The economic and environmental sustainability of aquaculture depends significantly on the nature and quality of the fish feed used. One of the main criticisms of aquaculture is the need to use significant amounts of fish meal, and other marine protein sources, in such feed. Unfortunately, the availability of the oceanic resources, typically used to produce fish feed, cannot be utilized indefinitely to cover the worldwide feed demand caused by ever-increasing aquaculture production. In light of these considerations, this study estimates how aquaculture farm economic outcomes can change by introducing insect meal into the diet of cultivated fish. Several possible economic effects are simulated, based on various scenarios, with different percentages of insect flour in the feed and varying meal prices using a case study of a specialized off-shore sea bass farm in Italy. The findings indicate that the introduction of insect meal—composed of Tenebrio molitor—would increase feeding costs due to the high market prices of this flour and its less convenient feed conversion ratio than that of fish meal. Therefore, the expected environmental benefits of using this highly promising insect meal in fish feed do not align with the current economic interests of the aquaculture industry. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate this theme, and it must be noted that our findings cannot be generalized widely because a specific case study was used. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that efforts should be made—at least at the farm level—to find profitable ways to encourage the introduction of this attractive alternative to guarantee both economic and environmental sustainability in the near future.

The studies focused on the use of insects have outlined numerous reasons for using insects as food and feed as an important method to increase food opportunities for consumers. Insects have been emphasized as a food source with a low environmental impact due to the limited requirement for arable land and water, low ecological cost, and high-quality protein provision. In Europe and Western countries, insect farming is a growing business in which, however, some critical economic aspects must be recognized. The sector needs to be adequately promoted to rationally exploit the huge amount of potential. As such, the aim of this study was to analyze the recent research on economic aspects related to insect farming for feed and food production with the purpose of providing evidence of the critical economic points in this emerging sector. The focus was mainly oriented to understanding how insect farming can foster virtuous circular economic processes, specifically considering economic aspects on the basis of the limited literature currently available and the circular economic principles. A circular business model approach was proposed to address the entire insect-based feed and food supply chain from a circular economic perspective. In our opinion, the findings underline some economic research questions that need to be addressed in the near future, and the conceptual approach can be individualized to help increase cost- and eco-effectiveness from a circular economic perspective.

This paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency and the total factor productivity change of dairy farms in EU countries. Analyses were carried out in order to determine which countries showed the best performance adaptations when the quota regime was relaxed and to evaluate the technical conditions of European farmers at the starting point of the new regime (milk quota abolition). A data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied on aggregate data related to 22 European countries for the period from 2004 to 2012. The findings suggest that milk farms show small scope for improving efficiency using their own technical input. The estimation of total factor productivity and its components suggest that the European milk sector has suffered a decline in productivity. This means that external factors, independent of the farmers' capacity to use technical inputs, can play a greater role than efficiency in conditioning productivity and profitability in the near future.

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Recreational functions are among the most important practices to improve farmers’ income and to promote sustainability in the rural territories. Two crucial issues are the ability to rationally allocate farm resources and the ability to efficiently produce different sorts of food and non-food goods. Possible cost savings due to the co-presence of different activities can generate positive effects in the creation of value by agritourist farmers. This paper aims to investigate technical efficiency related to agritourism and recreational functions in Sardinia. Based on a sample of 37 farms and using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach, we aim to estimate the technical efficiency of double attitude processes, such as those that characterise agritourism practices. Our findings suggest that efficiency can improve if technical inputs are adequately used; however, the scale appears to be close enough to optimal. Furthermore, we estimated that the margins for improving the efficiency are larger for recreational services and that technical factors contribute to efficiency with a different magnitude. Furthermore, we estimated whether agricultural and non-agricultural resources are efficiently allocated. To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts in Europe at using an efficiency analysis in agritourism.