Farm-level indicators for crop and landscape diversity derived from agricultural beneficiaries data

Abstract

The EU follows the broad aim to develop viable food production systems, through supporting the sustainable management of natural resources and climate action and to strive for more balanced territorial development. These core values are reflected in the changing Common Agricultural Policy. This policy is one of the key drivers of agricultural practice across the EU, as it has become more oriented towards the concepts of sustainability in recent years. The EU operates a farm-level monitoring system, the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), which acts as a check to establish if such successful change is being achieved, currently the primary focus is on the economic dimension of sustainability. We argue that to complement existing monitoring tools, cost-effective measurement of indicators for other sustainability dimensions at the farm scale is required. This article explores to what extent EU agricultural beneficiaries data as collected under the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) can be a complementary source of information for this task. To this end, candidate indicators for the environmental dimension from available studies were reviewed and it was assessed whether the data requirements for the indicators could be met through IACS data. The identified five environmental indicators were produced from an IACS data set from Germany. The indicator data was quantitatively analysed and compared with target values reported in the literature, and interpreted with regard to meaningfulness and possible improvements. Our results show that IACS data is indeed a potential source for farm level indicators for the environmental dimension, primarily with regard to landscape diversity (landscape features, parcel size) and the diversity of crop production. The spatial nature of IACS allows for a link to other environmental data and to agroecosystem models which may provide additional indicators, e.g. nutrient balances. However, important information on management of field operations and livestock herds is still insufficient in both FADN and IACS.