Database Used for FLINT WP5 Activities: Description and Quality Assessment

Overview & Synopsis

The objective of the FLINT project is to provide an updated data-infrastructure needed by the agro-food sector and policy makers to have access to up to date information on farm level indicators on sustainability and other new relevant issues. Better decision making is facilitated by taking into account the sustainability performance of farms on a wide range of relevant topics. This is realised by complementing the farm-level data of the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) of the European Union (EU) with information about farm sustainability. FADN data contain information on economic sustainability of farms but it is mainly limited to revenues and costs; for this reason, the FLINT project has completed the FADN data with economic information on innovations, risk and market outlets. As for environmental and social data, they are rather scarce in FADN but the FLINT project has collected a wide range of information on greening, land management, pesticides, nutrient balance, energy, water, farmers’ use of extension, farmers’ quality of life, etc. Through various means (face-to-face surveys, phone interviews, postal survey, data collection from other sources, etc) additional data has therefore been collected during the FLINT project from 1,099 farmers from nine EU countries (i.e. the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, Poland, Spain, Ireland, Greece, France and Germany). Workpackage (WP) 5 of the FLINT project aims at analysing the value added of these newly collected data. Within this WP5, this first deliverable D5.1 aims at presenting the structure and the content of the database, as well as discussing issues of data quality and to learn from experiences in FLINT in order to improve the usability of the new data if the FLINT test is replicated in the future.