Abstract
Just by integrating all production factors, a sustainable business strategy that balances between resilience and economic targets and considers all business units can be assigned to diversified farm forests. The guidelines for establishing a farm forestry accountancy network (Niskanen & Sekot 2001) have already contemplated a “Total Economy of Farm (TEoF)” concept to point out the economic role of forestry in relation to other operating units of an economic entity. As forest management copes with manifold particularities, ranging from temporal detachment of expenses and revenues, economic burdens and various calamities to an untended forest business culture, we presume that active small-scale farm forests (< 200 ha) may decline in line with the agro-structural change. To counteract this, with “TEoF” we want to provide an incentive to the 60,3% private forest holdings in Europe (I: 66.4%; A: 74.2%) (Eurostat & FAO 2010; MCPFE 2011), of which 99% are smaller than 50 ha (Schmithüsen and Hirsch 2010).
In cooperation with the Austrian small-scale farm forestry accountancy network we recently built a similar network in South Tyrol to which we applied the principles of “TEoF”. For our cross-border study between North and South Tyrol we refer to 13 exploratively selected farm forests in South Tyrol that were surveyed in the first two periods. By considering the period-specific distribution of expenses and revenues, also in case of discontinued harvesting, we display the annual results in a cost object accounting with absolute and relative economic indicators for each operating unit. Beyond that, the multiannual assessment enables us to compare each unit across-periods and to apply a benchmark analysis with the mean values derived from the South Tyrolian sample. With adding the mean values from 13 North Tyrolian farm forests from the same periods, we extended the benchmark analysis to a cross-border comparison, at least for the forestry indicators. Results may provide governance impulses to sustain small and medium-sized farm forests. As the latter have a high responsibility for conserving cultural landscape areas, their production directly influences societal relevant ecosystem services. Since actively managed farm forests are capable of combating and repairing damages that are occurring more frequently, and since they might be consulted for implementing coordinated CO2 compensation measures, the maintenance of small scale farm forests is important as they deliver a significant contribution to the European Green Deal.