Abstract
The possibility to certify the quality of agricultural productions is moving also towards the capacity to evaluate both the C-footprint and the total energy consumption (including direct and indirect components) related to the expected, or actual, behaviour of the farm. This is particularly felt by farming systems ensuring high gross margin values, such as viticulture and apple-orchard systems. To this aim, the possibility to be able to refer to a single standard farm model, able to deal with both planning and monitoring tasks, is therefore increasingly strong. The paper provides the proposal of a new farm conceptual model through a farm configuration tool completed with database and related modular software interfaces for storing information of both the features of the production environment and of its management dynamics. Every farm is treated as a complex system, in which different type of components (climate, biological, technological, organizational, economic etc.) interact continuously. Because of this, all the operational areas must be regarded with a level of detail consistent with each other, because each part affects the other directly or indirectly. This led to define a farm ontology (FO) based on a single general reference model, in which all the major entities and relationships of the system are represented with a detail able to satisfy all most common applications across the farm, regardless of the farming system at hand. This FO facilitates any LCA application, allowing the use of common methods and databases in the early stages of inventory analysis.