Farming system archetypes help explain the uptake of agri-environment practices in Europe

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F86652079%3A_____%2F24%3A00587380" target="_blank" >RIV/86652079:_____/24:00587380 - isvavai.cz</a>

Alternative codes found

RIV/61989592:15310/24:73626434

Result on the web

<a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4efa" target="_blank" >https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4efa</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4efa" target="_blank" >10.1088/1748-9326/ad4efa</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Farming system archetypes help explain the uptake of agri-environment practices in Europe

Original language description

The adoption of agri-environment practices (AEPs) is crucial for safeguarding the long-term sustainability of ecosystem services within European agricultural landscapes. However, the tailoring of agri-environment policies to the unique characteristics of farming systems is a challenging task, often neglecting local farm parameters or requiring extensive farm survey data. Here, we develop a simplified typology of farming system archetypes (FSAs), using field-level data on farms' economic size and specialisation derived from the Integrated Administration and Control System in three case studies in Germany, Czechia and the United Kingdom. Our typology identifies groups of farms that are assumed to react similarly to agricultural policy measures, bridging the gap between efforts to understand individual farm behaviour and broad agri-environmental typologies. We assess the usefulness of our approach by quantifying the spatial association of identified archetypes of farming systems with ecologically relevant AEPs (cover crops, fallow, organic farming, grassland maintenance, vegetation buffers, conversion of cropland to grassland and forest) to understand the rates of AEP adoption by different types of farms. Our results show that of the 20 archetypes, economically large farms specialised in general cropping dominate the agricultural land in all case studies, covering 56% to 85% of the total agricultural area. Despite regional differences, we found consistent trends in AEP adoption across diverse contexts. Economically large farms and those specialising in grazing livestock were more likely to adopt AEPs, with economically larger farms demonstrating a proclivity for a wider range of measures. In contrast, economically smaller farms usually focused on a narrower spectrum of AEPs and, together with farms with an economic value <2 000 EUR, accounted for 70% of all farms with no AEP uptake. These insights indicate the potential of the FSA typology as a framework to infer key patterns of AEP adoption, thus providing relevant information to policy-makers for more direct identification of policy target groups and ultimately for developing more tailored agri-environment policies.

Czech name

—

Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10509 - Meteorology and atmospheric sciences

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Environmental Research Letters

ISSN

1748-9326

e-ISSN

1748-9326

Volume of the periodical

19

Issue of the periodical within the volume

7

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

22

Pages from-to

074004

UT code for WoS article

001249985900001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85196050913