Using the Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment Routine (SMART) for the Systematic Analysis of Trade-Offs and Synergies between Sustainability Dimensions and Themes at Farm Level

When trying to optimize the sustainability performance of farms and farming systems, a consideration of trade-offsand synergiesbetween different themes and dimensionsis required. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic analysis of trade-offsand synergiesacross all dimensionsand themes. To achieve this aim we used the Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment Routine (SMART)-Farm Tool which operationalizes the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) Guidelines by defining science-based indicator sets and assessment procedures. It identifies the degree of goal achievement with respect to the 58 themes defined in the SAFA Guidelines using an impact matrix that defines 327 indicators and 1769 relations between sustainability themes and indicators. We illustrate how the SMART-Farm Tool can be successfully applied to assess the sustainability performance of farms of different types and in different geographic regions. Our analysis revealed important synergiesbetween themes within a sustainability dimensionand across dimensions. We found major trade-offswithin the environmental dimensionand between the environmental and economic dimension. The trade-offswithin the environmental dimensionwere even larger than the trade-offswith other dimensions. The study also underlines the importance of the governance dimensionwith regard to achieving a good level of performance in the other dimensions.