Calculating environmental cost indicators of apple farm practices indicates large differences between growers

ABSTRACT

This study evaluates the environmental impact of current apple cultivation practices in Flanders, Belgium. It evaluates integrated production, the most common practice, and it compares this production method with conventional and organic production. The assessment was based on Farm Accountancy Data Network data from 2010 to 2012 for 64 farms in the region and a life cycle approach was used. The findings showed no significant improvement in environmental impacts for integrated farms compared to conventional farms and, even more, the former showed significantly higher average impacts per hectare for the categories ‘acidification’, and ‘non-renewable energy use’ in comparison with the latter. The organic production group showed higher average impacts per kilogram due to lower yields. Secondly, impacts related to the categories ‘acidification’, ‘eutrophication’ and ‘global warming potential’ were monetized based on the shadow price method in order to obtain external costs. Results show that external costs increase the production costs for integrated farming at least with 5%, both when these costs are expressed per kilogram and per hectare. However, the findings show a large variability in impacts and costs per farm. Farm-specific practices have therefore an important influence on the total environmental cost rather than production group-specific practices.

KEYWORDS:

• External costs
• shadow prices
• life cycle analysis
• apple production
• FADN

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Division of Monitoring and Study from the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries of the Flemish government for sharing FADN data and for their feedback on the results of the study. Authors Yanne Goossens and Annemie Geeraerd greatly acknowledge the support of the Science, Engineering and Technology Group at KU Leuven for the Expertise Centre Ethics@Arenberg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yanne Goossens http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8546-8582

Additional information

Funding

The research has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [grant number 311778] in the framework of the GLAMUR project.