Sustainability Assessment for Asparagus Farms that Work with a Community-Supported Agriculture Model in Turkey

Due to the diversified nature of agricultural systems, it is difficult to handle the sustainability aspects of different farming practices. With an intention to evaluate the sustainability of the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model in Turkey, the current study focuses on asparagus farms and designs farm-specific sustainability indicators that would be helpful for the farmers. The framework developed for this purpose consists of 20 environmental, 8 economic, and 17 social sustainability indicators derived and adopted from extensive literature. The indicators are then used to form survey questions to gather data directly from the farmers. The results show that these farms are sustainable in some aspects, mostly from a social sustainability perspective, and not in others. In order to be fully sustainable, they need to make alterations in some of the agricultural practices on the farm, diversify their production, measure their environmental impacts on air, soil, and water, and most importantly define successors for their farms in order to keep asparagus production for the years to come.