between the properties of each breed/ species to cope with climatic unknowns (species offering different hardiness or which develop at different periods of the year) or variations in market prices (which have different

Approaches based on concepts and theories borrowed from disciplines such as ecology and management science are particularly fruitful for fuelling reflective thinking and reframing analyses in agronomics science when the aim is to investigate the dynamics of change and the

For farmers, the art of farm management resides in tackling head‐on how they define and readjust the production objectives set, how they lead negotiations with other farm stakeholders in order to achieve these objectives given the resources available, how they tackle uncertainty and how they tackle opportunity. These are all complex adaptation processes occurring at the interface between the farm and its environment, which emerge not only in the decisions taken but also in the short‐term and long‐term practices that we have termed "flexibility." Our analysis of these processes applied to three real‐world systems enabled us to highlight a handful of principles governing farm business flexibility. First, the situational contextualiza‐ tion: flexibility is dependent not only on the technical features of the production system components (plasticity) but also on the socio‐economic environment in which the businesses evolve; second comes the collectiveness component: flexibility becomes greater as the business integrates the collective dimension of farm activity, even if the overriding aim is to maintain decision‐making autonomy over the production system. Finally, from the methodology standpoint, trials led at our experimental farm station have prompted us to continue investi‐ gations into methods for qualifying and if possible even quantifying the sustainability of farm structures in interaction with their environment, factoring in the different farm‐structuring organizational levels. This research will ultimately be used for inter‐farm comparisons

This work was carried out with the financial support of the "ANR—Agence Nationale de la Recherche—The French National Research Agency" under the "Programme Agriculture et

crop varieties.

12 Livestock Science

effects on different farm outputs).

adaptability of farm in response to situations of uncertainty.

integrating on‐farm production system adaptability over time.

Développement Durable," project "ANR‐05‐PADD‐04‐01, Discotech."

**Acknowledgements**

Stéphane Ingrand1,2,3,4\*, Laura Astigarraga5 , Eduardo Chia6 , Xavier Coquil7 , Christophe David8 and Jean‐Louis Fiorelli7

\*Address all correspondence to: stephane.ingrand@clermont.inra.fr

1 Inra, UMR, Métafort, Méthamis, France

2 Agro Paris Tech, UMR, Aubière, France

3 Irstea, UMR, Aubière, France

4 Clermont Université, VetAgro Sup, UMR, Clermont‐Ferrand, France

5 Universidad de la Republica, Facultad de Agronomia, Montevideo, Uruguay

6 UMR Innovation, Montpellier Cedex, France

7 Inra UR Aster, Mirecourt, France

8 Isara, Lyon Cedex, France
