An approach for comparing agricultural development to societal visions

Abstract

There is broad agreement that agriculture has to become more sustainable in order to provide enough affordable, healthy food at minimal environmental and social costs. But what is “more sustainable”? More often than not, different stakeholders have opposing opinions on what a more sustainable future should look like. This normative dimension is rarely explicitly addressed in sustainability assessments. In this study, we present an approach to assess the sustainability of agricultural development that explicitly accounts for the normative dimension by comparing observed development with various societal visions. We illustrate the approach by analyzing farm- and landscape-scale development as well as sustainability outcomes in a Swiss case study landscape. Observed changes were juxtaposed with desired changes by Avenir Suisse, a liberal think tank representing free-market interests; the Swiss Farmers Association, representing a conservative force; and Landwirtschaft mit Zukunft, an exponent of the Swiss agroecological movement. Overall, the observed developments aligned most closely with desired developments of the liberal think-tank (72%). Farmer interviews revealed that in the case study area farms increased in size (+ 57%) and became more specialized and more productive (+ 223%) over the past 20 years. In addition, interpretation of aerial photographs indicated that farming became more rationalized at the landscape level, with increasing field sizes (+ 34%) and removal of solitary field trees (− 18%). The case study example highlights the varying degrees to which current developments in agriculture align with societal visions. By using societal visions as benchmarks to track the progress of agricultural development, while explicitly addressing their narratives and respective systems of values and norms, this approach offers opportunities to inform also the wider public on the extent to which current developments are consistent with different visions. This could help identify mismatches between desired and actual development and pave the way for designing new policies.

Farmer surveys in Europe suggest that specialized, intensive farms were more likely to perceive negative impacts from COVID-19

“…Then, we asked participants to approximate the impacts of the pandemic on farm productivity (“amount of farm products that were produced”), sales (“amount of products that could be sold”), received price (“price received for farm products”), labor availability (“labor availability”), and the supply of goods and services (“shortage in supplies and technical support/services”) on a Likert scale from −3 (very negative) to 3 (very positive). The data on overall perceived impact was then related to farm(er) characteristics such as age, farm type, and farm structure, as well as farm specialization, management intensity, and farm size (see Helfenstein et al ( 2022 ) for details on the questionnaire).…”

“…Nitrogen fertilizer use and number of pesticide applications on the main crop together with livestock density are common indicators of land use intensity (Herzog et al 2006 ; Geiger et al 2010 ; Emmerson et al 2016 ). Share of feed import was added since it is an important indicator of input intensity for livestock farms (Helfenstein et al 2022 ). Finally, the share of ecological focus area (inverted) was deemed relevant since this is an important indicator for land management intensity (Herzog et al 2017 ).…”

Assessment of multifactor productivity based on empirical data in the agricultural sector of the economy of Ukraine

“…The use of normative methods is more concerned with the micro level of economic activity management, quality control and production processes directly in the production units. Therefore, for macroeconomic analysis it is more appropriate to use economic-statistical methods, which consist in the measurement and analysis of the dynamics of productivity of production resources based on statistical information about the volume of production and resource inputs of a given production system [2].…”

Identification of representative dairy cattle and fodder crop production typologies at regional scale in Europe

“…To date, previous studies have highlighted the need to move toward more sustainable farming systems across the three sustainability pillars (Duval et al 2021;Helfenstein et al 2022). In this sense, livestock production in high-and middle-income countries is experiencing a transition toward more intense, concentrated, and productive systems (Britt et al 2018).…”