The Role of Non‐Use Values in Dairy Farmers’ Willingness to Accept a Farm Animal Welfare Programme

Abstract

Choice experiments about a hypothetical farm animal welfare (FAW) programme were presented to a sample of randomly selected German dairy farmers. Based on the theory of social interactions, it was hypothesised that the probability of participating in the programme would increase with (i) the ease of implementing programme attributes on the farm, (ii) perceived use values such as increased milk yield, and (iii) stated levels of non‐use existence values derived from improved animal welfare conditions and extrinsically motivated non‐use values from enhanced prestige among relevant peer groups. It was found that non‐use existence values were negatively related to programme acceptance because relatively high personal standards may not be in line with the programme design and may make the programme seem unnecessary. In addition, the intention of enhancing public acceptance of dairy farming appeared to have an influence on some farmers’ willingness to accept the programme, which can be explained by the relevance of social interactions among peers in the context of farmers’ provision of FAW.

Leverage Points for Governing Agricultural Soils: A Review of Empirical Studies of European Farmers’ Decision-Making

“…Surprisingly, we found only a few studies on the role of advisory services. Even more surprising is that we do not find a clear link but again a mixed picture related to the significance of the impact on farmers' decision-making, for example to facilitate best management practices, new ideas, and new technologies [44,47,70,83,116]. Bager and Proost [44] illustrate that advice as a voluntary measure to influence farmer behaviour can be effective alongside compulsory regulation by supporting farmers in the search and readiness for new technical solutions and through influencing farmers' priorities and attitudes.…”

“…We find 14 studies where farm size is a significant determinant (10 non-significant), showing mostly a positive influence on decision to participate in AESs [93,96,97,105,108], to participate in cooperatives [117], impacting pesticides use and pest management [50,51], and the willingness to adopt renewable energies [42]. Although economies of scale and space to try new options might be the key for the implementation of new practices, several studies found no clear link of farm size to factors such as adoption of organic farming [87], renewable energies [42], climate adaptation [67] or local conservation measures [82], cross compliance [39], participation in AES [95,112,116] or in CAP greening [118], or regarding the specialization on hop [120], indicating that farmers' decisions are not merely correlated with or dependent on the available field size in the European context.…”

“…In contrast to pro-environmental attitude, entrepreneurial attitudes-particularly the classic distinction between productivist and post-productivist attitudes [126], but also more general attitudes towards the goals of farming (e.g., purely profit-oriented versus 'landscape stewardship' versus production of healthy food)-have very different effects on decision-making. Significant influences have been found regarding decisions to participate in AESs in environmentally sensitive areas [92], but against AESs related to field margin or in animal-welfare programmes [97,116]; by tendency in disfavour of adopting organic farming [87,89], yet positively related to adopting renewable energies [42] as well as investing in a hog barn [75]. However, several insignificant results are documented, too, related to participation in country stewardship schemes and in field margin programmes as part of AESs [95,97], to acceptance of cross compliance [39], or on adoption of integrated crop protection or organic farming [86][87][88].…”

“…These are difficult-to-capture factors that may, however, have large relevance for decision-making. The extent to which farmers have social networks [73,108,116], how open they are to those [95], and the type of norms and how they respond to them [83] are important influences on on-farm decision-making. Particularly, in the face of movements such as community-supported agriculture [134], it is no longer only relationships towards other farmers and advisors that are relevant, but also social interactions with consumers gain increasing importance.…”

Farmers’ willingness to invest in livestock disease control: the case of voluntary vaccination against bluetongue

“…In the economic literature, these are described as non-use or passive values (e.g. Hansson and Lagerkvist, 2015;Schreiner and Hess, 2016) or nonpecuniary benefits (Howley, 2015). Another key factor is that private decisions could be influenced by social pressures through different types of perceived norms (Jones et al, 2015;Vande Velde et al, 2015;Sok et al, 2016b).…”