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As major generators of environmental impacts, farms play a crucial role in enhancing the environmental sustainability of food-supply chains. However, appropriately assessing farm environmental performance poses a challenge; a plethora of different indicators have been used for this purpose, sometimes in the absence of conceptual considerations. This paper develops a broadly implementable framework for defining and measuring farm environmental performance which complies with the environmental sustainability concept viewed from an ecological perspective. After providing a critical review of existing indicators in the literature for measuring farm environmental performance and identifying their strengths and above all their weaknesses, it proceeds to develop ideas on how to implement the environmental sustainability concept at farm level. Starting at the macro level, these ideas are based on the central concept of ecosystem carrying capacity (constraints) referring to biophysical threshold thinking. The implementation of this concept at farm level results in the framework that we propose for measuring farm environmental performance. Environmental sustainability requires compliance with the carryingcapacity constraints imposed by the natural ecosystem within which a farm operates.

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Abstract:Complying with the carrying capacity of local and global ecosystems is a prerequisite to ensure environmental sustainability. Based on the example of Swiss mountain dairy farms, the goal of our research was firstly to investigate the relationship between farm global and local environmental performance. Secondly, we aimed to analyse the relationship between farm environmental and economic performance. The analysis relied on a sample of 56 Swiss alpine dairy farms. For each farm, the cradle-to-farm-gate life cycle assessment was calculated, and the quantified environmental impacts were decomposed into their on-and off-farm parts. We measured global environmental performance as the digestible energy produced by the farm per unit of global environmental impact generated from cradle-to-farm-gate. We assessed local environmental performance by dividing farm-usable agricultural area by on-farm environmental impact generation. Farm economic performance was measured by work income per family work unit, return on equity and output/input ratio. Spearman's correlation analysis revealed no significant relationship, trade-offs or synergies between global and local environmental performance indicators. Interestingly, trade-offs were observed far more frequently than synergies. Furthermore, we found synergies between global environmental and economic performance and mostly no significant relationship between local environmental and economic performance. The observed trade-offs between global and local environmental performance mean that, for several environmental issues, any improvement in global environmental performance will result in deterioration of local environmental performance and vice versa. This finding calls for systematic consideration of both dimensions when carrying out farm environmental performance assessments.