Article cost of extending the farm accountancy data network to the farm sustainability data network : Empirical evidence

The European Green Deal, its Farm to Fork strategy and Biodiversity strategy will set the scene for the future revisions of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP will address an increasing set of objectives, including contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement. To enable evidence-based policy making and monitoring, the Farm to Fork strategy proposes to extend the current monitoring system to include a broader range of sustainability issues. The current monitoring system called Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) has a strong focus on financial and economic data. The FADN is an instrument for monitoring and evaluation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy and collects bookkeeping results from 80,000 farms. The extension to a Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN) should include a broader set of indicators on the sustainability performance of farms. This paper estimates the costs of collecting this broader set of sustainability indicators in the FSDN based on the experiences of a pilot in 9 member states and a survey among all member states. The results show that collecting the sustainability data from all farms included in FADN would increase the costs by about 40%. The results show large differences between countries depending on the current costs of data collection and the expected additional work to include sustainability indicators. Given the pressing need for these data, a scenario was developed where sustainability data are collected from a subsample of 15,000 farms. This can be achieved within current budget limits if the current FADN sample would be reduced from 85,000 to 75,000 farms. The discussion section addresses some concerns raised on the extension of FADN to FSDN such as: willingness of farmers, administrative burden, economic background of FADN and the quality of the data.