Rapid sustainability assessment of organic and low-input farming across Europe and identification of research needs

Summary

The objective of this report is to present information on research needs to support improvement of sustainability of organic and low input dairy farms in the EU which could be addressed with on-farm projects. The report describes the execution and findings of two tasks in Work Package (WP) 1 of the SOLID project: 1) Case studies using a rapid sustainability assessment on a total of 70 organic and 32 low input dairy farms in nine countries across Europe and 2) a series of workshops held in these countries, designed to discover farmers’ views of research needs relating to aspects of sustainability. A total of 72 dairy cow farms from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Romania and UK, and 30 dairy goat farms from Flanders, the Netherlands, Greece, Spain and Italy were involved in the case studies. The farms were associated with the SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) partners in the project, which included co-operatives, advisory services and an organic certification body.