The method for computing values used in the evaluation

62 R. Rossi, D. Nota Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 77 2000 53–64 Fig. 1. Location of the two checked farms within the Tuscan landscape systems Italy. La Selva farm in subsystem PC6 of the landscape system of Coastal Plains. Poggio Antico farm in subsystem CP5 of the landscape system of Pliocene Hills. 19. The parameter ‘per crop and pest minimal two predators present in the system’, even if it is cor- rect, does not seem very viable in practice. 20. About the criterium ‘animal welfare husbandry’, it is necessary to recall and select the ‘relevant standards’ proposed by NGOs. 21. The parameters ‘shelter against the adverse weather sun, wind, rain’ and ‘room for natural behaviour’ seem to be the most relevant ones for this issue. 22. Regarding the main aspect ‘economy’, many pa- rameters are indicated divided by ‘100 ha’. In many situations the farm size is much smaller: it is better to measure ‘per hectare’. 23. For the criterium ‘subsistence on material level welfare’, it is not clear wether the parameter ‘di- rect EU-type of incomes’ has to be taken in a pos- itive or in a negative way. On the other hand, the issue of the payment of ‘environmental services’ of sustainable agriculture particularly in marginal areas should be seen as one of the final results of the evaluation. 24. It is not clear how to use the parameters proposed for the criterium ‘green economy’. 25. For the criterium ‘local participation and respon- sibility’, in the parameter ‘organising outlets’ we include the organisation of ‘professional training’. 26. For the main aspect ‘psychology’, the meaning of the parameter ‘temporal gusts’ is not clear. 27. For the main aspect ‘physiognomycultural geog- raphy’, it is not completely clear how to use the criteriumparameter ‘identity of the landscape in the region’: in fact in the examples taken for the evaluation, when you have more than one land- scape type in the same region, each one seems to score the same degree of identity.

4. The method for computing values used in the evaluation

The goal of selected criteria and parameters is to allow ‘relative’evaluations among farm-landscapes within a certain geographical situation, and to address efforts towards the most appropriate solution. The goal should not be to support financial or otherwise merely a ‘beautiful’ landscape instead of an ‘ugly’ landscape, but to support the appropriate solution for the sustainable management of any kind of landscape. Wether beauty and sustainability on the one hand and non-sustainability and non-beauty on the other go together or not remains as yet open for research. For this reason, we think it is not yet relevant to rank different farms with respect to all the criteria presented in the six Tables. It may be sufficient to develop a tool that allows the comparison of a farm to be ‘environmentally and economically acceptable’ one for the same situation. For our rapid assessment we decided to avoid nu- merical values, and used a scoring method that is clearly ‘qualitative’, namely marking: ++ for very pos- itive; + for positive; ± for neutral; −for negative and − − for very negative performance of the farm per pa- rameter of the Tables 1 to 6. No score is given to pa- rameters that were not relevant for the particular farm situation. A question mark ? is used when no infor- mation was available or when the rating was deemed uncertain. The problem of weighting the parameters pertaining to each criterium, the criteria relevant for each main R. Rossi, D. Nota Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 77 2000 53–64 63 aspect of the assessment and the main aspects for the final evaluation is still open. For a wider discussion of this aspect we refer to Andreoli et al. 1998, or Andreoli and Tellarini 2000 In this exercise, we assume that all criteria have the same weight and we added the scores per parameter per criterium to find average values for the all criteria, and subsequently for each criterium per major topic, and so on for the final assessment per farm for all Tables. In Tables 1–6 criteria and parameters relevant for each main topic of the evaluation are assessed. Table 7 contains the recapitulation of the assessment and the final evaluation.

5. Conclusions