01 March 2024
Assessing agricultural sustainability
Sustainability assessments are a useful tool to guide the transition towards greater sustainability. However, there are challenges to be aware of when developing methodologies and interpreting results.
Improving the sustainability of our food systems is an ever-pressing need. The cost-of-living crisis and depletion of our natural resources are examples of the issues that can challenge the way we produce and consume food. All actors of the food chain, including farmers and consumers, have an important role to play in contributing to the transition towards greater sustainability.
To provide guidance as to the “where to from here”, sustainability assessment tools are useful. Once populated with agri-food data, these tools can provide the evidence base needed to inform public policy. They can also help demonstrate the sustainability credentials of our agri-food production systems to succeed in the marketplace and guide consumers in their food choices. At the farm level, these tools can reveal strengths and weaknesses of the farm system, thus creating useful benchmarks and pointing out areas where improvement is possible.
Despite recent advancements, assessing sustainability still remains a challenge, says Lorraine Balaine, a Research Officer at Teagasc Athenry: “Methodological choices in sustainability assessments can influence results and their interpretation. Thus, practitioners and users must exercise caution. Research conducted in Teagasc, notably within an EU project called MilKey, can point the way towards some of the key challenge areas.”
Sustainability in 3D
Agricultural sustainability is a three-dimensional concept, which encompasses economic, environmental and social considerations, explains Lorraine.
“Failure to achieve a suitable performance in any of the three sustainability dimensions can lead to ‘make or break’ situations, endangering the system’s balance and hindering it from thriving. Moreover, improved recognition of agriculture’s multi-functionality suggests that our sustainability assessment frameworks must capture impacts and externalities across a wider range of issues.”
It follows that the scope of assessment frameworks must be holistic by nature, with equal weighting of the economic, environmental and social dimensions. Integrated assessment tools, such as the recently developed multi-criteria DEXi-Dairy tool, are needed to enable practitioners to simultaneously consider and visualise performance across the three sustainability dimensions.
Before developing integrated assessment tools, one must first be able to successfully assess each sustainability dimension separately. However, as Lorraine points out, “to date, the three sustainability dimensions have not received equal attention in the literature, partially due to the evolution of the sustainability concept as a whole, as well as specific methodological challenges.”
While economic sustainability has traditionally been in the spotlight, environmental sustainability is increasingly gaining attention. Assessing economic sustainability is less challenging than environmental sustainability as it is comprised of observable and thus easily measurable aspects that do not require expensive equipment (e.g. production costs and output). Conversely, in the environmental dimension, many aspects are not easily observable (e.g. gaseous emissions, water quality).
Even if they can be measured, equipment costs are prohibitive for large-scale rollout; therefore, modelling approaches tend to be favoured, despite being less accurate. For example, this is the case of agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. They can be measured through a comprehensive set of equipment such as an Eddy Covariance Flux Tower or the GreenFeed System, or modelled through approaches such as a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology.
Lorraine adds that social sustainability remains “the forgotten child”.
“Despite progress, assessing this dimension is challenging due to the lack of consensus over its definition and scope, as well as difficulties in measuring multi-dimensional and somewhat abstract concepts such as farmer wellbeing and animal welfare.”
Indicators and implications
Agricultural sustainability can be broken down into a suite of sustainability indicators. These indicators should be easy to calculate and understand, and sensitive to variations in sustainability performance across time and farms. The Teagasc Sustainability Report, published on a yearly basis, is a good example of how a suite of sustainability indicators can be put together to comprehensively assess and compare farm systems over time. In this way, synergies and trade-offs within and across sustainability dimensions can be revealed.
Nevertheless, it is important to critically appraise selected indicators to avoid drawing conclusions that may negatively impact aspects of the farm system (or the food production chain) that lie beyond assessment boundaries, continues Lorraine.
“Because of practical considerations, one must find a happy medium in the number of indicators represented in sustainability assessments. Choice is a necessary evil, but it implies restricting the assessment lens. In a sense, we must bear in mind that some farms may perform very badly or very well in certain sustainability aspects because of inherent characteristics, some of which may be outside of the farmer’s control, such as geographical location and soil type.”
Hence, purposely omitting sustainability aspects from assessments can lead to an incomplete and sometimes misleading view of farm systems. While we will never be able to fully resolve the issue of subjectivity and simplification in selection processes, assessments of shortcomings and transparency should be guiding principles in this line of work and when communicating with stakeholders.
Quality data and methods
Farm sustainability is assessed through a combination of robust assessment tools (developed by science) and farm activity data (provided by the farmer). Hence, the quality of the data is equally as important as the developed methodology in sustainability assessments. Overall, recall data is less accurate than farm records. Misrecorded data can slip through the cracks, even in official data platforms. Thus, it is important to establish verification procedures to ensure the validity of sustainability estimates.
With this in mind, says Lorraine, “it is worthwhile to mention that access to higher levels of data disaggregation can open possibilities to use more advanced (and thus more accurate) assessment methodologies. For instance, this is the case when modelling farm GHG emissions to move from Tier 1 assessments (default emission factors) all the way to Tier 3 (farm specific)”.
One final point is that assessment methodologies evolve over time as science progresses. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently updated GHG equivalencies to convert different gases to carbon dioxide equivalent. Advancements in science can lead to changes in sustainability estimates, and it is difficult to communicate to stakeholders how and why their sustainability performance might be revised. This issue must be reflected upon more deeply, notably when designing decision-making tools and monitoring systems for policy or certification schemes.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the contributions of partners from the MilKey consortium and of the Teagasc National Farm Survey team.
Funding
This research was funded under the 2018 Joint Call of the Cofund ERA-Nets FACCE ERA-GAS, SusAn, and ICT-AGRI 2 on “Novel technologies, solutions and systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in animal production systems” (DAFM grant number 2019EN201).
Contributors
Lorraine Balaine
Research Officer,
Agricultural Economics & Farm
Surveys Department, REDP,
Teagasc Athenry.
lorraine.balaine@teagasc.ie
Cathal Buckley
Senior Research Officer,
Agricultural Economics &
Farm Surveys Department, REDP,
Teagasc Athenry.
Dominika Krol
Senior Research Officer,
Environment, Soils and Land-Use,
Teagasc Johnstown Castle.
[pic credit] SimonSkafar/istockphoto.com