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Abstract
Currently, agricultural farm units are
faced with a double and most times contradictory
challenge, in order to be successful: on the one hand the
invested capital has to be profitable and the economic
performance has to be maximised. On the other hand,
given the socio-environmental situation, it is necessary to
preserve and to protect the environment and natural
resources. Given the potential conflict of the two aims,
since the satisfaction of one implies the
underperformance of the other (and vice versa), the
question then is: which is the solution to choose?
We intend, in this work, to formulate a farm plan
with the purpose of reconciling the criteria of
environmental sustainability with that of economic
competitiveness.
For this achievement we proceed to the comparative
study of sustainability of different groups of farms
identified in the study area (first evaluation cycle)
through MESMIS (“Marco para la Evaluación de
Sistemas de Manejo de Recursos Naturales Mediante
Indicadores de Sustentabilidad” - Framework for
Evaluation of Natural-Resource Systems Handling
through Sustainability Indicators) methodology, that
allowed to select the more sustainable group of farms.
Based on the found potentialities and weakness on
these production systems, we stepped to the planning of
a production unit of bovine meat, which obeys
simultaneously to economic and environmental
objectives, using Multicriteria Decision.
We finished the work with the sustainability
evaluation between groups of farms identified previously
and the planned farms (second evaluation cycle), based,
again, in the MESMIS methodology, to confirm (or not)
the greatest sustainability of the last ones. Analyses of
the results allow us to confirm the greatest relative
sustainability of the planned farm, for the diverse traced
scenarios.