Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Due to overwhelming sustainability challenges in modern agriculture, sustainability assessment is an important tool for farms of all types to better understand and thus improve sustainability performance.
The Public Goods (PG) tool is a farm sustainability assessment tool that aims to assess overall farm sustainability in the environmental, social, and economic dimensions. The aim of this work is to understand how the PG tool could be adapted to be better suited to assessing the sustainability of regenerative farms.
The PG tool was examined for its relevance to important concepts in regenerative agriculture within the context of the “six principles of regenerative agriculture” framework, and the tool was modified based on these findings. The adapted tool was then introduced to regenerative farmers in Sweden for feedback through a semi-structured interview process.
There were a number of positive perceptions of the adapted PG tool, such as its general relevance to regenerative agriculture concepts, ability to provide new insights about farm sustainability in three dimensions, and possible use as a communication and benchmarking tool. However, there are also some concerns raised about the challenges of practical application and farmers’ general lack of interest in the tool. For these reasons, the PG tool may not be an ideal assessment for regenerative farms, but can still bring value due to the overall strengths of the tool.