A farm multicriteria analysis model for the economic and environmental evaluation of agricultural land use

The paper presents a model that produces and evaluates alternative farming systems. The economic and environmental viewpoints are considered within different hypotheses of agricultural policy and farmer’s decision-making process. The model is composed of three parts: a) a multiobjective programming model for the simulation at farm level of policies and farmer’s decision-making; b) a model for the environmental impact assessment of the results of the previous simulations; c) a multi-attribute evaluation of the simulations from both the economic and environmental point of view. The model has been applied in the area of the Venice Lagoon Basin (VLB), located in northern Italy. The economic-environmental evaluation demonstrates that there is clear synergy between the tendency of the farmer to minimise the risk of the cropping systems and the necessity to reduce the environmental impact of farming techniques. This is particularly useful for promoting low-impact agricultural practices in the situations dominated by traditional production methods whose environmental implications appear very variable.

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