Ika Darnhofer

Research Focus

My research focus is on decision making on family farms.

Although I appreciate the value of the various tools of neoclassical economics for informing farm management on the short-term and for commercial farms, I find they are limited in their ability to capture the complexity family farmers face, when making decisions over the medium to long term. I am also convinced that limiting ourselves to quantitative data and mathematical analysis curtails our ability to capture important aspects of events.

My research focuses on resilience as a primary management goal of family farmers. Although resilience thinking has primarily been applied at the spatial level of whole social-ecological systems, I believe that many principles can be applied at the farm level, and that these will help us understand how farmers manage their farm under real-life conditions.

While I appreciate the insights that can be gained by various approaches that try to 'measure' the resilience of farms, I think that they often miss the processual aspect of resilience, i.e. the ability to engage with the on-going (and often unexpected) changes on- and off-farm. I am therefore exploring a processual and relational approach to understanding resilience. To do so, I explore insights that can be gained from processual sociology as well as new materialism. And given that farms are not just about the farmer, but also about building, machinery, soil, plants, animals, I also integrate insights from research on non-human.