On the economics of crop rotation diversification. Valuing pre crop and cropping system effects and accounting for opportunity costs

Alain Carpentier (), Ibirénoyé Honoré Romaric Sodjahin () and Rémy Ballot ()
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Alain Carpentier: SMART - Structures et Marché Agricoles, Ressources et Territoires - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Rennes Angers - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement
Ibirénoyé Honoré Romaric Sodjahin: SMART - Structures et Marché Agricoles, Ressources et Territoires - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Rennes Angers - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement
Rémy Ballot: INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Agronomie - AgroParisTech - Université Paris-Saclay - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

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Abstract: Crop diversity in general, and crop rotation diversity in particular, is a key principle in the design of agro-ecological cropping systems. Since economic motives are of primary interest for farmers, assessing and analyzing the economic return of crop production diversification is essential for convincing farmers to adopt diversified cropping systems or for identifying key elements to be improved in the diversified cropping systems that are currently proposed or developed. This article presents a simple approach for assessing and analyzing the economic value of crop rotation diversification. This approach relies on basic economic calculus and on data that describe the technical performances of crop rotations with various degrees of diversity in comparable production conditions. It demonstrates that the economic value of a diversification crop can usefully be decomposed into the sum of three components: the value of the pre crop effects, the value of the cropping system effects and, finally, the opportunity value of producing the diversification crop. The last component is purely economic while the two others value the agro-ecological effects of crop rotation diversification. The approach is illustrated by means of an application considering the insertion of pea in a cereal-based rotation, a topic of special interest in the EU owing to the current EU dependence on imported protein for feed production and to the benefits brought by inserting legumes in cereal based production systems. More generally, our investigations for gathering data for applying our approach also revealed significant information lacking, especially for describing the effects of cropping system diversification on yield and chemical input use levels. Documenting these effects is crucial for assessing the economic benefits and costs of crop diversification for farmers. These observations certainly calls for agronomists to pay more attention to the economic features related to their research topics and for economists to better account for the agronomic features of the questions they address when they consider agricultural production practices.

Keywords: Crop rotation valuation; Diversification; Pre crop effect; Cropping system effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12-15
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04793152v1
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Published in 16. Journées de recherche en sciences sociales, INRAE; SFER; CIRAD, Dec 2022, Clermont Ferrand, France

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