Research and agriculture for a better world

As part of the Re-Livestock project we are responsible for coordinating data collection from innovative livestock farms. The aim of the data collection is to characterise and monitor the performance of the mitigation and adaptation potential of each farm. The data feeds into other tasks in the project, including a Multicriteria Assessment of farm sustainability that will identify potential trade-offs between sustainability dimensions. The results of the assessments will also be used in farmer workshops to stimulate discussions around sustainability and resilience against climate change. The on-line tool  is multi-lingual, and adapts to the farm system being assessed, by filtering out questions and categories that aren’t relevant, being also interesting for farmers self assessment.

The Public Goods Tool  was initially developed by the UK Organic Research Centre, as part of the Organic Conversion Information Service (OCIS) in 2011. Designed to capture data about farm practices and represent the sustainability and produce of public goods, the PG Tool has since undergone various iterations and adaptations; MVARC has been involved in its most recent iteration that has transformed the original excel-based version into a user-friendly on-line tool as part of the EU Horizon Re-Livestock project.

The term ‘sustainability’ means different things to different people - a common language is needed to support measuring, understanding and communicating farm sustainability as the basis of the food system. Since 2020, we have been working with the Sustainable Food Trust  to develop a common framework to define and measure whole-farm sustainability, the Global Farm Metric.  

As part of the European Agromix project, there were two deliverables (D1.1 and D1.3) dedicated to developing a protocol for an Assessment of Farm-Resilience. We trasnformed these reports into an online Resilience Assessment Tool.