Abstract: Focus questions • How to support effective adaptive responses to CC and stimulate proactive attitudes of farmers, policymakers & researchers? • How to co-construct the nature of the issues about CC adaptation? The «Oristanese» case study • Very diversified agricultural district in a Mediterranean context o Irrigated and rainfed farming systems o Variety of cropping systems, intensity levels, farm size • Multiple stakeholders o Cooperative agro-food system o Producers’ organizations (rice, horticulture) o Variety of extensive pastoral systems Emerging outcome • The dairy cattle coop is developing a new win-win pathway linking hi-input dairy cattle farming with low input beef cattle grazing systems • The local government is investing in the EIP for supporting the local beef production chain to reduce meat imports and enhance pasture biodiversity and ecosystem services (eg wildfire prevention) Emerging challenges Adaptive responses as co-evolution pathways • design social learning spaces for researchers, stakeholders and policy makers • combining integrated assessment modeling and social learning facilitation

Abstract: To comply with complexity in farming and social demands with respect to farming practices, to remain competitive in and resilient to an ever changing decision environment, today’s farm managers need to develop an extensive portfolio of activities, made coherent by an overall strategic vision. This paper focusses on dairy farming, which shows complexity by integrating crop and livestock processes and faces nowadays important challenges from its social and market environment. The aim is twofold: first, what does strategic thinking mean in dairy farming and what kind of strategic decisions are eligible for a sustainable development, second, what kind of methodological framework can be built to support the farmer’s strategic thinking and decision making. The novel strategy exploration implies not only the mere crop-livestock organization alternatives, but also creatively looks for resilience increasing activities that allow for flexible food nonfood substitutions, multiple valorization trajectories and alternative multi-agents arrangements. Concrete examples include agroforestry, alternative nutrient throughputs or composting. The methodological support focusses on four principles: (i) integrative, considering the whole-farm scale, (iii) normative, leading to improved decision making, (iii)participatory, compiling transdisciplinary knowledge and (iv) communicative, using typical farm benchmarking. Findings are brought together from  literature, own research experiences on dairy farm management and interaction with stakeholders, amongst other the technical sciences researchers in the MACSUR knowledge hub. No Label

Abstract: Better management of pesticides is a potentially important strategy for reducing environmental impact while maintaining yields.  Pesticide use is influenced by several drivers, including sowing date, which can directly impact disease burden.  Analysis of sowing dates for spring barley was the first stage of this project, which aims to provide insight into areas of farm management which can be optimised to reduce environmental impact.  Sowing dates were taken from the Adopt a Crop database, which contains data from 1983 onwards for commercial farms across Scotland.  Work was carried out at three levels: national, to provide an overall picture of historical patterns; regional, to highlight differences within Scotland; and case study, to determine whether the national trend was visible in a single region.  A general trend towards later sowing of spring barley in Scotland is visible – yet, this pattern is less pronounced in certain regions.  Future work must therefore consider what factors have lead to this shift, to more fully understand interactions between sowing date and the environment. No Label