A new framework for the assessment of the environmental sustainability of farms

The present research contributes to the literature proposing a new model for the assessment of environmental sustainability of agricultural activities at the farm scale and discussing some relevant points related to the process of selection and weighting of the indicators. The framework is based on a set of 18 indicators that evaluate 5 main environmental components by the following steps: identification of the most relevant variables representing for environmental impact of agricultural activities, choice of the indicators, assignment of their range scores, data collection, calculation of the score for each farm and visualization of the data. The method is applied to a case study represented by fifty farms from the South Milan Agricultural Park (Italy), that have been selected in order to represent different farming systems and economic dimensions. The method allowed a comparison at farms and farming system level, showing sensitivity to farms’ characteristics and farmers’ choices.