Looking to the future of land evaluation at farm scale

Land evaluation has a long history of describing and quantifying the sustainable productive capacity of land, but there is a global recognition of the need for this discipline to evolve and recognise other services, beyond food production, provided by landscapes which contribute to human well-being, as well as account for impacts on receiving environments. In this paper, we explore if a natural capital ecosystem service approach could be added to the land evaluation and farm planning process to enable the quantification and valuation of all benefits obtained from farm landscapes. Bringing (i) ecological theory (that provides the relationship between stocks and processes and supports the premise that the manipulation of key stock attributes changes ecosystem function and service provision) together with (ii) land evaluation (a process embedded in geology, geomorphology and soil science, which in actual practice puts heavy emphasis on an agro-technical analysis) and (iii) farm planning (which has more of a focus on socio-economic constraints to the production system) enables more of the interactions between the intensity of a use and practice and the natural and built capital stocks, as they influence the provision of all services to be examined. Furthermore, the analysis of the farm businesses can be extended beyond production and associated financial analysis only, to an integrated analysis that includes other services. The proposed approach addresses a number of the limitations of the current approach to land evaluation and farm planning.