## 1 Introduction  
The future of agriculture depends on the system's responses to the global challenges of climate change adaptation, carbon emission reduction, water availability, water quality restoration, and ecosystem services' provision. Policy, technology and science have a key role to play in addressing these challenges [1, 2, 3]. Climate change, the most studied of global change challenges, is already causing major disruptions in food supply due to yield losses and subsequent chain reactions on socio-economic systems [4, 5]. However, a larger range of disruptions are putting agricultural systems under pressure and could lead to major disruptions to the agro-economical system: diseases or pandemics like the Asian Swine Fever outbreak [6, 7], socio economic factors (war, conflict, etc. ), trade restrictions/barriers or agreements [8], new food consumption trends [9, 10], and disruptive technologies such as cowless milk [11]. Technology can also be a positive factor: precision agriculture to optimise yields and minimise nutrient losses [12, 13], biotechnology such as the use of seaweed for reduction of methane emissions [14, 15], water/irrigation optimisation, and efficiency improvements [16], and others. The range of potential beneficial and detrimental disruptive elements highlight the urgent need to address long-term sustainability of agricultural systems [17, 18]. Since the 2000s, the international community through multilateral agreements and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have advocated for countries to restore or limit their impacts on the environment, based on policy informed by science. Agricultural activity, that represents almost 40% of global land use worldwide [19], is a significant contributor to Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions [20; 21], soil and water quality loss [22; 23; 24], biodiversity loss [25; 26; 27], and thus environmental sustainability. At the international scale, several institutions have guided recommendations, incentives, and warnings over the past two decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides assessments of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and recommendations; the Paris Agreement was adopted by 196 countries to limit global warming; the United Nations (UN) adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [28; 29], and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [30], by the Aichi Biodiversity Targets were formulated for conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services by 2020 [31]. These environmental goals need to be synergistic with agricultural productivity and food security goals and thus the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is leading international efforts to defeat hunger, and provide adequate nutrition for all people. All these international efforts link policy and science at a global scale and incentivise nations to tackle global change challenges, and national governments are the key players in setting policy to enhance sustainability, resilience, productivity, and trade opportunities. Policy implementation often requires global coordination, comprehensive, integrated, and multi-sectoral analyses to support national target-setting [32]. The national scale is thus a key scale to define policy, laws, and regulations, and also to negotiate and organise international market trade especially for food security purposes or national sustainable profitability [33; 34]. Agricultural systems need to strive for more flexibility and more adaptation options to gain resilience under economic, environment, and social disruptions [35]. Modelling is a useful tool for system conceptualisation, understanding, projection of future scenarios, and hypothesis testing about the impact of disruptions in a system's overall behaviour in relation to changes in its components. Models are generally defined by two ways: (1) their approach, i.e., how the internal process is working, and (2) their thematic application, i.e., the thematic question they are being used for.