Assessing the Sustainability of Activity Systems to Support Households’ Farming Projects

This chapter aims to introduce the setting up of an evaluation tool assessing the sustainability of activity systems and supporting farming households’ projects at the establishment stage. This chapter analyses three methods used to appreciate the farm sustainability and identifies not only their limits but also their contributions to our own methodology, at the level of complex activity systems in which farming production is combined with transformation, sales or outside activities. We propose to recognise two different contributions to sustainable agriculture: a farm-focused sustainability and an extended sustainability, which means a contribution to the sustainable development at a regional scale. These theoretical elements were regularly confronted with the analysis of advisors’ practices and comprehensive surveys with households in Southern France, where an analysis was carried through a partnership with researchers and local actors. It produced a tool to appraise agricultural projects, with pluriactivity or without, distinguishing farm-focused and extended sustainability.