Family farming plays a vital role in mountain areas. Its survival is related to multiple factors, including intrafamily farm succession. This study examined data on apple-producing family farms in an Italian Alpine valley, trying to identify which factors foster or discourage intrafamily succession and to what extent they do this, both at the farm level and from the potential successor's viewpoint. To do so, various farm, farmer, and individual characteristics were analyzed using probabilistic regression. We found that intrafamily succession was more likely when the farm was managed by a woman (+20%) with a high school diploma (+13%) who had at least 1 child with specialized education in agriculture (+27%) and when farm sales had increased in recent years (+25%). We also found that a child's willingness to take over the family farm decreases as the number of farm children increases and when the child is a female with a high school diploma; however, the likelihood that children will take over the family business rises as farmer education level and work experience increase. These findings, while mixed, suggest that women play a key role in keeping family farming alive in mountain areas, along with education of family members, improved marketability of agricultural products, and in general, competitiveness and profitability of the family farm.

Food loss and waste have a negative environmental impact due to the water, land, energy and other natural resources used to produce the wasted food, along with post-consumption disposal costs. Reducing food waste will thus help improve sustainability and decrease the environmental impact of the food system. Using food waste for animal feed is of growing importance in terms of the policies targeted at tackling food waste but the current legal framework in the European Union (EU) strongly restricts the possibility of using food waste for this purpose. The aim of this work is to evaluate the feasibility of innovative measures for feed production in the EU and to identify the best strategies to implement them. First, a technical evaluation of a case study is presented, which is a process developed in the United States for urban food waste transformation into animal feed. Second, there is an analysis of the potential application of this process in the European Union within the current legal framework. The results reveal that the feed product derived from food waste is compliant with EU safety requirements and is nutritionally valuable. This work also suggests that the implementation of this kind of process in the European Union has great potential, provided that food surplus is recovered and treated before it turns into waste and that the different types of food surplus identified are used as feed for the right animal type in accordance with European legislation (i.e., livestock, aquarium fish, pets). On these terms, pet food can be the most concrete strategy for using food waste within the European context. In general, the implementation of feed-from-food measures to reduce food waste in Europe is already possible and does not need to wait for further policy interventions.

Several studies provide evidence of the role of written communication in influencing public perception towards genetically modified organisms, whereas visual communication has been sparsely investigated. This article aims to evaluate the exposure of the Italian population to scary genetically modified organism-related images. A set of 517 images collected through Google are classified considering fearful attributes, and an index that accounts for the scary impact of these images is built. Then, through an ordinary least-squares regression, we estimate the relationship between the Scary Impact Index and a set of variables that describes the context in which the images appear. The results reveal that the first (and most viewed) Google result images contain the most frightful contents. In addition, the agri-food sector in Italy is strongly oriented towards offering a negative representation of genetically modified organisms. Exposure to scary images could be a factor that affects the negative perception of genetically modified organisms in Italy.

Sustainable development is more often considered by media, public opinion, and politicians to be the main goal our society should attempt to pursue in the coming years. To this aim, academic researchers have made sustainability one of the main objects of their studies. This work focuses on environmental sustainability and presents a brief overview of how it is taken into consideration in the agricultural economics field by considering this topic from different perspectives and thus highlighting how this field is gradually broadening its scope to include sustainable development objectives. Our analysis shows that the path towards sustainable development is strongly correlated to the protection of the environment. Therefore, agricultural policies aimed at protecting and preserving the environment, and, more in general, innovation along the agri-food chain, together with consumer attention towards environmental issues, can play an important role in achieving this objective.

The transfer of farm activity over time occurs through different pathways, among which the more frequent is intra-family farm succession. Thus, better information on farm succession determinants is crucial for understanding farm succession and informing appropriate sectoral policies. To date, substantial research has focused on the effect of farm, farmer and potential heir features on farm succession, while the role played by socioeconomic conditions around a farm has been relatively less examined. Building on previous contributions, the present paper considers farm succession as the opposite of labour migration out of the agricultural sector. Thus, the effect of the labour market and surrounding conditions (LMSC) around a farm on its succession probability is explored. The aim of this paper is therefore to explore whether and to what extent the inclusion of LMSC variables may contribute to a better understanding of farm succession. Using data from a sample of 266 fruit and vegetable farms (gathered for informative purposes by a producers' organization consortium), empirical evidence that LMSC variables play an important role in explaining the succession probability in these types of farms is provided. Specifically, the results show that (i) including LMSC variables in a farm succession analysis increases the explanatory power and robustness of the model estimates; (ii) LMSC variables have a non-linear effect on succession; and (iii) some explanatory variables (farmer education and farm age, specialization and dimension) are significant across various specifications, while other variables (farmer age, territorial location and distance of a farm from its producer organization) change their sign and/or significance when LMSC variables are included in the model. As a consequence, our findings suggest that LMSC variables should be included in farm succession and labour market analysis to provide a better estimate of farm succession probability.