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Ph.D. student at CTIFL / INRAE Email: antonin.pepin@ctifl.fr / antonin.pepin@inrae.fr Address: INRAE, UMR SAS, 65 rue de St-Brieuc, CS 84215, 35042 Rennes Cedex, France Expertise: Agronomy Keywords: Environmental assessment, life cycle assessment, vegetable farms, organic farming

Research

Ph.D. thesis subject: "Environmental performance of organic vegetable farms"

Vegetable production in organic agriculture (OA) relies upon a wide variety of production systems that range from low-diversity, high-input farms similar to conventional agriculture to highly diversified micro-farms inspired by permaculture and bio-intensive market gardening. Their environmental performance is unknown.

The thesis will assess the environmental performance of OA market gardening systems located on a gradient ranging from simple systems, intensive in external inputs, to complex systems, intensive in agroecology. To do so, it will use life cycle assessment (LCA), a systemic and multi-criteria approach to environmental assessment. The LCA methodological framework will be adapted to the assessment of complex and diversified agricultural systems, particularly with regard to their multifunctionality and biodiversity assessment, and applied to a network of vegetable farms.