Organic field crop systems - Evaluating resilience to enhance farm sustainability

Job presentation

As part of this program, we are focusing on assessing the resilience of organic and non-organic farms. What is resilience? It's the ability of a system to gradually recover from a hazard and regain its initial performance. The aim of the program is to gain a better understanding of how farms are impacted by various hazards (climatic, economic, health-related, etc.), and what factors would enable them to better adapt to and overcome them.

Initial work has been carried out to propose an evaluation method, as there is currently no consensual, standardized method.

The work proposed in this internship aims to continue the reflections already underway by tackling the evaluation of an initial case study (applying the method developed for the program). This case study will be made up of various fictitious farms representative of organic production systems, on which we will simulate the occurrence of two types of hazard (economic and climatic) and their impact on the socio-technical and economic performance of production systems.

Job duties

Evaluate the resilience of the production systems represented by the case studies to the occurrence of economic and climatic hazards. The results obtained will be used to formulate initial hypotheses as to the factors affecting the resilience of production systems, and to develop the method on the basis of feedback from experience.

• Literature review and interviews with experts to complement the proposed method with evaluation indicators on farmers' quality of life.
• Definition of evaluation scenarios to be applied to typical cases, including hazard scenarios (order and frequency of hazards).
• Evaluate the impact of hazards on the performance of case studies.
• Using a combination of different tools, assess the impact of hazard sequences on the socio-technical and economic performance of the different case studies.
• Analyze the variability of the performances obtained as a function of the hazards experienced.
• Summary of results

Profile required

• Student at engineering school or university (Master2) looking for a final year internship in plant production with an interest in organic production systems;
• Ability to write, analyze and summarize;
• Good command of Excel and knowledge of R software would be a plus.
  

A team of experts at Terres Inovia will answer all your questions and help you develop your skills;
A pleasant working environment, close to transport links and Paris;
Possibility of teleworking (in accordance with Terres Inovia's internal regulations).