A multi-criteria assessment of the agri-environmental sustainability of organic mixed-crop and dairy farming systems

The research team at INRA Mirecourt is working on prototyping agricultural systems that are sustainable from an agro-environmental perspective. This work aims to determine the practical conditions for implementing agricultural systems that are, in principle, sustainable. Accordingly, two organic dairy systems that are, in principle, sustainable have been designed as part of a ‘participatory’ approach: a grassland-based dairy system and a mixed-cropping and livestock dairy system, both tested as part of a systems-based experiment. These systems aim to achieve both agricultural and environmental objectives. They are managed in accordance with multi-objective decision-making rules, which formalise the management of the systems, and are assessed from both biotechnical and practical perspectives via a structured, multi-year experimental framework, supplemented by model-assisted evaluation. This evaluation framework is used to inform the redesign process, with the aim of improving, ‘step by step’, (i) the agri-environmental sustainability of the systems under evaluation and (ii) the practical conditions for implementing these agri-environmentally sustainable production systems.The knowledge derived from this design-evaluation approach, centred on system-level experimentation, will require validation through comparison with real-world commercial farming situations.