Social sustainability of German dairy farmers: Development of a concept for measuring social sustainability and first results from 8,677 farms

Social sustainability is often neglected in sustainability discourse, including discourses concerning sustainable agriculture. When it is considered in sustainability assessment tools, the focus is often on the employees and not on the farm manager herself/himself. In German agriculture, however, family farms predominate, often with one farm manager having primary responsibility. The resilience of German dairy farms therefore also depends on the social sustainability situation of the farm manager. This paper describes the development of an indicator-based, self-assessment tool for dairy farmers to evaluate the status quo of their own social sustainability. To this end, indicators to measure and assess social sustainability have been developed in close consultation with more than 100 experts along the dairy value chain (e.g. scientists, farmers, dairy representatives). These indicators are aggregated into a social sustainability index (SSI) in this study. Initial descriptive results show that only an index score of 40% is achieved on average (median). Overall, however, the results show a dispersion, especially when looking at the results of different herd size classes or future prospects. For example, the SSI increases with increasing farm size.