Impact Assessment of Greening and the Issue of Nitrogen-Fixing Crops

Abstract

In the CAP reform 2014-2020, the 'green' component of direct payments remunerates environmental services and includes three greening requirements: crop diversification, maintenance of permanent grassland and establishment of an ecological focus area (EFA). This paper evaluates the effect of 'greening' and payment redistribution on farm incomes and land use, considering two different hypotheses of the EFA weighting factor (Ewf) for nitrogen-fixing crops. The evaluation is developed at farm level by a positive mathematical programming (PMP) model and applied to more than 2,000 farms in northern Italy. The results show that crop diversification will mainly affect the cereal area, with significant reductions in maize and wheat, while the EFA requirement, especially with the lower Ewf, will boost the spread of protein crops. Nevertheless, 'greening' does not significantly affect farm income, while greater economic effects are mainly due to the redistribution of direct payments.

EU‐wide Economic and Environmental Impacts of CAP Greening with High Spatial and Farm‐type Detail

“…This effect is not covered in most models as they assume a fixed land supply (e.g. Solazzo and Pierangeli, 2016;Solazzo et al, 2015 andalso Czekaj et al, 2014).…”

“…Czekaj et al, 2014;Cortignani and Dono, 2015) or an individual (real) farm model (e.g. Louhichi et al, 2015;Solazzo et al, 2015;Vosough-Ahmadi et al, 2015;Solazzo and Pierangeli, 2016) is used. The greening measures target land allocation at farm level implying that their eligibility and uptake largely depend on farm-specific characteristics (e.g.…”

A weighted $$\chi ^2$$ test to detect the presence of a major change point in non-stationary Markov chains

“…In this section we will apply our weighted χ 2 test to study the impact of the new particularly that of arable land and grassland [Solazzo, Donati, and Arfini 2015;Cortignani, Severini, and Dono 2017]. Farmland evolution has already been modelled in literature using Markov Chains [Sang et al 2011;Fu, Wang, and Yang 2018].…”

“…The new CAP has introduced a new funding policy, called greening, which is conditioned to the compliance of farmers with some ecological practices, with some mandatory ecofriendly farming practices. Such farming practices regard, and potentially influence, farmland allocation, particularly that of arable land and grassland [Solazzo, Donati, and Arfini 2015;Cortignani, Severini, and Dono 2017]. We will apply our test to a sample of 638,952 land parcels in Lombardy, occupying a total area of 743,072 hectares, whose land use has been observed in the years 2011-2016.…”