Sustainability Monitoring with Robotic Accounting—Integration of Financial and Environmental Farm Data

The production of farm sustainability indicators is vital for all actors in the food chain. This paper shows how robotic accounting could assist in the monitoring and compliance of farm performance, to assess the various aspects of sustainability. We show how financial farm accounting, which is routine on most farms, can be extended to deliver a range of sustainability metrics. Using farm invoices from the Netherlands and Ireland, we show that many invoices contain volume data that can be used to calculate environmental indicators such as pesticide use, mass balances (especially needed in organic farming), material balances of N and P, energy use, antibiotics use, etc. Using a number of illustrative use cases, we show the feasibility of deriving both financial and sustainability data from invoices. Standard algorithms can be used to link the invoice data to bank payment data and code it with a chart of accounts using a simple data and process model. Linking invoices with bank data provides advantages with respect to completeness, reliability, and efficiency. We describe a software tool that provides flexible data management processes that can easily be adapted by the user to collect new data that reflect emerging environmental or social concerns. Data collectors can set up procedures in which new types of data can be acquired or new indicators calculated, avoiding the need for software reprogramming. The digitalisation of invoices, ideally in a standard (UBL) format, is a necessary step to facilitate the process described. This digital format would lead to reduced accounting costs and at the same time could also provide farmers with a dashboard of sustainability indicators. Once invoices are digitalised, accounting costs drop, the potential for errors or omissions is reduced, and the administrative burden for environmental accounting diminishes due to the low marginal cost of data management.