Tag: family farms

‘Sustainable intensification’ of agricultural production, or ‘producing more with less’, has been widely adopted as a policy approach by national governments and international agencies, including the European Union (EU) through its Common Agricultural Policy. Sustainable intensification will be facilitated through on-farm innovation in a process that is fostered by knowledge sharing between actors with complementary forms of knowledge. These actors, their organisations, the knowledge flows between them and the so-called ‘enabling environment’ constitute an ‘agricultural innovation system’ (AIS). This paper begins by reviewing recent international theoretical development of the AIS concept and of equivalent concepts in the EU. Although the international and EU development paths are similar, there are clear differences between them. It is argued that these different perspectives can be integrated into a single ‘multi-level’ model, with family farming at its centre. The paper then explores current agricultural innovation policy discourse in the EU. Based on the European Innovation Partnership ‘Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability’ (EIP-AGRI), this may result in the adoption of a new and contestable use of the term ‘Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System’ or ‘AKIS’ that is reminiscent of the EU’s treatment of the term ‘Rural Development’. The paper argues, however, that this development may in ...

Fertiliser use is an ambigious issue in agricultural economics with different arguments commonly given for and against it. The aim of this paper is to find the most important factors affecting fertiliser use in Lithuania, serving as a basis for our fertiliser tax modelling of Lithuanian family farms. Raw data from Lithuanian farms was collected from the Lithuanian Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) covering the years 2003–2017, and data from other selected countries was also found in the FADN database, although in this case, different years (2004–2016) were available. Results suggest the significant factors affecting fertiliser use on family farms in Lithuania differ significantly from other EU countries. Hence, our empirical results confirm that there is no unique methodology or unique set of financial instruments for fertiliser tax modelling among EU countries, and this should be taken into account in future studies. We also noticed that investment in land, the extent to which farm output consists of wheat, rye and field vegetables, the use of harvesters and finally, land quality should also be taken account in future fertiliser tax modelling.

This paper presents a critical discussion of the concepts of farm-level viability, sustainability and resilience, which are typically discussed separately in the literature. While farm-level viability frequently focuses on measurable economic factors, sustainability is comparatively more elusive because of its added social, cultural and ecological dimensions. Resilience, in turn, is unambiguous in the sense that it requires particular conditions, but is achieved in dynamic ways. A traditional resilience strategy in agriculture globally is co-operative action, involving farmers working together to enhance their viability and sustainability, often achieving resilience. We draw attention to agricultural development models that are distinctive because they leverage co-operative action in and between family farms in agricultural communities while pursuing integrated viability, sustainability and resilience strategies. We focus on the prospect of such rural development models, particularly a values-based supply chain approach, and identify crucial considerations and future research needs.

Agriculture is an activity burdened with multiple risk factors, some of which are related to the biological nature of production. Climate change, liberalisation of international agricultural trade and changes in the agricultural support system mean that the importance of risk in agriculture will increase. This means that increasing attention will be given to risk management at the farm level, although implementation of the appropriate risk management strategy is connected to farmers’ perception of, and aversion to, risk. This study, which integrates these three aspects of risk in agriculture, is based on data collected from almost 600 participant farms from the Polish FADN system. It was shown that drought is perceived by farmers as the main factor of risk in production in Poland. Polish farmers are rather risk averse, but a little more in terms of their personal health and less in the case of the farm. The analysis showed that the following factors increased the level of risk aversion of Polish farmers: debt ratio, losses in production in previous years, soil quality and concentration on financial independence as a hierarchy of priorities. The most important risk-coping strategy was crop insurance. Knowledge of farmers’ perception of risk, risk aversion and preferred ...