Challenges, functions, and risk management strategies in complementary farming systems in the French-Italian beef production chain.

France and Italy (the first and third European beef-producer countries, respectively) have a mutual dependency in beef production: 43% of beef-cattle slaughtered in Italy is imported from abroad (80% from France) as young bulls and heifers (10 ± 2 months of age). This value chain, born in the 60s and driven by a rapid increase of beef demand, was supported by the extensive grassland-based system in the center of France, as well as the spread of maize silage use and development of intensive management practices in the North East of Italy. We aimed at jointly exploring the resilience of two farming systems representative of the French and the Italian part of this transnational value chain. For the French part (FRA), we considered Bocage Bourbonnais, a grassland-based suckler cow-calf system raising weaners for internal French consumption and export to Italy. For the Italian part (ITA), we considered the North Eastern Italy, where imported cows are mostly raised in cereal-based fattening farms, mainly characterized by roofed facilities, with littered or slatted floors. Following the steps of the Meuwissen et al. (2019) resilience assessment, we assessed 1) challenges, 2) functions, and, in addition, 3) the main risk management strategies, via a survey (designed by Slijpers et al., 2020), submitted to farmers in both study areas (50 in FRA, 25 in ITA, averaging answers within each case study). Farmers were asked to assign importance by distributing 100 points among 8 functions, to assess the relevance of the challenges on a Likert scale from 1 to 7, and to mark risk management strategies as implemented (1) or non-implemented (0) in the last 5 years. While both systems assigned a relatively high importance to “economic viability” (FRA 23%; ITA 25%), the systems showed differences in “Food production” (FRA 18%; ITA 27%),“Natural resources” (FRA 15%; ITA 13%) and “Biodiversity and habitat” (FRA 11%; ITA 6%). “Animal health and welfare” obtained a relatively high importance in both systems (FRA 14%; ITA 15%). Concerning challenges, both systems are highly concerned by economic issues (“persistently high input prices”: 4.53 in FRA; 4.69 in ITA) and institutional issues (“strict regulation”: 4.55 in FRA; 5.33 in ITA); differences regarded environmental and social issues (“low soil quality”: 4.09 in FRA; 2.88 in ITA), and social issues (“low societal acceptance”: 4.67 in FRA; 3.64 in ITA). The biggest differences in risk management strategies were “using production or marketing contracts to sell production” (FRA 0.42; ITA 0.04), “investing in technologies to control environmental risks” (FRA 0.12; ITA 0.44) and “cooperating with other farmers to secure inputs or production” (FRA 0.86, ITA 0.24). Differences observed in function importance and challenges are possibly linked to intensive vs extensive farming conditions, and the differences in risk management strategies reflect different retail requirements, the better chance to apply new technologies to intensive than extensive systems, and different social interactions among farmers. Concerns in the French systems about climate change and societal acceptance might lead to strategies aimed at herd reduction, thereby causing consequences on the Italian system (decreased supply and highest costs) and on the resilience of the value chain. A valuechain level resilience study is a perspective for increasing the resilience of the two individual systems.