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Sustainable intensification has been proposed as a pathway to achieve food security and reduce environmental impacts of agriculture by focusing on narrowing yield gaps on existing agricultural land while improving resource use efficiencies. There is a general consensus that regions with large yield gaps can benefit most from sustainable intensification but it remains unclear how sustainable this is for farmers given their current resource constraints and livelihood strategies. Here, we draw upon three contrasting case studies, for which detailed data at field and farm levels were available for yield gap decomposition, to assess how sustainable intensification of crops (at field level) works out at farm level using environmental and socio-economic indicators. Although there is large potential for future intensification (more output with more input) of cereal production in southern Ethiopia, current input use in these farming systems is not economically and environmentally sustainable at farm level. The same is true for rice production in Central Luzon where sustainable intensification (more output with less input) can help to narrow yield gaps and improve N use efficiency (NUE) but it is not profitable due to the heavy reliance on costly hired labour. Trade-offs between yield gap closure and labour productivity were also observed in the aforementioned farming systems. Arable farms in the Netherlands exhibit small yield gaps as well as higher economic performance, NUE and N surplus compared to those observed in Southern Ethiopia and Central Luzon. For improving environmental sustainability, these farms require increases in resource-use efficiency and a reduction of the environmental impacts through a lower use of inputs (same output with less input). We conclude that public investments conducive for innovation and profitable farming are essential to make technologies accessible and affordable for farmers and to ensure that yield gaps can be narrowed and sustainability objectives served at the farm level.

Haberli Júnior, C., Spers, E. E., Oliveira, T., & Yanaze, M. (2020). Brazilian farmer perception of dynamic capability and performance over the adoption of enterprise resource planning technology. International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 23(4), 515-528. https://doi.org/10.22434/IFAMR2020.0029 The study investigates the perceptions of the effects and impacts on the performance of agricultural and livestock farms based on the view of obtaining dynamic capabilities by the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology. The dimensions for measuring farmers’ perceptions of ERP adoption were technological, organizational and environmental and their diffusion and the impacts measured on dynamic capabilities were on internal operations, costs, sales and natural resources. A total of 502 farmers directly involved in managing the production, located in the main agricultural areas of Brazil were interviewed. The results indicated that the perception of obtaining dynamic capabilities in the farms by adopting the ERP was significant, but with lower levels in costs and natural resources. The influence of farm size on ERP adoption and its perception on farm performance was not significant. The proposed model proved to be adequate and can be validated and compared with other producing regions. publishersversion published

Increased climate variability during the last four decades has made the agricultural environment in many developing countries more uncertain, resulting in increasing exposure to risk when producing crops. In this study, we use recent farm‐level data from Ghana to examine the drivers of individual and joint adoption of crop choice and soil and water conservation practices, and how adoption of these practices impacts on farm performance (crop revenue) and exposure to risks (skewness of crop yield). We employ a multinomial endogenous switching regression model to account for selectivity bias due to both observable and unobservable factors. The empirical results reveal that farmers’ adoption of crop choice and soil and water conservation leads to higher crop revenues and reduced riskiness in crop production, with the largest impact on crop revenues coming from joint adoption. The findings also show that education of the household head, access to extension and weather information influence the likelihood of adopting these practices. Thus, enhancing extension services and access to climate information and irrigation can reduce gaps in adoption of soil and water conservation and crop choice, considered as climate‐smart practices that will eventually improve crop revenues and reduce farmers’ exposure to climate‐related production risks.

