The Farming Systems Design community and the University of the Republic (Montevideo, Uruguay) are co-organizing the 6^th Farming Systems Design Symposium (FSD6) in Montevideo, from August 18 to 21, 2019. The University is consortium partner in the Global Challenges Programme project HortEco, of which the topic is very much related to the theme of this symposium “Agricultural systems designs sustained by nature”. 

The Farming Systems Design community is an informal interdisciplinary scientific community of practice that promotes research and capacity building on farming systems design. The research focus of the FSD community is the farm system, the interactions and feedbacks at lower and higher levels of integration and the tools and methods required for understanding and implementing multi-functional farming systems. This community of scientists was brought together for the first time at a conference in Catania (Italy) in 2007, with the objective of moving their research focus from traditional field-level agronomic studies towards integrative farm system level approaches, in order to inform the dialog of science with practice, policy and business, and to foster co-learning processes. The unexpected success of the conference signaled the large interest of agricultural researchers to develop approaches and tools to support the design of sustainable farming systems worldwide. The four following conferences held in 2009 in Monterey (USA), in 2011 in Brisbane (Australia), in 2013 in Lanzhou (China) and in 2015 in Montpellier (France) reconfirmed the interest of the FSD community.

FSD6

The sixth FSD conference will be held in March 2019 in Montevideo (Uruguay) to continue strengthening this community and renew its commitment with generating knowledge and supporting innovation for a sustainable future.The theme of FSD6 conference is “Agricultural systems designs sustained by nature”, seeking for designs that make more intelligent use of biological processes to support environmentally and socially friendly production systems. We want to promote process and system-level understanding and quantification of current efficiency of the use of land and other production factors at multiple scales (field, farm, landscape, regional). One specific target of the FSD6 is to widen the interdisciplinary coverage of the FSD community, beyond the original core of agronomists. We welcome contributions from crop and animal science (including fisheries), economics, social sciences, ecology, management science, knowledge science, computer science… provided they contribute to the advancement of the science on farming systems analysis, assessment or design.

Call for abstracts open

The call for 300-words abstracts is open until September 16, 2018. More details about the call can be found at the FSD6 website.