Environmental and economic assessment of agricultural systems at crop, field, farm, and regional scale : Application of agro-ecological and economic indicators in northern Italy

Castoldi, N, 2007. Environmental and economic assessment of agricultural systems at crop, field, farm, and regional scale. Application of agro-ecological and economic indicators in Northern Italy. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Milan, Italy, 335 pp, 25 figures, 45 tables, 243 references, 4 annexes. In the last decades, the perception of relations between agriculture and environment has remarkably changed and concerns have been raised about the sustainability of agricultural production systems, involving consumers, citizens, policy makers and farmers. As direct measurements are too expensive and time consuming, agricultural indicator should be applied for the evaluation of a large number of farms, because they are based on data already available or easy to collect. In this work, agro-ecological and economic indicators were selected and applied at different scale (crop, field, farm, and regional) using data available in public agricultural databases or collected by farmer interviews. Indicators synthesize the management effects on the environment and the state of the farming system. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool used, the uncertainty of a single input variable was tested to quantify the corresponding uncertainty of the indicator.