Abstract
Assessing the economics of small-scale farm forestry (SSFF) is associated with typical challenges. There is a large number of economically small or even very tiny although quite diverse institutional units with hardly any standards in terms of bookkeeping. At the same time, there is a multiplicity of more or less interrelated on-farm activities, forestry being only one kind-of-activity within the institutional unit. In North as well as in South Tyrol farm forestry is investigated in terms of full cost accounting applied to small and purposively chosen sub-samples of the respective national Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). These forest accountancy networks (FANs) allow eliciting the contribution of forestry to family income. Additional data collected and analyzed for this purpose enables us to quantify the significance of forestry for the Total Economy of Farm (TEoF). Full cost accounting for all on-farm activities, as performed in South Tyrol, is advocated as a starting point for investigating interrelationships between the kind-of-activity-units within one institutional unit and ultimately for optimizing the portfolio of the individual farm in regard to income and resilience. Respective insight is not only of scientific interest but may provide also valuable references for extension services and can help to improve sector statistics, where the major part of farm forestry is doomed to be regarded as inseparable non-agricultural activity.