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Abstract
Agricultural researchers widely recognise the importance of sustainable
agricultural production systems and the need to develop appropriate methods to
measure sustainability. The principal purpose of this paper is to evaluate the financial and environmental aspects of sustainability of Organic, Integrated and Conventional Farming Systems (OFS, IFS, and CFS, respectively) at farm and more detailed spatial scales. This is achieved applying an integrated economic-environmental
accounting framework to three case study farms in Tuscany including different farming systems and different spatial scales. The
environmental performances of the FS were measured through the application of
an Environmental Accounting Information Systems (EAIS) at field, site and farm
level. The EAIS indicators were then integrated with (1) a set of financial
indicators to evaluate the economic and environmental trade-offs between
different FS and (2) with information on the regional and site-specific soil and
climate conditions to study the impact of different pedo-climates on the
environmental performances of the FS. The gross margins of steady-state OFS
were found to be higher than the corresponding CFS gross margins. OFS perform
better than I/CFS with respect to nitrogen losses, pesticide impact, herbaceous
plant biodiversity and most of the other environmental indicators. However, on
hilly soils, erosion revealed to be higher in OFS than in CFS. The pesticide and
the nitrogen indicators showed, for this example, that the environmental impact
due to integrated and conventional farming practices is similar. Regional pedoclimatic
factors resulted to have a considerable impact on nutrient losses, soil
erosion, pesticide impact and herbaceous plant biodiversity, site-specific factors
on nutrient losses and soil erosion. Conclusions are drawn on the possible
practical applications of the method for environmental measures in the
agricultural sector.