Following the decoupling of the cotton subsidies in 2006 the production system has become less intensive in input usage with an average yield reduction of 40 per cent. Albeit the farm income has not been reduced, the reform has had a negative effect on the economy of some rural areas of Southern...

This paper presents the first results of the initial stages of a three years research project on optimization of the use of agricultural lands subject to risk of abandonment. After devising a physical marginality index for olive cultivation based on soil quality and slope, we estimate an...

This paper presents a methodology for assessing the visual quality of agricultural landscapes through direct and indirect techniques of landscape valuation. The first technique enables us to rank agricultural landscapes on the basis of a survey of public preferences. The latter weighs the...

In this paper we present a methodology within the multi-criteria paradigm to assist policy decision-making on water management for irrigation. In order to predict farmers' response to policy changes a separate multi-attribute utility function for each homogeneous group, attained applying cluster...

This paper tackles several issues under-studied concerning agri-environmental schemes (AES), namely requirements related to ecological focus areas (EFA) and collective participation. For this purpose, choice experiment was used to assess farmers’ preferences towards AES in olive growing of...

Analyzing consumer preferences about Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and its characteristics is an important issue to improve consumption. The hedonic prices approach is a revealed preferences method that allows us to disaggregate EVOO market price into the implicit prices of its attributes. We...

In this paper the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) multicreteria evaluation method has been used to evaluate 4 different competing management options at olive plantations (Olea europaea L.) in mountain areas. All the evaluation process is integrated into a Geographical Information System (GIS)...

Agricultural landscape is a complex system composed by interrelated ecological, economic and social sub-systems. Disentangling interactions and mechanisms in such a context is, therefore, difficult and involves knowledge and methodologies developed in different scientific fields. In this paper...

In modelling farm systems it is widely accepted that risk plays a central role. Furthermore, farmers' risk aversion determines their decisions in both the short and the long run. This paper presents a methodology based on multiple criteria mathematical programming to obtain relative and absolute...

This study compares the predictive performance of several mathematical programming models. Using the cropping patterns, yields and crop gross margins of eighteen farms over a period of five years we compare the models' optimum solutions with observed crop distributions after the Reform of the EU...