Integration of all FSSIM components within SEAMLESS-IF and a stand alone Graphical User Interface for FSSIM

Policy makers and farmers have an interest in making ex-ante assessments of the outcomes of their choices in terms of policy and farm plan. This interest mainly concerns the assessment of socio-economic and environmental performance of farms as a result of innovations and policies. Mathematical models based on systems analysis are suited to explore and assess uncertain future states of systems. A Bio-Economic Farm Model (BEFM) is defined as a model that links formulations describing farmers’ resource management decisions to formulations that describe current and alternative production possibilities in terms of required inputs to achieve certain outputs and associated externalities. Currently many descriptions and applications of BEFMs are being published. A BEFM that is easy to transfer between locations or farm types is called generic, which we define as ‘being able to deal with different scales, locations, functionalities, and levels of detail. Although some model studies claim that their model is easily transferable to other regions and farm types, there is little evidence from literature supporting these claims. A generic bio-economic farm model should be able to adequately represent arable, livestock and perennial activities, current agricultural activities and future alternative activities, different objective functions, different resource and policy constraints, future policies and technological innovations as scenarios and should include good calibration procedures. In SEAMLESS the Farming Systems SIMulator (FSSIM) has been developed as a generic and transferable model that can easily be extended with new features and re-used across data-sets, farm types and locations. In this deliverable we (i) describe FSSIM and its design as an integrated generic bio-economic farm model, (ii) briefly describe each of the components of FSSIM and provide references to relevant deliverables and publications for more detail and (iii) evaluating FSSIM on criteria for generic models by describing applications of FSSIM.