Methodological Proposal of the Holistic Environmental Metric Use at Sustainability Assessment on Agriculture Field

Agriculture is essential for human life, as is a source of food, cosmetics, medicines, biostimulants, biopesticides, and other products of great interest. But sustainability refers to guaranteeing resources for future generations. Regarding the potential environmental impacts of agricultural practices, there must be adequate decisions in seeking better environmental sustainability. In this context, sustainability assessment is desired for the identification of sustainable practices, including agricultural activities. There are several tools for sustainability assessment described in the literature, mainly green chemistry metrics. But due to excessive simplifications of some green chemistry metrics and/or the possibility of incorrect adoption of a set of green metrics that leads to questionable interpretations, in a previous article, a new green metric for assessing the environmental sustainability of procedures in chemistry was developed, the holistic environmental metric named Green Graph Metric. Although aimed at chemistry science, the metric can be used in any field of knowledge, including Good Agriculture Practices. This article describes a methodological proposal by which agricultural farmers can use the green graph metric for the sustainability assessment of the use of fertilizers and soil additives, Water, Chemicals, Soil and substrate handling, Harvesting, and the environmental impacts of Waste management, Energy efficiency of agricultural activities on Wildlife protection, Air, and Human health.