Crop rotations are known to have two main kinds of economic effects: direct effects on potential yields and on the productivity of different inputs, and indirect effects on economically optimal input levels, especially pesticides and fertilizers. The main objective of this article is to uncover...

Agricultural land fragmentation is widespread around the world and may affect farmers’ decisions and therefore have an impact on the performance of farms, in either a negative or a positive way. We investigated this impact for the western region of Brittany, France, in 2007. To do so, we...

.Knowledge and projection of farm numbers and the structure of their population is an important issue for agricultural economists and policy makers. Although Markov chain models have enjoyed decades of popularity in forecasting total farm numbers, they generally fail to provide a detailed...

The objective of the paper is to assess the effects of spatial agglomeration on the technical efficiency of French pig farms. We use a two-stage method with the first stage consisting of calculating the efficiency scores of pig activity with the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)...

[Paper in French] We draw up a picture of farmland fragmentation in 2007 for France thanks to the use of the cartographic field pattern registry database. The reported indicators quantify the degree of fragmentation in its various dimensions (number, shape, size, distance and scattering of...

[Paper in French] In this article, we investigate the economic impacts of agricultural wetlands for farms in the Limousin region in France. We developed a microeconomic model of farmers' behavior assuming that they maximize their profit. This theoretical model was then specified econometrically...

The objective of this article is to analyse the trends in on-farm labour use, including own family labour, hired labour and contract work, and to assess the factors driving their evolution in France and in Switzerland during 1990-2007. A particular attention is given to agricultural policies,...

Agri-environmental schemes are the main policy instrument currently available in the European Union to promote environmentally friendly farming practices. Nevertheless, the adoption rate of these measures is still limited. This paper develops a profit maximizer theoretical framework to explain...

Using a panel of French crop farms, we test whether farmers’ technical efficiency under conventional practices is a significant driver of conversion to organic farming. An important issue is whether subsidies to organic farming could encourage inefficient farmers to convert. We find that the...

This paper investigates the potential impact of post EU-accession public support, namely the introduction of the decoupled Single Area Payment (SAP), in Lithuania on its farming sector’s restructuring and future efficiency. Analyses are based on efficiency calculations with 2001-2002 FADN data...