Uptake of Ecological Farming Practices by EU Farms: A Pan‐European Typology

Abstract

Summary Understanding and measuring the sustainability of farms is key to evaluating progress towards policy goals for a more sustainable agriculture. In the LIFT project, a farm typology was developed to classify farms according to their ecological performance, based on farm‐level variables from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). Selected variables are used to assess three key ecological dimensions of farming: total input intensity; degree of circularity (reliance on own‐produced versus external inputs); and avoidance of the use of specific inputs of concern for the environment and consumers. The combination of these aspects is considered as a measure of the farm proximity to a full agroecological approach. The typology allows comparison of farms across farm types, countries and years. We briefly present the method and discuss two key aspects: 1) how the proposed farm typology can inform policymaking in the context of a new EU policy framework; 2) how it can inform the foreseen transformation of the FADN into a Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN). We suggest that the use of a typology approach under the new FSDN provides useful information on the impacts of the implementation of agroecological practices with an acceptable additional effort in terms of data collection.

Farmers' adoption of ecological practices: A systematic literature map

“…A search string was developed to identify the population, intervention, comparison, and outcome (PICO) based on previous reviews of the farmer behaviour literature and a review of ecological farm types (Rega et al, 2018) conducted as part of the Low‐Input Farming and Territories (LIFT) project. The first part of the string defines our population of interest (Table 1).…”

The relationship between the ecologisation of farms and total factor productivity: A continuous treatment analysis

“…Recently Rega et al (2021Rega et al ( , 2022 examined the potential variables that can be used to identify this farming approach in the FADN and proposed a set of variables for identification purposes. This identification strategy can be considered an advance on current approaches as it considers a wider array of production inputs relevant for determining overall farming intensity (e.g., fuel, energy, machinery).…”

“…Presence of seminatural elements on farm. Rega et al (2022) connected these five key ecological farm management principles with ecological farming approaches. The first four principles were associated with archetypical farm types named 'farming approaches':…”

“…Recent studies criticise this dualism, stating that the existing organic categorisation system is too restrictive and does not account for the range of variability in agricultural ecological practices (Höglind et al, 2021). In addition to standard organic-conventional farm comparisons, two newer directions of research can be distinguished: (i) several papers have applied latent class models (LCM) to classify farms into extensive and intensive types (Dakpo et al, 2021a(Dakpo et al, , 2021b, and (ii) researchers have started to classify the range of ecological practices using a variety of schemes (Höglind et al, 2021;Stavi et al, 2016;Therond et al, 2017); for a comprehensive review see Rega et al (2022).…”

What Does Ecological Farming Mean for Farm Labour?

“…One ecological approach to farming, defined by Rega et al . (2018; also see Rega et al ., this issue), is labelled ‘low‐input’ farming, also referred to as ‘low intensity’ or ‘reduced input’ farming, which reduces the pressures that agriculture places on the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, through reduced reliance on external inputs derived from fossil fuels. Another type of farming considered in this article is organic farming.…”