The SALSA project has closed a long-standing gap in research by looking into the status of small farms in different regions of both Europe and Africa. Its findings should help these farms live up to their true potential.

Thirty reference regions, 25 of them in Europe and five in Africa. That’s how thorough the SALSA (Small farms, small food businesses and sustainable food security) project’s 4-year investigation of small farms has been. Since 2016, the project consortium has been interviewing small farm owners, mapping entire areas and identifying the characteristics of food systems with a focus on specific products. All this with one question in mind: What is the contribution of small farms to sustainable food and nutrition security across a wide range of food systems? This question had been pending for a long time, as assumptions used to prevail over actual data. “The knowledge gap before SALSA was enormous. We didn’t know how many small farms there were, what and how much they produced, where the produce went, who benefited, or even which small farms needed to keep existing,” says Teresa Pinto Correia, SALSA coordinator and professor at the Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment and Development (MED), University of Évora in Portugal. To fill these knowledge gaps, the project team tested three hypotheses: the first, whether small farms are a relevant source of sustainable food production; second, whether small farms are providing food and income for themselves and not solely for commercial purposes; and finally, whether small farms are increasing the overall food system’s diversity and thereby contributing to the latter’s resilience.