Farm diversity impacts on food production, income generation and environmental preservation: The Swiss case

A sample of 239 farm year observations of Swiss farms was assessed at the product group level for analyzing the relationship between environmental and economic performance and correlations between product groups (Milk, Cattle, Cereal, Beets, and Potatoes). The farms cover the production regions valley, hill and mountains and practice organic production or proof of ecological performance (PEP), the Swiss standard production.The environmental dimension was covered by nine impact categories calculated by the Swiss Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment method (SALCA). The impacts were aggregated using a data envelopment analysis (DEA). The economic dimension is assessed by the family workforce income per product group calculated from a full cost data set from the Swiss farm accountancy data network (FADN). Hereby, all indirect costs, which cannot be directly attributed to the product groups, were allocated using standard costs.We also included productivity as a third dimension in our analysis, quantified as output per area for crop products and output per animal livestock unit for the animal product groups.No trade-offs between the environmental efficiency and the economic performance were identified. On the contrary, for Cattle and Milk we found significant synergies (1.5 times more observations show synergies than no effect or trade-offs).Furthermore we found that productivity correlated positively with environmental efficiency for Milk (coef-ficient = 0.27), Cattle (coefficient = 0.38) and Cereals (coefficient = 0.30), but only for Cattle (coefficient = 0.17) and Potatoes (coefficient = 0.47) it correlated with economic performance.For all product groups except Cereals, the organic farming system had 5% to 10 higher environmental effi-ciency and 5%-26% higher economic performance than the PEP farms. Although the differences were not sig-nificant, a consistent decrease up to-20% in environmental performance and productivity was observed between the valley/hill and the mountain region.Our results show no indication that farmers maximize their productivity or economic performance at the cost of environmental efficiency. However, the large variability suggests that there is a) room for improvement in several dimension simultaneously, and b) that maximizing productivity does not seem to be a necessity for these improvements.

Automated summary

This study assessed 239 farm year observations of Swiss farms to analyze the relationship between environmental and economic performance and correlations between product groups. There were no trade-offs between environmental efficiency and economic performance, and synergies were found in some product groups. Organic farming systems performed better in terms of both environmental and economic efficiency. However, the mountain region had lower environmental performance and productivity.