Application of the sustainable value concept to a representative dairy farm of Florence Province, Tuscany, under a modeling perspective

Abstract

The increasing interest and need to evaluate sustainability at different spatial scales, raises also the need to gauge the contribution of farms to sustainability. The Sustainable Value Added (SVA) is an approach based on opportunity costs that compares the resource use of a company (or farms) to the resource use of a benchmark (represented by a group of farms or by performance goals). Thus SVA provides a tool to “determine by which entity the resources should be used in order to achieve the highest contributions to sustainability”. As such, SVA with the logic of investors properly answers to the so called Where-question, indicating by which economic entities resources are more efficiently used. Though SVA approach coherently follows the financial economic tradition in which its roots are embedded, requires an apt calibration-adaptation when specific issues are faced within the agricultural sector (e.g. measurement of environmental services and specific resources). In order to be conceptually and practically applicable to the agricultural domain, in this work the Sustainable Value Added approach is integrated with an agro-environmental sustainability information system(AESIS), an indicator-based framework for the evaluation of the sustainability of farms. AESIS is applied in combination with a farm optimisation 57 model constructed on a representative dairy farm of Florence Province, Tuscany. The model is optimised subject to: 1) a set of resource use constraints representing average farm endowments and norms of the dairy sector, and; 2) an extended set of constraints including additional environmental thresholds representing ideal performances of sustainability (benchmark). Results in terms of SVA are calculated and discussed with special concern to SVA applicability for farm-level analysis.