Volume 125 - Issue 1

This paper provides insights into the information behaviour of European farmers, foresters, and advisors in the context of the ongoing digital transformation. Data collection and analysis for this study were carried out as part of a substantial innovation project to create a new online knowledge platform, called EU FarmBook, for primary sector practitioners. Besides informing the design and development of this user-centred platform, this study also provides useful inputs to better understand the perceived information needs, preferences, and information behaviour of primary sector practitioners, which is an underexplored area of Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) in Europe. This paper presents and draws on 40 semi-structured interviews conducted with farmers, foresters, and advisors from 20 different countries. The results reveal some of the major ways in which the rapid advancements in digital information and communication technologies have affected farmers, foresters, and advisors. The problem-solving strategies of primary sector practitioners now rely largely on online resources. Searches for photos and videos have become a particularly integral activity that reflects their practice-oriented and solve-it-yourself attitudes. This has implications for agricultural extension services, which must be prepared for the challenges and changes that the digital revolution will bring to extension work.

Compared to most of the agricultural commodity markets in the European Union (EU), the pig market is less regulated and EU pig prices can be regarded as free market prices. It is thus an ideal economic research opportunity to investigate agricultural market integration and spatial price transmission mechanisms in the EU in the different Member States (MS). Depending on the geographical location, the decoupling of production costs from prices paid to pig farmers can jeopardise the fragile market balance between producers and processors. To retrospectively identify price setting trends, this paper examines how price return trends in the Hungarian pig sector are reflected in dynamic Diebold–Yilmaz spillover indices between 2007 and 2021. The results show that Hungary was mostly a net spillover receiver throughout the investigated period. Pairwise comparison of price spillovers to and from other MSs indicated that the German pig market had the strongest effect on the price forecast error variance in the Hungarian market, but transient interaction with other MS markets was also detected. To obtain a detailed time domain representation of the multivariate relationship between different MS’s price returns, our method considers an improved partial wavelet coherence (pwc) approach, which – to our knowledge – has...

Farm to school (F2S) programmes ensure school pupils receive an appropriate diet, fight malnutrition, and motivate children to attend school. The participation of local smallholders in F2S schemes contributes to these objectives, but also provides a market opportunity for local small farms. This is particularly important in the case of developing or emerging economies that are characterised by malnutrition among children and where smallholdings often struggle with limited market access, as is the case with Albania. The aim of this paper is to explore the main factors affecting farmers’ willingness to participate in a F2S scheme using data from a structured farm survey. Regression analysis results show that economically based motivation (farm-related factors such as size and post-harvest losses) intertwined with social capital factors and attitudinal indicators (experience and attitudes towards cooperation, reliance on local governmental support, information, and product safety perception level) affect farmers’ willingness to participate in F2S schemes. For farmers to participate viably in such schemes, it is necessary to provide knowledge, awareness, and support for ensuring compliance with food safety and quality standards and for improving cooperation.

The farmer-owned label is a relatively recent addition to the crowded landscape of information on food and drink product packages. Due to its novelty, research on the farmer-owned label is still scarce. Using 451 responses from random food consumers in the United States, we attempt to explain variability in the purchase of farmer-owned brands in ten different food and drink product categories in terms of label comprehension and price fairness perception. Our structural equation model results are contrary to expectations: we find a negative relationship of label comprehension to the farmer-owned brand share, which implies food consumers do not support the various implications of farmer ownership of food brands. In addition, respondents who perceive more distributive price fairness and procedural price fairness purchase a higher proportion of farmer-owned brands. Implications for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.

Is an agricultural corporation more efficient than a traditional family farm? This paper attempts to answer this question by examining the technical and allocative efficiency of family farms and agricultural corporations. To do so, it applies the stochastic production frontier method in panel data built on the family farms and agricultural corporations in the Japanese rice sector and focuses on comparing the technical and allocative efficiency of the two production forms at the same scale of operation. Results reveal that family farms have a significant advantage over agricultural corporations in technical efficiency at each level of scale of operation. In both production forms, as the scale of operation increases, the technical efficiency correspondingly rises. However, the disparity in technical efficiency diminishes between the two production forms as their land size increases. In contrast, the allocative efficiency of different factors differs between family farms and agricultural corporations at different scales of land size. Overall, family farms show superiority in the allocative efficiency of labour, and agricultural corporations exhibit superiority in the allocative efficiency of agricultural capital. Last, decomposition of total  productivity progress (TFP) reveals that family farms have positive TFP change which is mainly attributable to a positive and large allocative...