Sustainable Intensification Farming as an Enabler for Farm Eco-Efficiency?

Meike Weltin () and Silke Hüttel ()
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Meike Weltin: Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
Silke Hüttel: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2023, vol. 84, issue 1, No 12, 315-342

Abstract: Abstract Sustainable Intensification (SI) practices offer adopters exploiting improvement potentials in environmental performance of farming, i.e. enhance ecosystem functionality, while maintaining productivity. This paper proposes a directional meta-frontier approach for measuring farms’ eco-efficiency and respective improvement potentials in the direction of farms’ ecological output for SI evaluation. We account for farms’ selection processes into SI using a behavioural model and rely on a matched sample for adopters and non-adopters of agronomic SI practices from the northern German Plain. We conclude that the SI adopters determined the sample’s system frontier and showed higher mean eco-efficiency, but that most farms in our sample did not fully exploit the improvement potentials in biodiversity as ecological outcome.

Keywords: Sustainable intensification concept; Directional data envelopment analysis; Eco-efficiency; Environmental sustainability; Matching; Meta-frontier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 Q15 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10640-022-00718-6

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