When trying to optimize the sustainability performance of farms and farming systems, a consideration of trade-offs and synergies between different themes and dimensions is required. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic analysis of trade-offs and synergies across all dimensions and themes. To achieve this aim we used the Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment Routine (SMART)-Farm Tool which operationalizes the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) Guidelines by defining science-based indicator sets and assessment procedures. It identifies the degree of goal achievement with respect to the 58 themes defined in the SAFA Guidelines using an impact matrix that defines 327 indicators and 1769 relations between sustainability themes and indicators. We illustrate how the SMART-Farm Tool can be successfully applied to assess the sustainability performance of farms of different types and in different geographic regions. Our analysis revealed important synergies between themes within a sustainability dimension and across dimensions. We found major trade-offs within the environmental dimension and between the environmental and economic dimension. The trade-offs within the environmental dimension were even larger than the trade-offs with other dimensions. The study also underlines the importance of the governance dimension with regard to achieving a good level of performance in the other dimensions.
Faced with society's increasing expectations, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy uses environmental management as an increasingly critical criterion in the allocation of farm subsidies, with a shift in focus from production and area-based subsidies to payments for supplying public goods. There is an increasing demand to assess the ecological and environmental performance of farms as public money spent on provision of environmental services requires justifi cation. The objective of this research is to strengthen the basis of the concept of farm-level environmental performance assessment. Firstly we give an overview of indicator-based sustainability assessment tools. Even though there are several diff erent tools developed globally, and the themes and indicators for the assessment of environmental performance are very similar, there are signifi cant diff erences in terms of data survey among them. Secondly we describe the development and fi eld testing of the 'Green-point system' developed in Hungary. This system is able to measure the environmental performance of farms and their value/ capability of providing public goods and sustaining ecosystem services through a framework of farm enterprise calculations and assessments. The Green-point system fi ts well into the stream of yet scarce approaches and eff orts, which in several European countries aim to introduce and strengthen the so-called result-based agri-environmental schemes alongside the currently rather dominant management-based approaches.
As so far no farm-level sustainability assessment tool has been adjusted to the Hungarian circumstances which measures all aspects of sustainability our aim was to develop a conceptual framework for adaptation process. Main steps were defined and literature review was conducted. As a result of this SMART was selected as the most suitable assessment tool which will be adapted to the Hungarian needs applying Nominal Group Technique for expert involvement and Propensity Score Matching for farm sample selection.
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