Telling a different story: Farming resilience in hay-milk farms in Salzburg province

Abstract: Foregrounding relations and processes in resilience thinking has the potential to enable more holistic analyses and account for complexity, which could lead to more resilient actions, interventions, or ways of being. The concept of farming resilience builds on a process-relational understanding of resilience and thus offers a move away from more substance-based understandings of resilience as outcome. To operationalize the concept of farming resilience, I picked the case study of two small-scale Austrian dairy farms working with hay as feed conservation method instead of silage. Working on the two farms as embodied researcher, using active participant observation and narrative interviews, allowed me to deepen my analysis by adding nuances and detail to my data while not only observing but experiencing and being part of the farming processes. These empirical insights then contributed to unravelling what farming resilience is or may be. I present ethnographic stories and excerpts of my diffractive journaling of my experiences on the two farms by looking closer into feeding the cows and the involved processes such as mowing. These relational processes unravel farming resilience as the re-assembling of farming practices on the farm. Keys to the persistence of the small-scale hay-milk farms are experimentation and an open and flexible mindset to engage in persistences, adaptations, and transformations to changes. A process-relational approach brings forward resilience not as a stable state, but as constantly in the re-making. Resilience can never be taken for granted, nor acquired but requires continuous work. Re-thinking resilience as a bundle of processes stresses the importance of how we conduct research on resilience: We as researchers shape the world by revealing insights about it. We also get to choose how and whom we portray. With this there comes a certain responsibility because resilience requires specification at the point of intervention.