Carbon footprint for farms in the Czech Republic: a benchmark‐based assessment

TL;DR

This study assesses carbon footprints of Czech farms and finds that animal husbandry significantly affects relative emissions.

Contribution

The study introduces a benchmark-based framework for farm-level carbon footprint analysis and identifies the impact of animal husbandry on emissions.

Findings

Absolute carbon footprints are unsuitable for benchmarking due to the size effect.

Relative carbon footprints correlate strongly with the share of animal husbandry, especially per turnover.

Farms with high animal husbandry shares are unlikely to reduce emissions to levels of farms with low animal husbandry.

Abstract

Climate change is a pressing environmental and social challenge that demands effective monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One widely adopted approach for this is quantifying the carbon footprint (CF). Given that agriculture is a major contributor to GHG emissions, we have developed a comprehensive framework for CF accounting at the farm level. This framework has been tested on 12 farms in the Czech Republic to assess both data availability and calculation accuracy.

Our study examines how various farm characteristics, such as turnover, land area and number of employees, influence the overall CF and enable meaningful comparisons between farms. We found that absolute farm CFs are significantly influenced by the size effect, making them unsuitable for benchmarking purposes. By contrast, relative farm CFs (per turnover, per area and per employee) are not affected by the size effect, but can be affected by a scale effect. Additionally, we investigated whether a focus on animal husbandry leads to higher relative CFs. By calculating the share of animal husbandry (SoAH) in farm operations, we discovered a significant correlation between SoAH and relative CFs, with the strongest correlation observed for CF per turnover (0.87).

We argue that farms with high shares of SoAH are unlikely to reduce their relative CFs to the levels of farms with zero or low SoAH. We therefore propose applying benchmarking to farms with similar SoAH. We also propose that further research should focus on defining and validating relevant reference values, comprising a benchmark set that reflects different farm types. © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

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