Costs, quantity and toxicity: Comparison of pesticide indicators collected from FADN farms in four EU-countries

Sandra Uthes (uthes@zalf.de), Ines Heyer, Annemarie Kaiser, Peter Zander, Christian Bockstaller (christian.bockstaller@colmar.inra.fr), Yann Desjeux, Szilárd Keszthelyi, Eszter Kis-Csatári, Andras Molnar, Wioletta Wrzaszcz and Monika Juchniewicz
Additional contact information
Sandra Uthes: ZALF - Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung = Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
Ines Heyer: ZALF - Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung = Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
Annemarie Kaiser: ZALF - Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung = Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
Peter Zander: ZALF - Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung = Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
Christian Bockstaller: LAE-Colmar - Laboratoire Agronomie et Environnement - Antenne Colmar - LAE - Laboratoire Agronomie et Environnement - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UL - Université de Lorraine
Szilárd Keszthelyi: VUZE - Research Institute of Agricultural Economics
Eszter Kis-Csatári: VUZE - Research Institute of Agricultural Economics
Andras Molnar: VUZE - Research Institute of Agricultural Economics
Wioletta Wrzaszcz: Agricultural and Food Economics
Monika Juchniewicz: Agricultural and Food Economics

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Abstract: There is a growing demand in the last years for farm-level sustainability data reflected in various initiatives from farmers, science and food industries. An alternative to creating new tools and indicator assessment frameworks is to further develop existing farm monitoring systems, such as the EU-wide Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), towards inclusion of sustainability-related data. This article reports on a study carried out within the EU-project FLINT comparing indicators for pesticide costs, application quantity and pesticide toxicity calculated for 416 farms in four EU countries (France, Germany, Hungary, Poland). The farm sample was a non-representative subsample of the national FADN samples in these countries. Major focus of the comparison was to analyse the suitability of the indicators for implementation in a large so-far primarily economic farm-level monitoring system, such as the FADN. The FADN currently includes farm-level expenditure for crop protection as the only indicator with reference to pesticides. We show that it is possible to extend the current FADN with reasonable effort towards indicators for pesticide application quantity (pesticide usage, treatment index) and pesticide toxicity (here exemplarily used: lethal dose 50 in rats), while the data demands of more elaborated indicators could not be met with the current system. The correlation between indicators, reflecting the extent to which indicators come to the same conclusion, was small between pesticide costs and pesticide usage or toxicity, thus the use of pesticide costs as an ecological indicator, as was done in other studies, cannot be recommended. A combined consideration in the FADN system of pesticide quantity and toxicity, which showed moderate correlation, could be a suitable approach instead.

Keywords: FADN; farm level sustainability; treatment index; lethal dose; crop protection expenditure; pesticide use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in Ecological Indicators, 2019, 104, pp.695-703. ⟨10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.05.028⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02619674

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.05.028

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