The ‘Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation’ (TAPE) has been developed under the coordination of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to assess the impact of agroecology with a globally applicable and comparable method. TAPE aims to measure the performance of agroecological systems in the different sustainability dimensions. The method includes a questionnaire to be filled in by an enumerator during or after a farm visit. So far, TAPE has predominantly been applied in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this study, we tested the applicability of TAPE in Switzerland. Furthermore, we developed a new biodiversity index for TAPE that takes into account unplanned biodiversity (e. g. the effect of management practices on wild species) in addition to planned biodiversity (e. g. the number of breeds, presence of trees), since the current tool only considers the latter. Interviews were conducted on 21 farms throughout Switzerland covering different production systems. While generally applicable, the current version of TAPE proved inadequate for recording grassland-dominated farms, since many of the questions were designed for arable cropping systems. Furthermore, the effort required for data collection on Swiss farms considerably exceeded the target range of TAPE because the recording of pesticides, machinery, and information on plant and animal products was a more complex endeavour in Switzerland than in typical smallholder farming systems in LMICs. Nevertheless, preliminary agroecological results (valid for the farms observed) were successfully derived with TAPE. The agroecological elements ‘responsible governance’ and ‘social values’ achieved the highest average scores, while we identified space room for improvement in other elements such as ‘efficiency’ or ‘recycling’. No significant differences were found between the regions (valley/hill/mountain) for most elements, but (certified) organic farms performed considerably better than non-organic farms with regard to the transition to agroecology. It should be noted, however, that with only 8 organic farms and 13 non-organic farms, our sample was far too small to be representative for the Swiss farming sector. Next to testing TAPE in Switzerland, we extended the method to include unplanned biodiversity, an important ecological aspect that has so far not been considered. The newly developed biodiversity index is based on the European BioBio method. The comparison of the new biodiversity index with a significantly more detailed and time-consuming method (‘SALCA-BD’) shows a positive correlation (r = 0.56, p-value=0.009). Based on our results, the new biodiversity index was implemented in TAPE and is freely available for other users as needed.
