The EU’s Agenda 2000 reform and the sustainability of organic farming in Tuscany: ecological-economic modelling at field and farm level

Impact of Organic Farming on Biodiversity

“…These effects were scale dependent. At a within-field scale, species richness was greatest in organic farms, where there was a greater abundance of weeds; this was similar to our results and those of many others [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. These results suggest that weed species diversity can be promoted by using organic cropping practices [31].…”

“…Conventional and integrated production systems tend to be similar in both intensity of management and within-field biodiversity, but organic production tends to support greater density, species number and biological diversity in comparison with other investigated production systems [24]. At the field level, species richness was the greatest on organic farms where there was a greater abundance of weeds [24][25][26][27]31; organic production system had the highest biodiversity of weed species [28][29][30][31]. Organic agricultural practices yielded more weed species in root crops, red clover/grass mixtures and in winter triticale.…”

Stochastic utility-efficient programming of organic dairy farms

“…Smaller organic markets may mean greater price fluctuations. But, as far as we know, only deterministic linear programs have been used as decision support models for organic farmers (e.g., Berentsen et al, 1998;Pacini et al, 2004).…”

Integrated Rice-Fish Farming System in Bangladesh: An Ex-ante Value Chain Evaluation Framework

“…The more frequent it is, the more trust exists between the actors, and the less probability there is of opportunistic behaviour. Various types of analysis can be undertaken through the use of the value chain approach, such as functional analysis (Bahr et al 2004;Guptill and Wilkins 2002), institutional analysis (FAO 2005a), social network analysis (Kim and Shin 2002), financial analysis (FAO 2005b), input-output analysis (Hecht 2007), social accounting matrix (Courtney et al 2007;Adelman et al 1988), life cycle analysis (Rebitzer et al 2004), input-output-life cycle analysis (Lenzen 2001), material flow analysis (Finnveden and Moberg 2005), energy analysis (Finnveden and Moberg 2005) and an integrated ecological-economic modelling approach (Pacini et al 2004;Baecke et al 2002;Kledal 2006). One method could not hope to cover all relevant aspects, so in this study, we used a combination of methods: functional analysis, which depicts the interaction between actors of the value chain, describing their full activities from node to node along the chain; institutional and social network analysis, which presents an overview of the various chain actors the and relationships between people, groups and organizations in value creation; financial and input-output analysis, which determines the financial costs and benefits of the individual agents along the chain and traces the flow of goods and services between actors; and material flow analysis, which assesses the physical units of input and output involved in the production, processing, consumption and distribution.…”