Farm sustainability assessment: some procedural issues

This article discusses some procedural issues relating to a multicriterial assessment of farm sustainability, based on the criteria proposed by the European Union Concerted Action on 'The Landscape and Nature Production Capacity of Sustainable/Organic Types of Agriculture'. Two main problems are stressed: (1) the treatment of basic information used for evaluating farm performances as regards the criteria; and (2) the difficulties in evaluating a case-study farm, Firstly, the problem of implementing multicriterial analyses when using qualitative ordinal data and discrete quantitative data is faced, stressing the importance of clearly defining and applying procedures that can be transferred and repeated. This is due to the fact that almost all research contributions describe in detail multicriterial methods and results, but give little space to the problem of collecting and analysing basic information. Nevertheless, final results heavily depend on the way basic data has been gathered and processed in order to obtain the indices that have been used for the assessment. The lack of standards and of procedure description hampers the comparison of assessments and the possibility to judge their suitability to the aim of farm sustainability assessment. Secondly, the problem of finding external points of reference for judging a case-study farm is confronted. Case-studies can be important as 'models' for other farms. Indeed, it is easier to persuade farmers to adopt farming styles and decisions that somebody else has already successfully implemented rather than to adopt unexplored ways of managing their farms. This asks for reliable methods to assess a single farm, but almost all multicriterial methods only provide a tool for ranking a set of objects, e.g. farms, from the best to the worst. Conclusions provide some comments on the usefulness of these approaches. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B,V. All rights reserved.