Economic and environmental analysis of sustainable farming practices – a Bavarian case study

Within the Research Network on Agro-ecosystems Munich (Forschungsverbund Agrarökosysteme München, FAM) strategies to approach optimal land use have been investigated since 1990 in terms of minimization of environmental impacts and maximization of profit from agricultural lands. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interactions of the economic and ecological demands on agricultural land use with model calculations for the integrated farm section of the research station of the Research Network, Klostergut Scheyern in Bavaria, Germany, with a whole farm modeling approach. For this purpose the model system MODAM was used. MODAM simulates agricultural land use at farm level, calculates the economic returns and environmental impacts and runs farm optimizations with a linear programming tool. The integration of agri-environmental indicators in the model framework enables a multi-criteria optimization and the calculation of trade-offs. Optimization runs for the experimental farm show the complex interactions which occur when the farm considers environmental concerns in the objective function. Trade offs and abatement cost curves illustrate the relationship between agri-environmental indicators and economic returns of the farm. Here, soil erosion, nitrogen balance, global warming potential and gross energy input were implemented as agri-environmental indicators in MODAM.