Environmental assessment of dairy production systems: comparison of conventional and organic systems with the EDEN tool

Abstract

The EDEN tool assesses the sustainability of dairy farms. EDEN is based on the conceptual framework of life cycle assessment for the environmental component, complemented by economic and social performance indicators. This article presents and applies EDEN-E, the environmental component of the tool, for the environmental assessment of a group of forty-seven dairy farms, including forty-one conventional (CONV) and six organic (BIO) farms. For the impacts studied, this study largely confirms previous results concerning the effect of production method on impacts. The organic farms in the sample had fewer impacts than the CONV farms per hectare of land occupied, but between organic and CONV there were few significant differences per 1,000 kg of milk (only the agricultural area used). Moreover, the study strikingly reveals that for the sample of farms examined, the contribution of production mode to overall inter-farm variability is modest.