Modelling Farm Growth and Its Impact on Agricultural Land Use: A Country Scale Application of an Agent-Based Model

Veronique Beckers, Jeroen Beckers, Matthias Vanmaercke, Etienne Van Hecke, Anton Van Rompaey and Nicolas Dendoncker
Additional contact information
Veronique Beckers: Department of Geography, UNamur, rue de Bruxelles 61, 5000 Namur, Belgium
Jeroen Beckers: NVISO, Sinter-Goedelevoorplein 5 Parvis Sainte-Gudule, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Matthias Vanmaercke: Département de Géography, Université de Liège, Quartier Village 4, Clos Mercator 3—B11, 4000 Liège, Belgium
Etienne Van Hecke: Geography and Tourism Research Group, Department Earth and Environmental Science, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium
Anton Van Rompaey: Geography and Tourism Research Group, Department Earth and Environmental Science, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium
Nicolas Dendoncker: Department of Geography, UNamur, rue de Bruxelles 61, 5000 Namur, Belgium

Land, 2018, vol. 7, issue 3, 1-19

Abstract: The ongoing economic pressure on farmers has resulted in lower gross margins, lower income, and a continuous decrease in the number of farmers in large parts of the world. Most remaining farmers upscale their activities by taking over the land of their former competitors, resulting in a decrease in agricultural employment and an increase in average farm size, accompanied by specialisation and new management techniques. Understanding these significant trends and their impact on the land use and environment requires a deeper knowledge of the mechanisms involved and the impacts of different policy measures. These processes are ideally represented through agent-based modelling. Currently, agent-based models are rarely for larger regions. This paper presents ADAM (Agricultural Dynamics through Agent-based Modelling), using it for the case study of Belgium. ADAM was created to obtain insights in past and current agricultural trends and to explore possible effects of policy measures. ADAM simulates the evolution of a farmer population and their farms at a fine scale on the country level. It produces yearly outputs on the number of farms, their size, and the type of farming activity on every parcel. Results show that ADAM is capable of adequately modelling a farmer population according to past trends and that it can be used to explore the results of a business-as-usual scenario, therefore showing the possibility of creating agent-based models for larger scale real-world applications.

Keywords: agriculture; agent-based modelling; real-world application; agricultural dynamics; farmer population; farm evolution; ADAM model; country scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/7/3/109/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/7/3/109/ (text/html)

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:gam:jlands:v:7:y:2018:i:3:p:109-:d:170040

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().