Abstract
<jats:p>Small farm entrepreneurship occupies a particular place within agrarian systems, although its role is often underestimated. In contrast to large agricultural enterprises, small farms operate with limited resources, face restricted access to finance, and remain highly dependent on local ecological conditions. These features shape a type of economic behaviour that is not easily explained by standard optimisation models or linear approaches to modernisation. In the current context, this issue becomes more complex. In Ukraine, small farms function in an environment marked by multiple and overlapping forms of uncertainty. These include climate variability, changes in agrarian policy, disruptions in market infrastructure, and broader institutional instability. Such conditions reshape how decisions are made in practice, often shortening planning horizons and shifting attention toward immediate survival rather than long-term development. The ecological dimension is especially important. Small farms are closely tied to the quality of natural resources, which directly affects their capacity to reproduce economically. At the same time, this connection does not always lead to the deliberate adoption of sustainable practices. A number of institutional factors interfere with this process, including unstable regulations, high transaction costs, limited access to information, and relatively low levels of cooperation. In effect, sustainability tends to remain a working aspiration rather than something consistently built into everyday farm decisions. From a theoretical perspective, the interaction between institutional uncertainty and adaptive behaviour deserves closer attention. Small farms tend to rely on flexible strategies, diversify their activities, and adjust resource use based on accumulated experience. However, the effectiveness of such adaptation depends on the broader institutional setting. Where this setting is unstable or fragmented, adaptive responses are more likely to be short-term and reactive, which may weaken rather than strengthen the long-term ecological and economic resilience of farm systems.</jats:p>