Opportunity Costs of Providing Crop Diversity in Organic and Conventional Farming

Timo Sipilainen and Anni Huhtala

No 126652, 2012 Conference, August 18-24, 2012, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Targeted environmental policies for farmlands may improve the cost-efficiency of conservation programs if one can identify those farms that produce public goods with the least cost. We derive shadow values of producing crop diversity for a sample of Finnish conventional and organic crop farms in the period 1994-2002 in order to examine their opportunity costs of conservation. Our results of Data Envelopment Analysis show that there is variation in the shadow values between farms and between the technologies adopted. The degree of cost heterogeneity and farms’ potential for specialization in the production of environmental outputs determine whether voluntary programs such as auctions for conservation payments are economically reasonable.

Keywords: Crop; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/126652/files/IAAE%202012%20Huhtala.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae12:126652

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.126652

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2012 Conference, August 18-24, 2012, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().