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Agriculture and food systems are the central driving forces of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. In order to facilitate the transition towards more sustainable forms of food production, understanding and measuring on farm sustainability is crucial to evaluating the status quo and progress of applying on farm environmental measures and eco-practices.

Farmers and their farms play a crucial role in the transition towards more sustainable agriculture and food systems. Recognizing the urgent need for increasing resilience of socio-economic and ecological systems, we must consider sustainability assessment as an auspicious instrument for improving decision-making strategies at farm level to facilitate sustainable change.

Sustainability is the buzzword in the current debate about the environmental impact of the agricultural and food sector. The sector needs to become much more sustainable, most experts, practicioners and political decision-makers agree. But how this should be done, continues to cause heated debates. The central question is: how can we produce and provide sufficient healthy and culturally appropriate food for a growing  population in a resource limited world? At the same time, farmers should reduce negative environmental and social impacts of food production.

In the view of increasing environmental concerns, sustainability has come into the foreground over the past decade and several sustainability assessment tools have been developed. Critiques claim though, sustainability is only an empty phrase because of frequent unreflective usage and overstretching of the concept - often solely for commercialization purpose. Nonetheless, sustainability assessment is more important than ever due to ongoing environmental degradation, socioeconomic worsening or even crises related to agriculture and food systems.

The article primarily provides farmers and consultants with basic information about the current situation of organic farming. Within the framework of the CAPTIVATE program, it provides information on the topic of sustainable and organic farming.

Organic farming is one of the fastest growing farming methods in the world nowadays. Its rapid spread is explained by the fact that many consumers and producers consider it to be the most environmentally sustainable agricultural practice, which provides healthy, safe food for consumers. Organic farming is based on the concept of ecological farming, which is where the adjectives "ecological" and "biological" come from. The aim of ecological farming is to ensure sustainable development, during it reaches back to locally available reserves. 

The world’s agriculture faces many challenges nowadays, such as tackling the effects of climate change, conserving agrobiodiversity, or feeding the Earth’s growing population. These issues often induce conflicting development directions, such as digitalization and ecologization, as the case of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) shows. In the last decades, policymakers have focused mainly on greening agricultural production and the food industry, and now the CAP is part of the European Green Deal.