The determinants of adopting organic farming practices: a case study in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Th e presented article focuses on an analysis of the phenomena appearing in the implementation of the transition from classic conventional technology in the production of agricultural food products to an ecological manner of farming. Th e main objective is an empirical analysis of the determinants of the implementation of ecological production technology, whereby not only is their defi nition focused on, but also the quantifi cation of the level of their eff ect. Th e primary methodological tool for achieving the objective is a binary choice model, which was estimated in three variants -probit model, logit model and linear probability model. Th ese estimations are conducted on the basis of the unbalanced panel data from 531 agricultural businesses -legal entities obtained over the time period [2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. Results of the analyses indicate that the transition to and implementation of the organic production technology is negatively aff ected primarily by the higher age of the farmers and the high productivity of labour. On the other hand, the subsidies for the support of organic agriculture, as well as a high return on cost can be considered as the factors which positively infl uence the implementation of the organic technology. Given this fact, it is possible, through agricultural policy, to eff ectively infl uence the number of organically managing farmers, as well as the acreage of the organically managed land. And from the achieved outputs, the type of farm is subsequently characterised where a transition to organic farming may most likely be expected.

The Role of Factors Affecting the Adoption of Environmentally Friendly Farming Practices: Can Geographical Context and Time Explain the Differences Emerging from Literature?

“…• Farm specialisation and type of farming: The effect of a high level of specialisation has been analysed particularly in NE and SE. Here, a trend perspective allows us to give a good explanation of the opposite results provided by the literature: taking into account that, in several cases, the adoption of EFFPs implies a farm diversification [112], early EFFP adopters are generally mixed farms [14,75,99,103,111,113,114], while late adopters are more specialised [74,[106][107][108]115]. Both in NE and in SE, a specialisation in permanent crops positively affects the adoption of EFFPs [45,114,[116][117][118], while the effect of specialisation in livestock differs between SE farms, where the effect is positive [14,99,[106][107][108]111,114,[117][118][119][120], and NE farms, where the effect is negative [93,103,113].…”

“…In AF, and especially for soil and water conservation practices [12,[66][67][68][69][70], this positive role is often linked to higher flexibility in terms of decision-making, greater access to resources, and more opportunities to test new practices on small sample plots [71,72]. In NE and SE, however, a negative effect is found in some cases, related to the higher profit-orientation of larger farms compared with smaller ones, or to the ease of management of smaller farms in the case of labour-intensive EFFPs [7,46,[73][74][75][76][77].…”

Changes in the structure of the regional agricultural production (South Bohemian region)

“…Ekologické zemědělství je jedním z nejrychleji se rozvíjejících sektorů české zemědělské produkce (Malá a Malý, 2013) a rovněž český trh biopotravin vykazuje značné meziroční nárůsty (Doležalová, Pícha and Navrátil, 2009), vzory spotřebitelského chování vůči produktům ekologického zemědělství se pak vyvíjejí obdobně jako v západoevropských zemích (Zagata, 2012). Ekologicky hospodařící podniky vykazují spíše lepší hospodářskou výkonnost než podniky hospodařící konvenčním způsobem (Brožová, 2011), avšak zásadním aspektem tohoto faktu je role finanční podpory (Hrabalová a Zander, 2006, Brožová, 2011.…”

Business analysis of the financial support for organic production in Montenegro – technological and organizational aspects

“…Despite growing market and positive evolution in pricing policy of organic producers, existing literature and empirical research shows that organic producers have insufficient access to financial funds, especially in the domain of certification, organic production, research and the purchase of necessary equipment. For example, research conducted by Mala and Maly showed that some of the implementation of the organic production technology is negatively affected primarily by the rising age of farmers and that large farms do not have a tendency to make the transition to the organic production [6,18]. Besides that, limited credit mechanisms and insufficient capacity of commercial banks represent the most significant problems in the field of financing this production in Africa [7].…”