A flower strip next to a arable field.
(© André Künzelmann / UFZ)

By Bartosz Bartkowski, Michael Beckmann, Marek Bednář, Sofia Biffi, Cristina Domingo-Marimon, Minučer Mesaroš, Charlotte Schüßler, Bořivoj Šarapatka, Sonja Tarčak, Tomáš Václavík, Guy Ziv, and Felix Wittstock.

Read the full paper here.

Farmers in the European Union can participate in agri-environmental schemes (AES) in which the farmers receive payments for adopting environmentally friendly agricultural practices. How successful AES are in protecting the environment depends on whether farmers adopt them in the first place and how they implement them.

In our study, we conducted interviews with farmers in five European regions (Humber in the United Kingdom, Catalonia in Spain, Mulde river basin in Germany, South Moravia in Czechia and Bačka in Serbia) to understand the reasons farmers adopt AES and the reasons for how and where they implement them. We compared the results across the five regions in order to see how different the reasons are. We found that economic considerations play a central role in farmers’ adoption decisions across the surveyed regions. This means that AES are often adopted when farmers are already implementing the required measures, so adoption does not lead to new environmentally friendly practices and there should be no need to compensate farmers for them. Also, AES are implemented where their implementation creates least costs – even though this may not be where they would be most impactful ecologically. In addition to these economic considerations, many other reasons affect AES adoption. These reasons differ across regions. They include land tenure relations, whether farmers expect the AES to have positive environmental effects or whether farmers trust policy makers and administration. Both the differences and commonalities can help design better, more effective AES.