Determinants of farmers’ willingness to participate in subsidy schemes for pesticide-free buffer zones—A choice experiment study

By T. Christensen, A. B. Pedersen, H. Nielsen, M. Mørkbak, B. Hasler, S. Denver. 2011

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Danish farmers have been far less interested in agri-environmental subsidy schemes (AES) than anticipated. In order to examine how to improve the appeal of such schemes, a choice experiment was conducted concerning 444 Danish farmers' preferences for subsidy schemes for pesticide-free buffer zones. A random parameter logit framework was used to capture heterogeneity among farmers. Our results indicate that 1) the vast majority of farmers are willing to trade off the size of the subsidy for less restrictive scheme requirements and that 2) the amount of the subsidy they are willing to trade off varies with specific scheme requirements, suggesting which features are most important for successful policy design. Our results suggest that farmers value flexible contract terms higher than reduced administrative burdens. Finally, we suggest a practical approach to estimating a monetary value of farmers' reluctance to participate in AES. While the trade off's that farmers are willing to make between subsidy size and individual scheme requirements are case specific, our results concerning increased use of farm advisors, farmers ability of valuing different types of flexibility, and our attempt to place a monetary value on farmers' reluctance to engage in regulatory subsidy schemes have a potentially broader application platform.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db71d8effdda291b859b540a5d4c96806aa65413

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating farmers’ likely participation in a payment programme for water quality protection in the UK uplands (2013, background): “Also in accordance with the emerging literature, a considerable number of farmers in our study were willing to modify their land management practices if compensation payments were sufficient (Ruto and Garrod 2009; Christensen et al. 2011).”
Expected utility or prospect theory maximisers? Assessing farmers' risk behaviour from field-experiment data (2014, background): “Such schemes grant farmers for reducing pesticide use (Christensen et al., 2011), growing nitrogen fixing crops (Espinosa-Goded, Barreiro-Hurlé and Ruto, 2010) or providing ecosystem services (Wossink and Swinton, 2007), for instance.”
Leverage Points for Governing Agricultural Soils: A Review of Empirical Studies of European Farmers’ Decision-Making (2018, background): “(and most OECD (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) countries) is heavily regulated and farmers are highly dependent on CAP direct and other payments [131], the bureaucratic load can be expected to play a major role in decision-making, particularly with respect to voluntary parti”
Nudging farmers to enrol land into agri-environmental schemes: the role of a collective bonus (2016, methodology): “There is a growing theoretical and empirical economic literature on the reasons why farmers choose whether or not to sign an agri-environmental contract (Vanslembrouck, Van Huylenbroeck and Verbeke, 2002; Peerlings and Polman, 2009; Christensen et al., 2011; Ma et al., 2012).”
The design of agri-environmental schemes: Farmers’ preferences in southern Spain (2015, methodology): “…to measuring the marginal value of the attributes of a good or a policy instrument (Ruto and Garrod, 2009), with the underlying assumption being that farmers’ choices among voluntary policy schemes depend on the specific characteristics - attributes- of these schemes (Christensen et al., 2011).”