Comparing Sustainable Value Approach, Data Envelopment Analysis and indicator approaches - An application on German dairy farms

Objective of this paper is to compare different measurement concepts for sustainability at farm level in Germany: a) Sustainable Value Approach (SV), b) Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and c) indicator approaches close to KUL (Criteria for an Ecologically Compatible Land Management). The mathematical programming model FARMIS is extended wrt the underlying subject and applied for quantitative analysis. Indicators based on physical inputs are calculated based on monetary data of national FADN data. The methods are applied to a sample of about 4000 representative dairy farms. Results of SV are given in both absolute values and return-to-cost ratios which take farm size into account. Considering relationships between methods we found out that correlation between DEA and SV results are higher than 0.75. The indicator methods show correlations with the other approaches of more than 0.5 for economic indicators but a rather low correlation for ecological indicators. Further we identified characteristics of farms with high efficiency and sustainable performance. In order to show differences of used methods results are given by regions, size classes and orientation of production. Results indicate that bigger farms generate higher Sustainable Value. Farms in less favourable areas show a lower performance with regard to Sustainable Value and efficiency than farms located in other areas.