Sustainable intensification: Farmers’ adoption behaviour and environmental outcomes

Sustainable intensification measures imply implementing changes in farming systems to improve environmental outcomes without compromising economic outputs. In order to assess the achievement of these outcomes, the dissertation at hand investigates the role of farmers’ decision-making with respect to the effective implementation of sustainable intensification measures. The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, each dealing with one aspect of the decision process. The first study focuses on sustainable intensification measures as the decision objects. A systematic literature review of 349 scientific publications builds the basis to develop a conceptual model of sustainable intensification, where four fields of action structure the portfolio of sustainable intensification measures. This conceptual model allows particularising local priority measures and regional measure portfolios in focus group discussions with stakeholders. The second study analyses farmers’ decision rationales for these regional portfolios. An explorative approach based on multivariate probit and path modelling links farmers’ positive experience with their sustainable intensification measures used to their intentions to broaden the portfolios with additional measures. Several complementary relationships in the use of sustainable intensification measures are established. The second and third study rest on farm survey data from the northern German Plain collected in 2017. The third study links adoption behaviour and decision outcomes by analysing eco-efficiency gains achieved by using agronomic sustainable intensification measures based on a theoretical model. Eco-efficiency is measured as the distance of current farm production to the production possibility frontier in the direction of the environmental outcome. Adopters show higher average eco-efficiency scores than a control group of matched non-adopters and determine a meta-frontier. However, most adopters do not fully exploit the ecological improvement potential of their farm. This dissertation shows the capacities of sustainable intensification measures for on-farm environmental improvement. The capacity for improvement depends on farmers’ decisions on how effectively they apply sustainable intensification measures. Political intervention schemes and future research to support effective implementation and full exploitation of improvement potentials are discussed

Doctoral Researchers in the Leibniz Association: Final Report of the 2017 Leibniz PhD Survey

This report provides for the first time a detailed quantitative description based on survey data of those doctoral researchers who work and perform their research at one of the 91 Leibniz Institutes and Research Museums. In November 2017, the Leibniz PhD Network sent out invitations via PhD representatives and works councils to the doctoral researchers within the Leibniz Institutes and Leibniz Research Museums to participate in the survey’s online questionnaire. The present report and the underlying survey are the products of a collaborative process within the Survey Working Group of the Leibniz PhD Network

Conceptualising fields of action for sustainable intensification A systematic literature review and application to regional case studies

[EN] After two decades of research on sustainable intensification (SI), namely securing food production on less environmental cost, heterogeneous understandings and perspectives prevail in a broad and partly fragmented scientific literature. Structuring and consolidating contributions to provide practice-oriented guidelines are lacking. The objectives of this study are to (1) comprehensively explore the academic SI literature, (2) propose an implementation-oriented conceptual framework, and (3) demonstrate its applicability for region-specific problem settings. In a systematic literature review of 349 papers covering the international literature of 20 years of SI research, we identified SI practices and analysed temporal, spatial and disciplinary trends and foci. Based on key SI practices, a conceptual framework was developed differentiating four fields of action from farm to regional and landscape scale and from land use to structural optimisation. Its applicability to derive region specific SI solutions was successfully tested through stakeholder processes in four European case studies. Disciplinary boundaries and the separation of the temporal and spatial strands in the literature prevent a holistic address of SI. This leads to the dominance of research describing SI practices in isolation, mainly on the farm scale. Coordinated actions on the regional scale and the coupling of multiple practices are comparatively un-derrepresented. Results from the case studies demonstrate that implementation is extremely context-sensitive and thus crucially depends on the situational knowledge of farmers and stakeholders. Although, there is no 'one size fits all' solution, practitioners in all regions identified the need for integrated solutions and common action to implement suitable SI strategies at the regional landscape level and in local ecosystems.This research was financially supported by the European Commission under grant agreement 652615 and conducted in the context of the ERA-Net FACCE SURPLUS project VITAL, with the national funders NWO (Netherlands), BMBF (Germany), INIA (Spain), ANR (France).Weltin, M.; Zasada, I.; Piorr, A.; Debolini, M.; Geniaux, G.; Moreno-Pérez, OM.; Scherer, L.... (2018). Conceptualising fields of action for sustainable intensification A systematic literature review and application to regional case studies. Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment. 257:68-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2018.01.023S688025

Farm eco-efficiency: can sustainable intensification make the difference?

