Sustainable development has become one of the most frequently used frameworks for analyzing farms in a comprehensive and holistic way. To evaluate sustainable farming systems, many approaches were developed to communicate the notion of ‘sustainability’ from perception level to practical content through indicator-sets based assessment. How can we measure sustainability of agricultural production and communicate it to farmers?
What would farmers get from sustainability assessment?
Farm sustainability assessment tools can assist in an operation’s self-evaluation, providing farmers with transparent management advice for agricultural practice; or external reporting and evaluation for developing recommendations to enhance sustainability impacts for the value chain. The SAFA-Guideline from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and The Best Practice Guideline from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) help benchmark sustainability assessment tools for agriculture and its value chains. A number of tools have been used to perform environmental analysis based on environmental indicators in European countries. One of these, RISE 2.0 (Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation), is a globally applicable tool for assessing agricultural production.
What is RISE and how it helps improves farmers’ performance?
RISE was developed at the School of Agriculture, Forest and Food Sciences of Bern University of Applied Sciences in 2000. It is an advisory tool and supports communication and strategic discussion of farmers with extensionists. Farmers are provided with science-based feedback that is motivating and practically relevant. Described as a farm advisory approach with the primary purpose of extension targeting at farmers, the revised version of RISE (RISE 2.0) calculates the indicator degrees of sustainability using a computer model based on data collected by a questionnaire-based interview with the farmer.
A farm visit consist of an on-site audit in order to understand the farming system. RISE 2.0 consists of 10 indicators covering three dimensions of sustainability: (a) Environmental indicators: Energy and climate, Water, Soil, Biodiversity and Plant protection, Nutrient cycles, and Animal welfare; (b) Social indicators: Working conditions and Quality of life; and (c) Economic indicators: Economic viability and Farm management. The RISE 2.0 results are reflected in a sustainability polygon with which users can interpret the degree of sustainability of all indicators through a ‘traffic light’ colour code.
This method was applied on more than 1400 farms in 40 countries, in both commercialised and small-scale farms worldwide within a developing and transition country context. The assessed farms include dairy, vegetable and arable farms, coffee, cocoa and tea plantations, smallholdings in Africa as well as nomadic herders in Asia. The tool is currently translated into more than eight languages and has been used in various development projects.
