Adoption and potential of agri‐environmental schemes in Europe: Cross‐regional evidence from interviews with farmers

Abstract

In Europe and elsewhere, agri‐environmental schemes (AES) are designed to reduce agriculture's impacts on the environment. Designing effective schemes requires an understanding of the reasons that drive farmers' decisions whether to adopt AES. Currently, most insights come from individual case studies or structured surveys based on predefined questions. There is a paucity of studies that do not rely on rigid preconceptions about relevant behavioural factors while also offering a geographically and socio‐culturally broad perspective that can address the cultural and institutional context‐specificity of behavioural studies. Also, most studies focus on the adoption decision, while implementation decisions and their consequences for the ecological effectiveness of AES remain understudied. In this article, we present the results from semi‐structured farmer interviews conducted in five agricultural landscapes across Europe. The results are used to uncover reasons for AES adoption as well as the implications of AES implementation decisions for their ecological effectiveness. The main reason for AES adoption that was common across case study regions is the interplay of opportunity costs and payment levels, which has negative implications for the ecological effectiveness of AES as farmers prioritized marginal land or adopted non‐additional AES. Among reasons that vary across regions, tenure relations and the role of ecological reasoning stand out. We find that AES are unlikely to trigger broader shifts towards sustainable management but there is some potential for improvement, mainly by increasing the flexibility, spatial targeting and ecological ambition of the schemes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Farming system archetypes help explain the uptake of agri-environment practices in Europe

“…biodiversity conservation; Gailhard and Bojnec 2015), and production-specific (Sattler and Nagel 2010). Although it could be expected that large agri-businesses focused on high-intensity management and for-profit crop production may less likely engage in agri-environment programmes, previous studies have shown that greater profit margins, sufficient administrative capacity and a larger area of managed land allow higher AEP uptake in these types of farms, while AEPs are perceived as a form of income diversification (Paulus et al 2022, Bartkowski et al 2023.…”

“…Another notable trend that emerged from our analysis is that economically small farms across most farm specialisations are the ones that are the most unlikely to engage in any AEP (figures 4, 5; tables A9 and A10). Apart from the lack of administrative capacity (Wittstock et al 2022, Bartkowski et al 2023, some possible explanations may be the absence of suitable land parcels (Pavlis et al 2016) and insufficient outreach by policy-makers towards small farms to adopt agri-environment measures (Coyne et al 2021). The availability of advisory services, combined with low bureaucratic burdens, proved highly relevant to increasing AES adoption (Massfeller et al 2022).…”

“…These areas are traditional farming regions in Europe that are representative of each respective country and cover a cross-section of different farming systems and practices (Ziv et al 2020): the Mulde river basin in eastern Germany (∼51.1 • N, 12.5 • E), southern Moravia in the eastern Czech Republic (∼48.9 • N, 17.3 • E), and the Humber river basin in central United Kingdom (∼53.7 • N, 0.7 • W). The Mulde case study is located at the boundary between temperate and continental climates, where the annual mean temperature and precipitation totals are around 7.0 • C and 830 mm, respectively (Bartkowski et al 2023. While the average farm size of 93 ha in Mulde (maximum farm size of 4 967 ha) is comparable to 94 ha in South Moravia (maximum farm size of 6 136 ha), the Czech case study area has a warmer continental to Pannonian climate with an average annual temperature of 8.5 • C and rainfall of 660 mm (Bartkowski et al 2023).…”

“…The Mulde case study is located at the boundary between temperate and continental climates, where the annual mean temperature and precipitation totals are around 7.0 • C and 830 mm, respectively (Bartkowski et al 2023. While the average farm size of 93 ha in Mulde (maximum farm size of 4 967 ha) is comparable to 94 ha in South Moravia (maximum farm size of 6 136 ha), the Czech case study area has a warmer continental to Pannonian climate with an average annual temperature of 8.5 • C and rainfall of 660 mm (Bartkowski et al 2023). In contrast, the farmland in the Humber river basin is characterised by an oceanic climate, with the annual mean temperature and precipitation totals of 9.6 • C and 630 mm, and by a smaller average farm size of 52 ha.…”

“…We chose these dimensions because they were computable from the field-level IACS/LPIS data consistently across all case studies and because they represent essential farm structural characteristics (as opposed to farmers' individual characteristics) recognized as crucial for identifying policy target groups (Huber et al 2024). These dimensions also capture archetypal aspects of the farming systems, as the compatibility of AEPs with established farm practices and economic considerations related to the farm business were previously identified as the most relevant factors for the uptake of AEPs in our case studies (Wittstock et al 2022, Bartkowski et al 2023 and elsewhere (Lastra-Bravo et al 2015, Baaken 2022. Moreover, these dimensions are available as variables in the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), the main database that provides harmonised microeconomic data for farms in the EU derived from national surveys.…”