Agriculture has many functions for society. In addition to the central function of producing food, other important functions include providing an income for the farming family and managing the land sustainably. This is called “multifunctionality of agriculture.”

These functions could now be integrated into an eco-efficiency assessment for Austrian agriculture. The results were implemented in collaboration with the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and the Swiss research institute Agroscope in the study “Eco-efficiency of farms considering multiple functions of agriculture: Concept and results from Austrian farms” and published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Link to the paper 

With this assessment, it is now possible, both practically and scientifically, to take different functions of agriculture into account when analyzing strengths and weaknesses on the farm. This is intended to avoid a one-sided focus of optimization purely on yield or income, so that the agricultural business is once again seen as a holistic production system with many services.

Project goal

The aim is to bring ecology and economy on the farm into harmony in the long term.