Does land fragmentation affect farm performance?A french Breton case study

Agricultural land fragmentation is widespread and may affect farmers’ decisions and therefore have an impact on the performence of farms, wheter in a negative or in a positive way. In this paper we test whether the relationship is positive or negative for French western region of Brittany in 2007. The relationship between land fragmentation and farm performance is investigated with correlation coefficients applied to several performance indicators (production costs, yields, financial results and technical efficiency) calculated with Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) farm-level data, and several fragmentation descriptors calculated at the municipality level using datafrom the cartographic field pattern registry. The various fragmentation descriptors enable to account not only for the traditional number and mean size of plots, but also for their scattering in the geographical space. Our analysis highlights that the measures of land fragmentation usually used in the literature revael less signifant relationships with farm performance than mor complex measures accounting for distance. Our results indicate that farmsexperience higher cost of production and lower crop yields where land fragmentation is more pronouced, but that this does not impede those farms from generating higher financial results. However, further investigations based on sound econometric estimations are needed before causal conclusions could be drawn.