Over the last two decades, organic farming has been one of the few sectors of agriculture to increase exponentially across the world. This paper aims to analyse the relationship of market and agricultural policy signals on the share of organic farming, with a cross-country analysis in two key...

We analyse whether the 2003 CAP reform and the anticipated new program of rural development will lead to an expansion or a reduction of organic farming. An extended version of the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) method is developed in order to differentiate organic farming from...

We analyse the relative competitiveness between organic and conventional farming under different policy scenarios using a DEA-based non-convex metafrontier model. This model allows us to identify a farm’s ex post optimal technology based on input-output observations. Results for Bavarian dairy...

Soil quality has important implications for sustainable agricultural development and food self-sufficiency in many developing countries. A decrease in soil nutrient stocks, one of the components of soil quality, necessitates more inputs and greater management skills in order to compensate for...

This paper investigates the efficiency of organic milk farms in Germany based on data from 1994/95 to 2005/06. Five inputs and one output are analyzed by means of a stochastic frontier production function, allowing for heteroscedasticity and technical effects. The selection of determinants of...

This article investigates which factors influence the economic growth of organic farms. Organic farming has experienced a substantial growth in Germany since the beginning of the 1990s until today. Most organic farms are concentrated in the southern region of the country, Bavaria and...

Sustainability of agriculture is strongly related to the multifunctional role implicitly or explicitly recognized to it in the framework of the European Union CAP. This multifunctional role entails a multicriteria approach when assessing the performance and value for society of farming systems....

Farmers' decisions about conversion to organic farming are analyzed with a structural equation model. The Theory of Planned Behavior (ToPB), one of the prominent theories in the social psychology, is used as the theoretical basis of this study. Though ToPB is a well-defined theory, it is static...

There has been a decline in crop productivity in Kenya, a situation that has contributed to the raising food insecurity in the country. Communities in arid and semi-arid areas of the country, the landless, and female headed households are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. Given the...