Explaining Differences in Farm Sustainability: Evidence from Flemish Dairy Farms

Steven Van Passel, Erik Mathijs and Guido Van Huylenbroeck

No 25262, 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: An important objective of European agricultural policy is to have a sustainable, efficient farming sector, which uses environmentally-friendly production methods. Agricultural policy makers aim to combine strong economic performance with a sustainable use of natural resources. There is thus a need for tools allowing quantification of farm sustainability as well as for empirical research assessing, analysing and explaining differences in farm sustainability. Using a large dataset of dairy farms, we apply the concept of sustainable value creation to benchmark farm sustainability performance. An effect model captures the determinants of the differences in sustainability among Flemish dairy farms. Our empirical model shows that both managerial and structural farm characteristics are significant in explaining differences in sustainability performance and that the most important factors are farm size, farmer's age and the dependency on support payments. Furthermore, we observe a high sustainability performance on farms with higher levels of economic efficiency.

Keywords: Livestock; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/25262/files/cp060302.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:iaae06:25262

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.25262

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().