Abstract The aim of the study is to indicate perceived resilience of Polish farms during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic crisis. Hence, one of our research question is: do farmers involved in short food supply chains perceive their resilience to external shocks higher than others? Our study is embedded in the resilience theory and framework with three resilience capacities: robustness, adaptability and transformability. We interviewed (using semi-structured questionnaire) a group of 199 small- and medium-scale farms in Poland. We used statistical methods to determine the differences between farms involved in SFSCs (SFSC-farms) and not involved (non-SFSC-farms). The analysis reveals a higher total perceived resilience of farms involved in short food supply chains, especially in the case of farms which sell 15–50% of their products using SFSC, hence farms combining extensively short and long chains in comparison with non-SFSC-farms. When considering the three specific resilience capacities, farms participating in SFSCs noted higher perceived adaptability and transformability. SFSC-farms represent (on average) smaller arable land and lower value of farm (assets), but plainly higher land productivity. Moreover, they have higher investment-to-output ratio and are less dependent on subsidies. This indicates that small and medium-sized family farms can develop well as SFSCs participants while achieving relatively high perceived resilience, even in turbulent periods.
Borychowski et al. (2026) studied this question.