Societal expectations about agricultural production are changing. There are increased demands on issues such as food safety, animal welfare and the impact of agriculture on the environment (land, water and air). These changes have been refl ected in the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), but information on these issues is lacking and this complicates the required evaluation of policies. The EU Framework 7 project FLINT tries to close this gap by analysing the feasibility of collecting data on these new topics. FLINT has established a data infrastructure with up-to-date farm-level indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of the CAP. The project created a pilot network of more than 1,000 farms to collect a set of sustainability indicators at farm level. The pilot represents farm diversity at EU level, including the different administrative environments in the Member States. This paper sets out the context and the main contributions of the project. Societal expectations about agricultural production are changing. There are increased demands on issues such as food safety, animal welfare and the impact of agriculture on the environment (land, water and air). These changes have been refl ected in the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), but information on these issues is lacking and this complicates the required evaluation of policies. The EU Framework 7 project FLINT tries to close this gap by analysing the feasibility of collecting data on these new topics. FLINT has established a data infrastructure with up-to-date farm-level indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of the CAP. The project created a pilot network of more than 1,000 farms to collect a set of sustainability indicators at farm level. The pilot represents farm diversity at EU level, including the different administrative environments in the Member States. This paper sets out the context and the main contributions of the project.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the economic performance of Norwegian crop farms using a stochastic frontier analysis. Design/methodology/approach The analysis was based on a translog cost function and unbalanced farm-level panel data for 1991–2013 from 455 Norwegian farms specialized in crop production in eastern and central regions of Norway. Findings The results of the analysis show that the mean efficiency was about 78–81 percent. Farm management practices and socioeconomic factors were shown to significantly affect the economic performance of Norwegian crop farms. Research limitations/implications Farmers are getting different types of support from the government and the study does not account for the different effects of different kinds of subsidy on cost efficiency. Different subsidies might have different effects on farm performance. To get more informative and useful results, it would be necessary to repeat the analysis with less aggregated data on subsidy payments. Practical implications One implication for farmers (and their advisers) is that many of them are less efficient than the estimated benchmark (best performing farms). Thus, those lagging behind the best performing farms need to look at the way they are operating and to seek out ways to save costs or increase crop production. Perhaps there are things for lagging farmers to learn from their more productive farming neighbors. For instance, those farmers not practicing crop rotation might be well advised to try that practice. Social implications For both taxpayers and consumers, one implication is that the contributions they pay that go to subsidize farmers appear to bring some benefits in terms of more efficient production that, in turn, increase the supply of some foods so possibly making food prices more affordable. Originality/value Unlike previous performance studies in the literature, the authors estimated farm-level economic performance accounting for the contribution of both an important farm management practice and selected socioeconomic factors. Good farm management practices, captured through crop rotation, land tenure, government support and off-farm activities were found to have made a positive and statistically significant contribution to reducing the cost of production on crop-producing farms in the Central and Eastern regions of Norway.

Indicator-based tools are widely used for the assessment of farm sustainability, but analysts still face methodological and conceptual issues, including data availability, the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the heterogeneity of agricultural systems. This study contributes to this debate through the illustration of a procedure for farm sustainability assessment focussed on the case study of the South Milan Agricultural Park, Italy. The application is based on a set of environmental, social and economic indicators retrieved from the literature review. The framework is based on three main steps: (i) Data collection mainly through interviews with farmers and institutions; (ii) data elaboration through an aggregative structure; and (iii) score analysis. The latter step includes a descriptive analysis that allows a comparison among farms or groups of farms and a principal components analysis that helps to confirm the dimensions in which indicators were previously included (components). Results derived from the sampled farms show that the framework can provide easy-to-read results useful at different levels. The study highlighted the procedures for the framework construction that is compatible with the region’s context and objectives, using an analytical approach that aims at the use of balanced features of availability and reliability of data.

The present research proposes a model for the assessment of the social pillar of sustainability at the farm scale. Contrary to what is available for the environmental and economic pillars, there is a considerable lack of exhaustive approaches able to evaluate the social dimension of sustainability in rural areas. Thus, the idea was to create a mean by which a quantitative evaluation of the social characteristics of farms could be made. The study involved farms of the South Milan Agricultural Park, located in northern Italy. Thirty sampled farms were selected in order to represent the different livestock systems, land areas, economic dimensions and levels of multifunctionality of the area. The framework is based on a set of 15 indicators able to evaluate five main social "components": (i) quality of the products and the region, (ii) short supply chain and related activities, (iii) work, (iv) ethical and human development and (v) society, culture and ecology. The work was structured using the following steps: identification of the relevant variables for the social sustainability of farms, determination of the framework of indicators, assignment of their range scores, data collection, calculation of the score for each farm, data analysis and visualization. The method allows different types of analysis in relation to the objective of the research. Three main approaches were individuated: (1) the comparison among farms is the "farms' ranking" and the "aggregate ranking"; (2) the evaluation of single themes of sustainability is the "single indicator evaluation" approach and (3) the temporal comparison of the farm's result is the "score evolution" approach. The method showed a high sensitivity to the multifunctionality and the type of farm production, especially organic vs conventional, while other characteristics, such as the type of livestock and the land area, seem to differentiate the sample less or to characterize it in only a few social components. The work has underlined the importance and the advancement in the study of the social dimension that, however, needs further in-depth analysis through comparison with the other two pillars and among various social states in different rural areas.

