Tag: farm performance

The Operational Groups (OGs) of the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIPAGRI) were introduced by the 2014-2020 Common Agricultural Policy to foster competitive and sustainable farming and forestry. The objective of this paper is to assess the economic and environmental impacts of participating in the EIP-AGRI OGs located in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. Performance of participants in OGs is compared with that of non-participants, who are selected by applying propensity score matching techniques to an Italian farm accountancy data network sample of 3204 farmers observed in the period 2017-2020. Logistic regressions are used to measure both propensity scores and the average treatment effect on the treated, while one-to-many optimal matching without replacement is adopted to form the control group. The resulting sample is composed of 270 observations, of which 45 are treated subjects. Results indicate that the OGs analysed might have contributed to improving fertiliser management and profitability levels in participating farms, but they failed to preserve biodiversity and reduce the consumption of pesticides and other inputs such as water, energy, and fuels. To increase the effectiveness of OGs, policy makers are advised to condition projects on the actual experimentation and implementation of agricultural innovations and ...

Climate change is putting increasing pressure on agriculture, which might be reduced by paying more attention to risk management, production efficiency and farm investment. This paper describes the interrelationship between crop insurance take-up, technical efficiency and investment in Hungarian farming using a system of simultaneous equations. The empirical analysis is based on farm accountancy data for the period 2001-2019. Results suggest that both technical efficiency and investment have positive and significant effects on insurance take-up. Accordingly, higher technical efficiency and a higher investment rate both lead to increased insurance usage. In terms of its relationship with efficiency, insurance has a positive and significant coefficient, but investment does not have a significant influence on technical efficiency. Where investment is concerned, insurance usage has a positive and significant effect, but the role of technical efficiency is insignificant. Results suggest that policy interventions that stimulate any of the three factors can potentially have additional positive impacts through spill-over effects on other factors. These effects could be further enhanced if, for instance, interventions focusing primarily on insurance take-up also pay attention to investment by differentiating insurance premium subsidies, depending on whether there is an ongoing (or operating) investment that can be linked to weather-related ...

Societal expectations about agricultural production are changing. There are increased demands on issues such as food safety, animal welfare and the impact of agriculture on the environment (land, water and air). These changes have been refl ected in the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), but information on these issues is lacking and this complicates the required evaluation of policies. The EU Framework 7 project FLINT tries to close this gap by analysing the feasibility of collecting data on these new topics. FLINT has established a data infrastructure with up-to-date farm-level indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of the CAP. The project created a pilot network of more than 1,000 farms to collect a set of sustainability indicators at farm level. The pilot represents farm diversity at EU level, including the different administrative environments in the Member States. This paper sets out the context and the main contributions of the project.