Do improved pollination services outweigh farm-economic disadvantages of working in small-structured agricultural landscapes? – Development and application of a bio-economic model

Stefan Kirchweger, Yann Clough, Martin Kapfer, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter and Jochen Kantelhardt

Ecological Economics, 2020, vol. 169, issue C

Abstract: Increases in the size of agricultural fields, the loss of permanent green field edges and other semi-natural habitats have accompanied the intensification of agriculture, and are still ongoing. From a farm economic perspective, an increase in field size increases efficiency mainly due to cost savings. However, recent evidence suggests that increases in field size might lead to the loss of ecosystem services provided by farmland biodiversity, but this trade-off is rarely considered. Here, we aim to quantify the economic and ecological effects of these changes by developing a bio-economic simulation-based land-use modelling framework based on spatially explicit data from an agricultural region in Germany. The results show a substantial decrease in flower visitation in oilseed rape when field sizes increase and permanent green edges are lost. This also leads to a decrease in pollination from wild bees and affects yields and farm economics. However, this loss in agricultural gross margin is overcompensated by economic gains of field enlargement. We conclude that further, more comprehensive evaluations are required and suggest that maintaining fine-grained agricultural landscapes with permanent field margins in the long term may require incentives to farmers, as well as innovations that allow to farm small fields at lower costs.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919301326
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:169:y:2020:i:c:s0921800919301326

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106535

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().