Strategic risk is difficult to quantify.  Despite this fact, it is important to prepare risks impacting U.S. farms and build resilience.

Over the past several years, maintaining agility and absorption capacity has been a solid mechanism to deal with strategic risk. Absorption capacity has enabled farms to maintain some sense of stability with market turbulence caused by increases in input prices, Covid-19, trade restrictions, higher rental rates, fluctuations in labor availability, ongoing geopolitical conflict, and market downturns. As farms face these obstacles there is also a greater need for agility, including innovative techniques that can reduce business costs, enable workers to shift assignments to meet changing business needs, and diversify to reduce risk.