Authors: Paula Palma Molina, Emma Dillon and Trevor Donnellan (Teagasc)
Measuring and reporting farm sustainability is becoming increasingly embedded in EU policy frameworks, including in evaluating the success of Member State CAP Strategic Plans. This enables stakeholders to monitor progress, identify areas for improvement, benchmark performance, and design interventions that support the transition towards more sustainable agricultural systems. To measure farm sustainability, it is essential to rely on robust performance indicators across the economic, environmental and social pillars. The development of such metrics requires consistent data and transparency in reflecting both pressures and improvements over time.
In early November, Teagasc’s Agricultural Economics and Farm Survey (AEFS) department launched the new Teagasc National Farm Survey (NFS) Sustainability Dashboard. This communication tool is designed to improve access to and the visibility of sustainability performance data for Ireland’s main agricultural systems.
Drawing on detailed analysis of data from the NFS, which in Ireland operates as part of the EUFarm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN), the dashboard provides a repository of economic, environmental, social and innovation indicators for dairy, cattle, sheep, and tillage farms over a period of more than ten years. The dashboard has been developed to complement the annual NFS Sustainability Report and was made possible through funding from the Irish Ministry for Agriculture (Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine), in its support of the MEASURE project.
The indicators reported in the dashboard are as follows:
- Economic indicators: gross output, market-based gross margin, farm labour productivity, family farm income, economic viability, and market orientation.
- Environmental indicators: greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia (NH₃) emissions per farm, per hectare, and per unit of output (€ and kg), along with nitrogen and phosphorus use efficiencies.
- Social indicators: gross and net protein provision per farm and per hectare (a new feature in NFS sustainability reporting), hours worked on-farm and in total, household vulnerability, agricultural education, age profile, and isolation risk.
- Innovation indicators: system-specific measures such as discussion group membership, liming and reseeding, low emission slurry spreading (LESS), protected urea use, milk recording, and break crop adoption.
Designed to be accessible and user-friendly, the dashboard supports a wide range of stakeholders—including farm advisors, researchers, and policymakers—by providing clear evidence on agricultural sustainability trends in Ireland. Moreover, it is an important resource for evidence-based policymaking.
The dashboard also demonstrates how data collected through the EU’s FSDN can be leveraged to estimate and report a wide range of economic, social, and sustainability indicators. This strengthens Member States’ capacity to assess national agricultural sustainability performance, including the monitoring and comparison of different agricultural systems over time.
At EU level, the dashboard complements other initiatives such as the farm economics dashboards based on FADN data available through the Agri-food data portal and the Agri Sustainability Compass developed by the European Commission, which provides an overview of key EU agricultural sustainability indicators across the three dimensions of sustainability in agriculture.
Within the Tools4CAP project, data tools like this play a strategic role in shaping the future design, monitoring and evaluation of CAP Strategic Plans. The NFS Sustainability Dashboard can supply key sustainability data for ex-ante assessments, including SWOT analysis by offering high-quality baseline sustainability data. It also enables ongoing monitoring, allowing policymakers to track the evolution of key sustainability indicators over time, and strengthens ex-post evaluation by providing a consistent and transparent evidence base to assess the effectiveness and impact of the CAP. Finally, tools such as this can also provide replicable methodologies, contributing to the broader Tools4CAP objective of improving comparability and harmonisation of data tools across Member States.
The Irish Case Study, which developed an Intervention Logic for monitoring and evaluating direct payments, has already demonstrated the added value of indicators such as those featured in the dashboard. These indicators help assess the effectiveness of specific CAP measures and highlight opportunities to refine interventions to better support environmental, social and economic sustainability outcomes.