Project: AgPICKS: Agricultural Performance Indicator and Context Knowledge System

Purpose

Agricultural systems promoted as sustainable are multiplying while assessments of their performance lag behind. Given the lack of silver bullets in agriculture and the subjectivity of what sustainability means, producers and consumers need a reliable way to measure the performance of agricultural systems against sustainability benchmarks — especially as biophysical, socioeconomic, and agro-technological systems rapidly change. LTAR’s scientific expertise, coordinated experimentation, and data systems are uniquely positioned to fill this need. This project is designed to harness the power of LTAR to build a useful and usable sustainability indicator system for producers in supply chains with corporate sustainability targets, producers seeking to share on-farm knowledge, and producers seeking to understand tradeoffs and how their operations compare with others’, as well as researchers, conservation professionals, and agricultural consultants.

Developing the system

Concepts for indicators and metrics have evolved since 2018, first at national network meetings and later with a formalized consensus process. The architecture of the system has been developed since 2020 in the multidisciplinary Indicators Working Group. The system is intended to eventually explore indicators at multiple scales (e.g.,nation, region, landscape, farm/ranch, field). We are currently focusing on the farm/ranch scale to connect and standardize LTAR Common Experiment measurements, as well as to provide tools for other scientists and producers working at the farm/ranch scale. We have designed the farm-level system to be holistic, inclusive, outcomes-based, farmer informed, and infused with on-farm data collection.

System Architecture (2024)

The system for the farm/ranch level is designed to:

  • Measure whether farming or ranching systems are sustainable, i.e., whether they satisfy the needs of the farmer or rancher today while conserving natural resources for future generations.
  • Promote the understanding of tradeoffs of agricultural systems among four domains of Production, Environment, Society, and Economics.
  • Allow users to select metrics per indicator, including options that don’t require formal scientific training. Metrics recommended by the Common Experiment teams and Working Groups will be prioritized to enable coordination among Common Experiment scientists.
  • Be used with a peer-to-peer benchmarking tool built to help users understand how well their agricultural systems perform in relation to their own goals, and in relation to other systems in the database. 
  • Be understood in contexts of communities, supply chains, regions, and regimes as defined by the Human Dimensions, Modeling, Regionalization, and Resilience Working Groups. Farm/ranch-level indicator data will also be designed to inform models at these scales.
  • Evolve according to evolving modeler and stakeholder needs and preferences.

LTAR Sustainability Framework v.2024 (farm/ranch level)

 

Workplan

The project is operating on a 5-year workplan in coordination with the 2022 LTAR Strategic Plan. The Indicators Working Group opened the floor for a round of suggestions on Framework v.2022. The Indicators Working Group considered all input to develop a new consensus-based version (v.2024) to be used to build a suite of user tools in the Agricultural Performance Indicator and Context Knowledge System (AgPICKS).

 

References

Key publications that have helped to structure the system and prospective tools:

  • de Olde, E. M., Oudshoorn, F. W., Sørensen, C. A. G., Bokkers, E. A. M., & de Boer, I. J. M. (2016). Assessing sustainability at farm-level: Lessons learned from a comparison of tools in practice. In Ecological Indicators (Vol. 66, pp. 391–404). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.01.047
  • Gomez, A. A., Kelly, D. E. S., Syers, J. K., & Coughlan, K. J. (1997). Measuring sustainability of agricultural systems at the farm level. Methods for assessing soil quality, 49, 401-410. https://doi.org/10.2136/sssaspecpub49.c26
  • Latruffe, L., Diazabakana, A., Bockstaller, C., Desjeux, Y., Finn, J., Kelly, E., Ryan, M., & Uthes, S. (2016). Measurement of sustainability in agriculture: a review of indicators. In Studies in Agricultural Economics (Vol. 118, Issue 3, pp. 123–130). NAIK Research Institute of Agricultural Economics. https://doi.org/10.7896/j.1624
  • Musumba, M., Grabowski, P., Palm, C. and Snapp, S. 2017. Guide for the sustainable intensification assessment framework. Kansas, USA: Kansas State University. https://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/90523
  • Perez, I., Wery, J., Heckelei, T., Bergez, J. E., Leenhardt, D., Thenard, V., … & Josien, E. (2005). SEAMLESS System for Environmental and Agricultural Modelling; Linking European Science and Society. The major characteristics of scenarios and agricultural systems to be studied in Test case 1. https://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=FR2019163425
  • Spiegal, S., Webb, N. P., Boughton, E. H., Boughton, R. K., Bentley Brymer, A. L., Clark, P. E., Collins, C. H., Hoover, D. L., Kaplan, N., McCord, S. E., Meredith, G., Porensky, L. M., Toledo, D., Wilmer, H., Wulfhorst, J., & Bestelmeyer, B. T. (2022). Measuring the social and ecological performance of agricultural innovations on rangelands: Progress and plans for an indicator framework in the LTAR network. In Rangelands (Vol. 44, Issue 5, pp. 334–344). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rala.2021.12.005
  • Webb, N.P., Edwards, B.L., Heller, A., McCord, S.E., Schallner, J.W., Treminio, R.S., Wheeler, B.E., Stauffer, N.G., Spiegal, S., Duniway, M.C., 2024. Establishing quantitative benchmarks for soil erosion and ecological monitoring, assessment, and management. Ecological Indicators 159, 111661.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2024.111661
  • Whitehead, J., Lu, Y., Still, H., Wallis, J., Gentle, H., & Moller, H. (2016, July). Target setting and burden sharing in sustainability assessment beyond the farm level. In 12th European International Farming Systems Symposium (pp. 12-15). PDF on ResearchGate

ABOUT LTAR

 

The USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Long-Term Agroecosystem Research network consists of 18 Federal and university agricultural research sites with an average of over 50 years of history. The goal of this research network is to ensure sustained crop and livestock production and ecosystem services from agroecosystems, and to forecast and verify the effects of environmental trends, public policies, and emerging technologies.