Technical efficiency and conversion to organic farming: the case of France

Using a panel of French crop farms, we test whether farmers' technical efficiency (TE) under conventional practices is a significant driver of the conversion to organic farming. We find that the probability of conversion depends on the TE preceding the conversion, but that the direction of the effect depends on the farm size and type of production. This result is found to be robust whichever method of calculation of efficiency scores is used – parametric or non-parametric.