No abstract

We use data from a survey of 2439 farmers in 5 countries around the Baltic Sea (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Sweden) to investigate their preferences for adopting agricultural practices aimed at reducing nutrient leaching and greenhouse gas emissions. The measures considered are set-aside, catch crops and reduced fertilization. Contracts vary with respect to the area enrolled, contract length, possibility of premature termination, availability of professional advice and compensation. We quantitatively describe farmers' preferences in terms of their willingness-to-accept compensation for specific attributes of these contracts, if implemented. The results vary substantially between farm types (farmers' characteristics) and between the 5 countries, and support differentiation of contract obligations and payments to improve the uptake of Agri-Environmental Schemes. The results can be readily used to improve the design of country-specific nutrient reduction policies, in accordance with the next Common Agricultural Policy.

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In Finland, expanding dairy farms often face the problem of additional fields being geographically distant and only available as small parcels. We develop a stochastic production frontier model to estimate the technical efficiency of Finnish dairy farms and simulate the effect of parcel distance and parcel size on the efficiency of an average farm for 2000 through 2009. The overall development of technical efficiency is positive during the study period but increases in distance and decreases in parcel size both significantly reduce farm efficiency. Therefore, efforts to improve the parcel structure are justified.

No abstract