2012/01/01 by Damien Craheix, Craheix, Damien, Frédérique Angevin +13
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact #Agriculture and Rural Development Research #Développement durable #Sustainable Agricultural Systems Analysis #Système de culture #Système d’aide à la décision #Évaluation multicritère
paper · pdf · doi:10.17180/bx81-1x20
openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Current changes in the field of agriculture encourage stakeholders to envision new and more sustainable production methods. For this purpose, tools are needed to assess the proposed or newly designed solutions before they are taken to the fields and disseminated. MASC 2.0 is a multi-criteria assessment tool designed to assess the performance of cropping systems in terms of their sustainability. It was based on a decision support system (DEXi) which aggregates 39 qualitative criteria in a single tree. This tool applies to a wide range of situations. It can therefore be used to identify the best cropping systems in a given territory (ex post assessment) or design prototypes of cropping systems (ex ante assessment). Thanks to its flexibility, MASC 2.0 offers users the opportunity to propose their own vision of sustainable development by changing the weight given to each evaluation criterion. Its friendly and simple interface makes this tool a privileged support for exchanges and mediation between researchers, extension workers, farmers, and public authorities. Its main drawbacks are the time spent to fill in all the criteria and the inherent limitations related to the given scale (cropping system) in relation to the larger scales more often used to handle sustainable development issues.