Suchergebnisse

Abstract
To promote biodiversity, a diverse landscape is necessary. Structural change in agriculture and increasing cost pressure have led to the trend of fewer farms and larger farming units with less diversity. Reversing this trend is a societal task that requires a willingness to make sacrifices. For agriculture, we suggest combining new technologies and artificial intelligence to foster "new" ways of thinking for place-based solutions. That is, land management oriented towards natural habitats and more diversity, which is equally economically viable. It is essential to visibly reward the ecological added value.

AbstractSustainable Intensification (SI) practices offer adopters exploiting improvement potentials in environmental performance of farming, i.e. enhance ecosystem functionality, while maintaining productivity. This paper proposes a directional meta-frontier approach for measuring farms' eco-efficiency and respective improvement potentials in the direction of farms' ecological output for SI evaluation. We account for farms' selection processes into SI using a behavioural model and rely on a matched sample for adopters and non-adopters of agronomic SI practices from the northern German Plain. We conclude that the SI adopters determined the sample's system frontier and showed higher mean eco-efficiency, but that most farms in our sample did not fully exploit the improvement potentials in biodiversity as ecological outcome.

Nach einem drastischen Einbruch im vergangenen Jahr ziehen die Milchpreise wieder an. Doch auch künftig kann es zu Preiseinbrüchen in der Milchwirtschaft kommen. Zum einen wirken sich im Zuge der fortschreitenden Liberalisierung der Agrarmärkte internationale Marktentwicklungen verstärkt auf den deutschen Milchmarkt aus, zum anderen haben auch die Verhandlungsbeziehungen entlang der Wertschöpfungskette einen starken Einfluss auf die Erzeugerpreise. Langfristig ist für die Entwicklung der Milchpreise der Strukturwandel in der Milchwirtschaft und hier insbesondere die Positionierung der Erzeuger innerhalb der Wertschöpfungskette entscheidend.

Agri-environmental schemes (AES) target at improving environmental status of cultivated land by remunerating farmers willing to commit to higher environmental standards. Thus far, no consensus exists whether AES incentivize adoption of pro-environmental production or simply offer windfall profits for those already operating at lower intensities. Using farm-level data, evaluation typically rests on comparing farms with and without AES. For differencing out unobservables that drive farmers into AES participation and therefore confound impact measurement, DID-matching methods are widespread, yet critical reflection remains sparse. We target at closing this gap by shedding light on the implicit assumptions about cause and effect paths linking participation and treatment outcome. We discuss challenges for identification of causal effects in presence of unobservable confounders over a broad range of methods and illustrate DID methods to estimate AES effects on land-use in West Germany.