Collaboratrici e collaboratori

This study evaluates the results from an extensive sustainability assessment of 12 Swiss farms including all three dimensions (environmental, economic, social) of sustainability. The method is based on a newly developed method specially designed for use in Switzerland (Roesch et al. 2017). The aim of a currently ongoing project is a practical test of the method on 12 Swiss farms to verify the relevance, reliability and feasibility of the entire process, from data acquisition to the computation of the final sustainability indicators. First results from the first test year 2016 showed that computation of the sustainability indicators is feasible but the process of data acquisition including plausibility control needs to be improved. The analysis revealed that the various sustainability indicators correlate only little, indicating the need to keep most of the indicators for achieving a good overall picture of the farms. Synergies between economic indicators and environmental impacts were barely found. Higher workloads generally did not lead to increased economic success. The two indicators for biodiversity and landscape quality must both be kept because they provide complementary information of the farm.