Farm-level land use strategies in terms of agricultural production and biodiversity conservation in Switzerland.
In: Joint Conference of the Slovenian Association of Agricultural Economists (DAES) and the Austrian Association of Agricultural Economists (ÖGA). 23. September, Ljubljana - Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana. 2022.
Understanding farmers’ land use behaviour is a pre-requisite for the design of effective policies aiming at protecting and enhancing biodiversity in agriculture. The aim of the present paper is to develop a typology of Swiss farmers’ land use strategies in terms of agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. We adopt for that purpose a comprehensive perspective encompassing both the Ecological Focus Area (EFA) and the non-EFA. We use K-means cluster analysis to identify the farm types. We consider four clustering variables, namely the agricultural production intensity, the extent of farm’s participation in agri-environmental schemes for biodiversity conservation and the impact of farm agricultural practices on the organismal biodiversity of the EFA and non-EFA. Our results reveal that land use strategies are not only heterogeneous but also complex, going beyond the classical myopic dichotomy of low versus high EFA share.
