Capturing farm diversity at regional level to up-scale farm level impact assessment of sustainable development options

Abstract The effectiveness of quantitative system approaches, aimed at exploring options for sustainable development, can be improved by integrating farm typologies and participatory methods. An innovative method of quantitative identification and characterization of farm typologies was developed, whose advantages are the straightforward communication of results to stakeholders and rapid graphical selection of representative farms. The method is presented through an application to a large census dataset of specialized vegetable production systems of South Uruguay. Seven farm types were characterized that mainly differed for availability of off-farm labour, mechanization endowment and irrigation. Farm types can be used to complement a model-based exploration aimed at designing options for sustainable development of the farming systems. The potential of the method to support the up-scaling of farm level results to study the impact of different livelihood strategies at the regional level is discussed.