Benchmarking environmental and operational parameters through eco-efficiency criteria for dairy farms

Joint Benchmarking and Eco-Efficiency for the Sustainable Performance of Swine Production in Thailand

“…This concept, together with integrative design, offers an opportunity to substantially improve eco-efficiency. A number of previous studies [10]- [11] have investigated effective methods of linking benchmarking and eco-efficiency to improve agricultural operations. This study uses benchmarking and the concept of eco-efficiency with the objective of performing an eco-efficiency assessment of swine farms in Thailand.…”

Benchmarking the environmental performance of dairy farming systems

“…Although previous studies have already taken multiple environmental and economic indicators into account when benchmarking dairy farming systems (Fraser and Cordina, 1999;Iribarren et al, 2011), they did not incorporate data uncertainty of the indicators into their analyses. As aforementioned, data uncertainty might cause biased benchmarking results.…”

“…For measuring economic performance, indicators such as income, gross margin, and production cost are often used Iribarren et al, 2011;Lebacq et al, 2015). For measuring environmental performance, indicators like nitrogen and phosphorus surpluses, global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential, land use and energy use have been proposed .…”

“…For measuring environmental performance, indicators like nitrogen and phosphorus surpluses, global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential, land use and energy use have been proposed . To prevent biased conclusions (Fraser and Cordina, 1999;Iribarren et al, 2011) and to account for potential trade-offs between environmental problems, multiple indicators need to be taken into account when quantifying the eco-efficiency of dairy farming.…”

“…Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been used to evaluate the eco-efficiency of agricultural systems accounting for multiple environmental and economic indicators simultaneously (Picazo-Tadeo et al, 2011, Iribarren et al, 2011. Eco-efficient practices are identified and used as a benchmark for current inefficient practices .…”