title: Measuring farm sustainability using data envelope analysis with principal components: the case of Wisconsin cranberry.
abstract: Measuring farm sustainability performance is a crucial component for improving agricultural sustainability. While extensive assessments and indicators exist that reflect the different facets of agricultural sustainability, because of the relatively large number of measures and interactions among them, a composite indicator that integrates and aggregates over all variables is particularly useful. This paper describes and empirically evaluates a method for constructing a composite sustainability indicator that individually scores and ranks farm sustainability performance. The method first uses non-negative polychoric principal component analysis to reduce the number of variables, to remove correlation among variables and to transform categorical variables to continuous variables. Next the method applies common-weight data envelope analysis to these principal components to individually score each farm. The method solves weights endogenously and allows identifying important practices in sustainability evaluation. An empirical application to Wisconsin cranberry farms finds heterogeneity in sustainability practice adoption, implying that some farms could adopt relevant practices to improve the overall sustainability performance of the industry.
authors.affiliation: Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 427 Lorch Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Electronic address: fdong6@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Fengxia
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.affiliation: Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 427 Lorch Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Electronic address: pdmitchell@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Paul D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Mitchell
authors.affiliation: Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1575 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Electronic address: colquhoun@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Jed
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Colquhoun
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D029799:Vaccinium macrocarpon; D014922:Wisconsin
keywords: Common-weight data envelope analysis; Non-negative principal component analysis; Polychoric principal component analysis; Sustainability metric