Agricultural Business Strategy: Theory and Methods for Cost-Effectiveness Investment Analysis in Agro-Energy Production

Environmental change is currently considered a high-priority matter, both in the scientific community at large and at the institutional level of national and international governing bodies. Actually, an all-out effort seeks to investigate and advance viable solutions to deal with the global emergencies regarding to anthropic climate change; increasing demands for renewable sources of energy, technological innovation and energy-saving systems, ecological and environmental sustainability of natural resources and land. At the core of this worldwide endeavour an increasingly significant role seems destined to the agricultural sector and to agro-energy production systems for the potential benefits in terms of production costs. In fact, the interest in unconventional and low-impact energy sources mandates thorough investigation not only into the advantages, in terms of availability and affordability, but also into the impact on the environment and the quality of the landscape, as well as the aspects regarding the overall measures that need be adopted so as to enable the supply on the market. Given this scenario, the wide-ranging agro-energy question would be incomplete without extensive economic sustainability analyses, serving as operational decision-support tools to measure cost-effectiveness regarding investments in agro-energy production and its use.