Adapting farm-level sustainability assessment: Challenges for Florida strawberry agriculture

This paper evaluates the applicability of farm-level sustainability indices for measurement and identification of community-oriented issues in a high-value, rapidly urbanizing agricultural region. Agricultural sustainability indices must be measurable, operational, and tractable to be effective. As rural communities develop, it is paramount for agriculture industries, governments, and researchers to have effective frameworks for assessing sustainability.

We apply the Initiative for Sustainable Productive Agriculture's (INSPIA) indicator index as an assessment tool and Florida strawberries as an example industry. INSPIA's index is farm-level and ideally applied based on primary data (INSPIA, 2024). Cost, time, and confidentiality concerns often limit primary data collection, so we assess the indicators with secondary data. The accessibility of secondary data is crucial to evaluate communities, industries, and regions over time.

Communities in the region face pressures due to climate change, urbanization, and globalization and could benefit from effective sustainability assessment to track and evaluate their efforts. We find 87.8% of the variables required to evaluate INSPIA's indicators have measurement issues due to scope, compatibility, and data availability. The measurement issues represent index limitations but especially highlight the dearth of official (or even accessible) agricultural data available in the United States. More secondary data, particularly for specialty crops and rapidly urbanizing environments, and more tractable assessments are needed to enable accessible large-scale replication. Despite these issues, 51.6% of the indicators can be measured, if imperfectly, and provide a snapshot of the pressures on a community in transition.