Is Organic Agriculture Sustainable? Quasi-Experimental Evidence with Heterogeneous Effects from Italian Farms

Roberto Esposti

No 508, Working Papers from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali

Abstract: This paper evaluates the sustainability of organic farming by testing whether it achieves a win–win–win outcome, improving farm-level environmental and economic performance without compromising aggregate agricultural output. We adopt a quasi-experimental design that accounts for voluntary adoption and allows for heterogeneous treatment effects. We combine Random Forest and LASSO methods, enabling flexible, fully interactive modeling with high-dimensional covariates. The analysis is based on a balanced panel of Italian farms from the FADN dataset covering the period 2008–2022. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity in the effects of organic farming adoption. A win–win–win outcome does not emerge on average but is observed only for a small subset of farms; for other groups, the full sustainability of organic adoption appears questionable. These findings call for more targeted and differentiated policy support to promote organic farming.

Keywords: Sustainable Farming; Organic Agriculture; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Double Machine Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C23 Q01 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2026-07
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