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Problem
The public concern for animal welfare in The Netherlands, and in Europe, stimulated the development of alternative, animal-friendly production systems, e.g. the deep litter and aviary system for laying hens and group housing for sows. The societal criticism resulted in new legislation, favoring application of animal-friendly production systems. National introduction of animal-friendly production systems, however, requires not only a comparison of welfare aspects among these systems. A comparison of economic, ecological and other societal aspects is necessary as well.
Aim of the research
The aim of this research is to develop a methodology to assess the contribution of various animal-friendly production systems to sustainable development, based on the combined economic, ecological and societal performance of these systems. As an illustration, this methodology will be applied to two cases, i.e. the laying hen and the sow.
Approach
A methodology to assess the contribution of animal-friendly production systems to sustainable development comprises the following four phases.
- Description of the problem situation. This phase aims at a conceptual understanding of the various production systems under consideration, i.e., defining the production systems and identifying relevant stakeholders.
- Identification and definition of relevant economic, ecological and societal issues. Economic, ecological and societal issues define sustainable development. Soft system methodologies have been developed to enable the identification of relevant issues as brought forward by the relevant stakeholders and are considered to be a useful and important tool in this methodology.
- Selection and quantification of suitable indicators. In this phase relevant issues are to be transformed into quantifiable indicators. Selection of indicators will be based criteria that, amongst others, consider the ability of an indicator to distinguish among production systems, the possibility of an indicator to be quantified both technically and financially and the ability to determine a target or trend value.
- Aggregation of indicator information into an overall contribution to sustainable development. In the literature, various approaches are presented to determine the contribution of individual indicators to sustainable development: the AMOEBA-approach, Data Envelopment Analysis and Fuzzy Set Theory.
Stakeholders
The stakeholders are, e.g., farmers, consumers, policy-makers, animal welfare interest groups and scientists. Assistance is already promised by:
- Expert Center from Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Fisheries;
- Dutch Society for Protection of Animals;
- Product Boards for Livestock, Meat and Eggs;
- Research Institute for Animal Husbandry;
- Louis Bolk Institute;
- Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering;
- Farm Technology Group;
- Animal Husbandry Group;
- Farm Management Group.
Researcher
Ir. H. Mollenhorst