The Potential for Extending Economic Farm-Level Benchmarking to Environmental and Other Aspects of Farm Performance

Desk study exploring the potential to extend farm-level financial and technical benchmarking to cover the areas of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, animal welfare and agri-environment and management practices.

Project Aims:

The project has two main objectives:

To explore the potential to extend farm-level benchmarking to cover the areas of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, animal health and welfare, agri-environment and management practices.
To develop a framework and template for one of these areas, greenhouse gas emissions, to illustrate the approach.

ORC's Role:

Project management
Assisting in the review of current tools and relevant product certification schemes

Project leader and partners:

Organic Research Centre (ORC)
Rural Business Research (RBR) at Nottingham and Cambridge
Reading University
Cranfield University
Aberystwyth University

Deliverables:

Lampkin, N., Bailey, A., Lang, B., Wilson, P., Williams, A., Sanders, D., Fowler, S., Gerrard, C.L., Moakes, S., Mortimer, S., Nicholas, P., Padel S., (2011), The Potential for Extending Economic Farm-level Benchmarking to Environmental and Other Aspects of Farm Performance, Report for DEFRA