Ireland’s agriculture is characterised by an ageing farmer population and small average farm sizes. Past policy schemes developed to address these issues have been targeted at accelerating succession and retirement processes in agriculture. Their success however was limited. The process of...

Tillage farmers must manage numerous economic risks including uncertain yields and prices. Despite the presence of government subsidies, these factors can generate a relatively high variability in farm income. The improved management of farm income variability can contribute towards stability in...

This article investigates how French farmers could react if the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were fully suppressed, based on a survey of intentions of 295 farmers carried out in 2009. The farmers surveyed were beneficiaries of CAP subsidies in 2008, and were therefore mostly specialised in...

This paper explores farmers’ prospective responses to the “greening” of the Common Agricultural Policy. The analysis is based on discrete choice experiments with 128 German farmers. Participants were asked to choose between a “greening” option with a given set of management...

The effects of policy supported farm investments on structural change in agriculture have been studied rarely. The heterogeneity of farms and the problem of self-selection are challenging the evaluation of treatments in agriculture. Econometric methods can help to overcome these problems. In...

The post 2015 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms may bring a substantial change in the way farm payments are paid in Scotland where earlier farm payments were based on historical entitlements. Scottish farms now have to follow a Basic payment Scheme (BPS) which would be determined under a...

One common element in many voluntary and regulatory carbon markets to date has been the inclusion of emissions offsets that can be sold by entities outside of emission caps. A particularly low cost means of sequestering atmospheric carbon is reducing tillage of agricultural soils. A choice...

The paper investigates the effect of variations in soil type, rainfall, N fertilizer amount and crop prices on the objectives of arable farms operating in Nitrogen Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) and receiving the Single Farm Payment (SFP). Sensitivity analysis was carried out using a mixed-integer...

The main objective of this study was to investigate the factors that affected the decision of small-scale farmers who kept cattle and sheep on whether to adapt or not to climate changes. The Binary Logistic Regression model was used to investigate farmers’ decision. The results implied that a...

Results from a pilot application of Defra’s segmentation model applied to the Farm Business Survey for England are presented. Interviews with 750 FBS co-operators during 2010, using a discursive approach, classified co-operators into one of five segmentation groups: Custodians (14.0%);...