French specialized durum wheat farmers are subject to market risks (price volatility), production risks (fluctuating quality and yields), and an increasingly restrictive regulatory environment (limits on inputs).The purpose of this paper is to gain a more in-depth understanding of the strategies used by those farmers to manage these risks by analysing portfolio strategies in marketing methods and in production decisions. The findings show that three main categories of marketing methods can be adopted in different proportions: forward contracts, average price contracts and spot market selling. A hundred farmers are surveyed in South-West France. An empirical analysis of the determinants of their marketing methods show that risk perceptions and the farmer's level of education influence the choice to sign a preharvest contract for part of their production. In addition, agricultural diversification is negatively correlated with the choice to use forward contracts to hedge against market risk. [EconLit citations: Q13, L24, C24].
Farming systems in developed countries have highly specialized to reach economies of scale. In addition to their low economic resilience, specialized agricultural systems face more and more agronomic problems such as yield stagnancy or pest and pathogen resistance. Crop diversification is a lever to overcome these problems and to reduce chemical inputs. But the adoption of diversification crops remains low and heterogeneous, due to both monetary and non-monetary determinants. Unobservable determinants such as the perception of crop characteristics might explain this heterogeneity. The paper proposes an evaluation of farmers' preferences for these characteristics with a choice modelling conducted among 71 specialized grain farmers of south-western France. A random parameter logit model interacting crop attributes with farms' individual characteristics show that, in addition to monetary attributes, crop traits such as the level of nitrogen restitution and the positive effect of the diversification crop on pest management influence adoption. It shows an even stronger impact of these agronomic attributes when soil and agronomic conditions are constraining. Moreover, demand for crop diversification is influenced by the performance of the farm's main crop and by the type of marketing contract adopted, which suggests cross effects with risk management strategies.
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