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DIAMOND is a method for assessing the sustainability of livestock production that can be used for commercial livestock production. However, several sustainability criteria of the DIAMOND method cannot be evaluated under research conditions because they depend on strategic choices (marketing method, non-agricultural services, etc.), structural choices (livestock units) or financial choices (financial autonomy, sensitivity to subsidies) that are specific to the real workshops. Moreover, some of the indicators selected are not relevant under research conditions since labour costs (specific work related to experiments) and financial constraints (depreciation) are not representative of field conditions due to the constraints related to experimentation.
This is why we developed the S+sustainable? tool to evaluate the consequences of implementing innovations on the sustainability of livestock production. In S+sustainable? the sustainability objectives and criteria assigned to livestock production facilities are those of the DIAMOND method. We selected 16 of the 30 criteria of the DIAMOND method: 5 in the economic pillar, 6 in the environmental pillar, 5 in the social pillar. For each criterion, we defined 3 to 5 indicators that could be easily evaluated under research conditions for each of the production phases (maternity and fattening in the rabbit sector; rearing and force-feeding in the foie gras palmiped sector). The impact of the innovation on the indicators is evaluated in a semi-quantitative manner according to the following scale [-1; -0.5; 0; +0.5; +1] depending on whether the innovation has a strongly negative, moderately negative, zero, moderately positive or strongly positive effect for the indicator in question compared to the control system.
The effect of the innovation on a sustainability criterion corresponds to the average of the scores for each indicator, and ranges from -1 to +1. The consequences of the implementation of the innovations on the sustainability of the workshops is represented graphically by a radar with the 16 branches, associated with the 16 sustainability criteria evaluated.