Sustainable intensification measures promise ecological improvements of farming while maintaining profitability. That is, farms should be able to produce at a higher ecological efficiency without losses in economic efficiency. Based on a theoretical framework, we investigate this promise empirically by analysing the environmental improvement potential of sustainable intensification. We thereby focus on quantifying biodiversity gains using a directional meta-frontier approach and farm survey data from the northern German Plain. We compare eco-efficiency scores in an ecological direction between adopters and matched non-adopters to identify the causal relationship between these gains and sustainable intensification. We find that adopters determine the system frontier. Despite higher mean eco-efficiency scores, most adopters do not yet fully exploit the potential of ecological improvements through sustainable intensification

Sustainable Intensification Farming as an Enabler for Farm Eco-Efficiency?

Sustainable Intensification (SI) practices offer adopters exploiting improvement potentials in environmental performance of farming, i.e. enhance ecosystem functionality, while maintaining productivity. This paper proposes a directional meta-frontier approach for measuring farms’ eco-efficiency and respective improvement potentials in the direction of farms’ ecological output for SI evaluation. We account for farms’ selection processes into SI using a behavioural model and rely on a matched sample for adopters and non-adopters of agronomic SI practices from the northern German Plain. We conclude that the SI adopters determined the sample’s system frontier and showed higher mean eco-efficiency, but that most farms in our sample did not fully exploit the improvement potentials in biodiversity as ecological outcome

Is there a cult of statistical significance in Agricultural Economics?

In an analysis of articles published in ten years of the American Economic Review, Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have shown that economists often fail to adequately distinguish economic and statistical significance. In this paper, we briefly review their arguments and develop a ten-item questionnaire on the statistical practice in the Agricultural Economics community. We apply our questionnaire to the 2015 volumes of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the European Review of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the American Economic Review. We specifically focus on the “sizeless stare” and the negligence of economic significance. Our initial results indicate that there is room of improvement in statistical practice. Empirical papers rarely consider the power of statistical tests or run simulations. The economic consequences of estimation results are often not adequately addressed. We discuss the implications of our findings for the publication process and teaching in Agricultural Economics

Water conservation under scarcity conditions : testing the long-run effectiveness of a water conservation awareness campaign in Jordan

This study measures the long-run effect of the Abu Tawfeer media campaign in Jordan. Based on a representative sample (N = 367) conducted five years after the end of the campaign, a multivariate instrumental variable regression analysis shows that the campaign only marginally changed people’s water conservation awareness and behaviour. The rigorous methodological approach allows disentangling the distinct channels through which the effect of the conservation campaign was transmitted. Moreover, this is one of the first studies that comprehensively examines the role of awareness in determining water conservation behaviour.</p

Analysing behavioural differences of farm households: An example of income diversification strategies based on European farm survey data

Different forms of income diversification represent important strategies of farmers to either cope with the changing economic framework conditions or to valorise given territorial potentialities. Nevertheless, the decision to diversify economic activities on or off the farm will heavily depend on the agricultural business and household characteristics. Our study used a survey of 2154 farms from eleven European regions to identify distinct farm types in order to investigate differences regarding the willingness to diversify in the future. Two scenario situations with continuation (baseline) and without any market intervention (“No CAP”) were tested. A factor and cluster analysis depicted six farm types both previously described and novel. The typology proved validity across all case studies, whereas single types occurred more frequently under specific site conditions. The six farm types showed strong variations in the stated future diversification behaviour. Young farm households with organic production are most likely to diversify activities particularly on-farm, whereas farm types characterised by intensive livestock holding and also already diversified and part-time farm households are least likely to apply this strategy. Results have further shown that under hypothetical conditions of termination of economic support by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) an increasing share of farmers – throughout all types – would apply income diversification, mainly off-farm diversification, as a survival strategy