Tail lesions are important pig welfare indicators that could be recorded during meat inspection as they are more visible on the carcass than on the live animal. Tail biting is associated with reduced performance in the bitten pig, but it is not clear whether problems with tail biting are reflected in general farm performance figures. Farm advisory services aim to improve farm productivity which could be associated with improvements in pig welfare. Record keeping forms an integral part of such advisory services. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of record keeping in the Teagasc eProfit Monitor (ePM herds) on the prevalence of tail lesion severity scores in Irish slaughter pigs. In addition, we investigated associations between the prevalence of tail lesion scores and production parameters at farm level in ePM herds. Pigs were observed after scalding/dehairing and tail lesion score (0 to 4), sex and farm identification were recorded. Tail lesion scores were collapsed into none/mild lesions (score ⩽1), moderate lesions (score 2) and severe lesions (score ⩾3). The effect of record keeping (ePM herd) on the different tail lesion outcomes was analysed at batch level using the events/trials structure in generalized linear mixed models (PROC GLIMMIX). Spearman’s rank correlations were calculated between average tail lesion score of a batch and production parameters. A total of 13 133 pigs were assessed from 73 batches coming from 61 farms. In all, 23 farms were identified as ePM herds. The average prevalence of moderate tail lesions was 26.8% and of severe tail lesions was 3.4% in a batch. Batches coming from ePM herds had a lower prevalence of moderate tail lesions than non-ePM herds (P

Social capital becomes the main capital that must be owned by an entrepreneur, thus increasing the entrepreneurial spirit. The purpose of this research is to know the institutional condition of the members of the group of tilapia fish farm, the social capital of the member of the cultivation group of tilapia, the entrepreneurial spirit, farm performance of the tilapia fishery group, and the institutional influence, social capital, entrepreneurial spirit to the business performance of the nila fish farming group in Sleman District. The method used in this research is a method of a mixed method, with 150 responders and analyzed with SEM. The results showed that more than 50% of institutional conditions, social capital, entrepreneurial spirit, and business performance of tilapia fish farming group members of beginners, middle, and main in Ngemplak and Cangkringan Subdistrict Sleman Regency has a high category. There is no significant institutional influence on the influence of social capital on the entrepreneurial. Institutional is not a moderator variable between social capital relations and entrepreneurial spirit. This indicates that the higher/ lower institutional will not result in changes the higher/ lower the influence of social capital on entrepreneurial.

In the past few decades, farms have increased in size and the focus of management has changed from curative to preventive. To help farmers cope with these changes, veterinarians offer veterinary herd health management (VHHM) programs, whose major objective is to support the farmer in reaching his farm performance goals. The association between farm performance and participation in VHHM, however, remains unknown. The aim of this paper was to compare farm performance parameters between participants and nonparticipants in VHHM and to differentiate within participation to evaluate the possible added value of VHHM on the farm. Five thousand farmers received a questionnaire about the level of VHHM on their farm. Farm performance parameters of these 5,000 farms were provided. For all respondents (n = 1,013), farm performance was compared between participants and nonparticipants and within level of participation, using linear mixed and linear regression models. Farmers who participated in VHHM produced 336 kg of milk/cow per year more and their average milk somatic cell count (SCC) was 8,340 cells/mL lower than farmers who did not participate in VHHM. Participating herds, however, had an older age at first calving (+12 d), a lower 56-d nonreturn rate percentage (-3.34%), and a higher number of inseminations per cow (+0.09 inseminations). They also had more cows culled per year (+1.05%), and a lower age at culling (-70 d). Participants in the most-extended form of VHHM (level 3) had a lower SCC (-19,800 cells/mL), fewer cows with high SCC (-1.70%), fewer cows with new high SCC (-0.47%), a shorter calving interval (-6.01 d), and fewer inseminations per heifer (-0.07 inseminations) than participants in the least-extended form of VHHM (level 1). Level 3 participants, however, also had more cows culled per year (+1.74%) and a lower age at culling (-103 d). Discussing specific topics with the veterinarian (milk production, fertility, and udder health) had only marginal effects on improving the farm performance parameters related to those topics. Given the relevance of fertility on the farm and the focus on longevity by society, it is important to determine underlying reasons for the negative associations of these topics with participation in VHHM. A longitudinal study could provide answers to this. For now, veterinarians should be aware of the associations. The increased milk production and milk quality could help the marketing of VHHM to farmers.