Sustainable Intensification Farming as an Enabler for Farm Eco-Efficiency?

Abstract

Sustainable Intensification (SI) practices offer adopters exploiting improvement potentials in environmental performance of farming, i.e. enhance ecosystem functionality, while maintaining productivity. This paper proposes a directional meta-frontier approach for measuring farms’ eco-efficiency and respective improvement potentials in the direction of farms’ ecological output for SI evaluation. We account for farms’ selection processes into SI using a behavioural model and rely on a matched sample for adopters and non-adopters of agronomic SI practices from the northern German Plain. We conclude that the SI adopters determined the sample’s system frontier and showed higher mean eco-efficiency, but that most farms in our sample did not fully exploit the improvement potentials in biodiversity as ecological outcome.

A “Teal” Deal for European agriculture

“…Studies also report that GHGs emissions can increase due to the use of organic fertilizers and soil amendments (Shakoor et al, 2021;He et al, 2023). On the contrary, integrated fertilization and pest management strategies could significantly reduce the use of agrochemicals (within the boundaries of EGD) and maintain the yields, without compromising neither the environment, nor consumers' safety (Pretty and Pervez Bharucha, 2015;Tang et al, 2022;Weltin and Hüttel, 2023). On a similar note, urban farming and precision agriculture have been included among the potential strategies that EBD could promote (Rocamora and Comer, 2023).…”

Agricultural technology as a driver of sustainable intensification: insights from the diffusion and focus of patents

“…Patents that support the transition towards SI should both relate to the efficiency of agricultural production processes and be environmentally friendly (Haughey et al 2023;Weltin and Hüttel 2023). The keywords (wildcards) used for assorting "efficiency" and "environmental-friendliness" patents (Table 2) were selected through keyword analysis of patent titles and abstracts complemented by expert knowledge of our co-authors (brainstorm approach proposed by Li et al 2009).…”

Economic and Environmental Sustainability Trade-Off Analysis in Sheep Farming Using the Farm Accountancy Data Network Database

“…The environmental dimension was assessed using data from eleven indicators, some of which were already used in various combinations in previous research [5,17,37,63,66,[72][73][74]. This work represents an evolution of those studies as it includes two indicators not previously used, such as animal emissions and carbon sequestration, which we consider critical in evaluating the environmental performance of farming because they complete the picture provided by a set of more generic indicators.…”