Collaboratrici e collaboratori

Understanding heterogeneity of agricultur-al production systems is important for the design of targeted and tailored policies that have multiple sus-tainability goals. In Switzerland, seasonal grazing of alpine summer pastures is important to many farms. Yet, these so-called alpine summer farms are under increasing pressure due to climate and farm structur-al change, resulting in loss of biodiversity and aban-donment of farms. Swiss agricultural policies govern farms with uniform policy interventions through di-rect payments to address these challenges. However, these farms are highly heterogeneous in terms of socioeconomic and biophysical conditions and we lack an understanding of their structure. We therefore (1) investigate the structure of Swiss alpine summering farms using census data and unsupervised clustering techniques to generate a farm typology and (2) ana-lyse associated dependence on public support and environmental performance. Our methodological approach enriches the existing socioeconomic farm level data with spatial data in order to depict the farms infrastructure and biophysical environment. Our results suggest (1) six types that differ in terms of organizational structure, herd composition, bio-physical environment and accessibility and (2) vary-ing dependence on public support and environmental performance. This work will help to develop targeted policies tailored to specific farm types by accounting for the heterogeneity of alpine farming systems that address both climate and farm structural change