Resilience is everywhere in farming right now. Resilient soils. Resilient supply chains. Resilient rural communities. It's almost like the word ‘collaboration’ - Is it starting to get over-used and under-actioned.

Despite that, resilience IS a great word, don’t get me wrong, I still use it with authenticity, but a podcast I recently listened to painted resilience in a way I wasn’t using it - in being what happens once you’ve fallen and got back up.
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The dictionary definition: “Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, adapt to change, and spring back into shape after a setback”

Resilience is about recovering. That means you first have to fall.

This is where the term robust, or robustness comes in. 
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The dictionary definition: “Robustness means the quality of being strong, healthy, and able to withstand damage, failure, or heavy use”
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See the difference? One is built strong from the outset, the other is a bounceback from a failure.
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Shouldn’t we be planning not to fall in the first place?

The podcast that changed my perspective

I've been listening to Nate Hagens' The Great Simplification for years, and his recent episode with biologist Olivier Hamant, "The Optimization Trap" - is one of those rare listens I had to do at x1 speed to properly absorb.
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Hamant draws a distinction that's been rattling around my head since: performance is efficacy plus efficiency, aka, doing the most, with the least, as fast as possible. We live in a world optimised for performance, speed and production - we’ve built fragile systems, quickly, to support a growing population - to some extent, I can see why, and some may argue that is has worked to date - but what we are starting to see now, is that what got us ‘here’, won’t get us ‘there’.
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One of his quotes was, “Nature doesn't select for the most efficient organism. It selects for the most adaptable one.” 
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Read that again.
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Now apply it to your farm, or the agricultural system as a whole. Are we adaptable right now? 

It's a direct hit on how we've built modern agriculture. We've spent seventy years optimising farms for performance, maximum output, minimum input cost (and/or highly chemically altered inputs), and the tightest possible margins on a single system running at full tilt, carting products from around the globe - despairing as input companies race to raise costs at the same speed.

We built an entire food system on the logic of a spreadsheet, on prescriptive, simple advice from people selling products and not the logic of a paddock and a real-life, living, breathing, natural, biological ecosystem. And it worked, some would argue it still is thanks to the payouts currently being exceptional..

Right up until it doesn't. Until the drought hits, or the payout drops, until fertiliser plants get bombed and shipping trade gets disrupted, El Nino threatens extreme droughts or the bank starts putting the pressure on.
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This is then where "efficient" turns to "brittle."

So what's the actual difference between robustness and resilience?

Resilience says: I got hit, I broke a bit, but look - I bounced back.
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Robustness says: I was built so the hit didn't break me in the first place.
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Resilience is reactive. It's the farm that survives the drought because the owner white-knuckled it through, sold down stock, took on debt, and rebuilt after. Thankfully they came through it this time. But that's a story about recovery, and recovery costs something every single time, financially, physically, and in the toll it takes on the person doing the recovering. You don't get resilience for free. You pay for it in burnout, in equity, in peace, in family time and in the years you'll never get back.
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Robustness is the farm that barely blinks. Well balanced with diverse pasture species so there's always something growing regardless of what the season throws. Soil biology doing the work synthetic inputs used to fake. A mixed enterprise so one bad payout doesn't sink the whole operation. Robustness doesn't need to bounce back because it never fully broke.
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Hamant names four things that build robustness in living systems, and I read this list and basically saw Groundshift's whole philosophy staring back at me: 

• ‘Redundancy’ There is more than one way to do the job. We are not purists, we’re realists.
• ‘Heterogeneity’ Diversity, not monoculture - in plants, inputs, people and advice
• ‘Connection to living systems’, biology, not chemistry, doing the heavy lifting
• Non-prescriptive systems, customised to your actual farm, your soil, your catchment, not a generic template from somewhere else.
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That’s not a full list, but I enjoyed drawing the parallels from his work.

Why this matters

Resilience lets you keep the fragile system and just add a recovery plan on top. Robustness asks you to change the system itself.
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Perhaps it doesn't fit neatly into a 12-month funding cycle or a press release but when banks and insurance companies understand how to support their farmers into lower risk businesses - we’ll all start to see the opportunity. I want to be stewarding land that actually holds up over generations, not just a season. And generational thinking is the whole point, isn't it? None of us are doing this so the farm survives this drought or bounces back from that flood. We're doing it so there's still ecosystem, still soil, still a viable business left for whoever's standing here in 30, 50, 100 years.
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This is why Groundshift works with your whole-farm. It's biological. It's about rebuilding the actual capacity of the system - soil, stock, people, margin -  to hold steady when things move. Because things are going to keep moving. We just need to look to the other side of the world to see how this last summer season has decimated crops and parched the land.
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Climate, payout, policy, input costs - I’m inclined to say, these factors are only going to get more volatile.
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Robustness doesn’t sound sexy. But having nothing to bounce back from, because it never broke - is. 
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Want support to make your farm more robust? Get in touch!

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P.S. When Nate asked Olivier if he could wave a magic wand and fix anything in the world, he said he would get every farmer to adopt ‘agroecology’. 

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