Estimation of the European Development Framework to Measure Bulgarian Field Crops Farm Sustainability by Economic Size Classes

Abstract

Creating the European development framework to measure farm sustainability involves estimation of average European Union rates on the farm level, which excludes different farms’ specializations and economic size classes.
This paper aims to find out the sustainability benchmark and the average levels of each economic size class of the EU’s field crops farm sustainability of all economic size classes, which requires some basic indicators covering the main sustainability dimensions – economic, social, and ecological.
The applied methods for the construction of the Composite Sustainability Indexes combine two different approaches. The Relative Comparative Assessment is a tool normalizing the used variables to calculate farm sustainability scores for the different pillar evaluations, as well as the compound index, while the “Benefit-of the-Doubt” modification of Data Envelopment Analysis estimates the sustainable development policy efficiency. Results determine exactly how the area payments push large-scale field crop farms’ sustainability up by strongly supporting a larger production scale, at a cost to the smallest entities.