Farm size and farmers environmental-friendly practices in livestock farming

Alessandro Corsi, Silvia Novelli and Davide Biagini

No 276182, 166th Seminar, August 30-31, 2018, Galway, West of Ireland from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Agriculture is among the major contributors to climate change, accounting for 24 percent of global CO2 emissions. Within the agricultural sector, livestock has a major role in greenhouse gas emissions. However, animal husbandry also affects the environment through nitrogen leaching to water tables from manure and slurry spread or stored on the soil. Both impacts can be diminished by appropriate practices, concerning the effluents storage and the modalities of their spreading on the soil. We investigate to what extent farmers adopt such practices and, more importantly, which are farm and farmers’ characteristics more conducive to the adoption of such practices. In particular, given the predominance of small farms in Italian agriculture, we assess the effect of farm size on the adoption of appropriate practices. To this purpose, we estimate ordered and binomial probit models of the adoption of virtuous practices from data of the 2010 Agricultural Census in Piedmont (Italy). The results suggest that, in general, larger farms are more likely to adopt virtuous practices, but the effect of farm size is nevertheless rather weak. Technical and cost issues linked to the physical conditions (location in hills and mountains) are apparently a relevant impediment to these practices.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Environmental Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/276182/files/F ... estock%20farming.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:eaa166:276182

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.276182

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 166th Seminar, August 30-31, 2018, Galway, West of Ireland from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().