A multicriteria method to evaluate the resilience of grass-based dairy farms to climate change in Brittany

International audienceGrass-based dairy systems have proven their interest for sustainability, but their resilience to climate change has been less studied. As crop diversification is usually seen as good practice for more resilient farming systems, we want to study if the sole use of grasslands as forage resources is less resilient than the use of grass and maize. To do so, we designed a three-step method for assessing the resilience of dairy farms to climate change. First, we established correlations between farm performance indicators and climatic variables during the last 5 years, to estimate their vulnerability and their adaptations to these external drivers. Then, we compared the different farming systems through a multi-criteria approach of resilience co-designed with the farmers. Our results show that climatic variables have a low impact on the performances of studied farms. However, grass-based systems experience more inter-annual variationsin milk production than grass maize systems, while their economic performances are more robust. This work provides a useful tool for resilience assessment of dairy farms