Sustainability in Smart Farms: Its Impact on Performance

Abstract

In Spain, more than 30% of producers have run out of business because of a lack of sustainability. They search for managerial guidelines that allow them to reach the farm's economic viability. When trying to improve the performance of farms and farming systems, a complementary consideration of sustainability dimensions is required. The aim of this paper consists of offering a complementary and integrative approach from the sustainability concept in four different dimensions: economic; technological; organizational; and training in Manchego Cheese Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). Sustainability through the putting into practice of some managerial concepts has been able to reach better results and smarter farms. To perform this study, metrics to analyze each of the mentioned dimensions of sustainability have been applied to a sample of 157 farms with the main objective to identify the sustainability dimensions and its impacts on farm's final results promoting smarter farms. The Structural Equation Model (SEM) has been applied to measure the impact of each dimension of sustainability on final farm's results. Results reported that the farm's economic and organizational sustainability have been influenced by the returns on investment.

Structural and Technological Characterization of Tropical Smallholder Farms of Dual-Purpose Cattle in Mexico

“…They indicate that producers should increase dimension at a great extent, otherwise a significant number of smallholders will be expelled from the system and will have to become laborers in their community or migrate to urban areas to find employment [32]. The increase of scale and intensification is an important aspect, although it is not enough for reaching a sustainable development in the tropics [2,7,10,11,17]. Our results showed that size was not associated to technological level.…”

“…The research is exploratory and further research evaluating the incidence of technologies in the results through logistic regression, structural equation model (SEM); identifying the causes of inefficiencies with DEA, etc. [6,7,9,10] should be done.…”

“…The need to increase the information on their functioning, improving their low level of technology adoption and the analysis of their apparent resistance to adopt more innovative strategies are amongst the main challenges of the small scale systems. Higher levels of technology adoption are associated with an increased competitiveness, sustainability, and viability of farms [8][9][10].…”

It’s Not a Fad: Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research in European and Global Contexts

“…Their research suggests that farms face tremendous challenge of failing sustainability. By reference to selected case-studies from Spain, the authors suggest how the challenge can be bypassed [19]. Certainly, smart villages and the production process is not only about farming.…”

Impact of Dynamic Capabilities on Performance in Dairy Sheep Farms in Spain

“…In Spain, the dairy sheep industry suffers from an intense crisis as a consequence of a group of factors: lack of profitability, increased bureaucracy in management, absence of intergenerational relay that assures the continuity of the activity [1][2][3], changes in the habits of consumers with a reduction in the consumption of sheep meat and animal protein [4], and the need to mitigate climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions [5]. In Castilla La Mancha (central Spain), the producers have responded to the crisis: 33.7% of farms have abandoned the milking activity and the rest show a trend towards the intensification and specialization of production [6].…”