By contrast, converting arable land into EFA is perceived as a high-cost measure.
The trade-off between conservation benefits on the one hand and farmer acceptance on
the other seems particularly pronounced. Policy is well advised to err on the safe side by
demanding only moderate EFA shares. Likewise, fixing the location of the EFA
(instead of allowing farmers to choose annually) should only be considered if assigned
a high conservation value. Farmers perceive this measure as relatively high cost. Allowing landholders to rotate the EFA will significantly raise the acceptance of “greening”.
The option of growing leguminous crops on EFA land appears very attractive to
farmers. It should only be made available if legumes are judged to yield conservation
benefits similar to other, less productive uses of the EFA.
Some of the policy provisions proposed in the political debate to ease the burden of
“greening” at the farm level are only valued by a minority of farmers. These include
the option of counting AES land or landscape features as EFA. The latter is only valued by farmers who have such features on their land (but not by others). Likewise, the
possibility of growing leguminous crops on twice the EFA, as an alternative to retiring
the EFA from production, is only valued by farmers who already grow such crops.
Nonetheless, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the average farmer in our survey would prefer cultivating legumes on EFA land instead of setting it aside.
In addition to the above conclusions which follow directly from the empirical results,
the following aspects may also affect farmer acceptance and conservation benefits:
Acceptance of “greening” among dairy farmers with high cow stocking rates may
be raised by allowing the EFA to be used as (non-permanent) grassland. This would
allow farmers to mitigate the loss of roughage production while contributing to conservation objectives. Such an option would need to be accompanied by management
prescriptions (e.g. relating to mowing dates or fertiliser quotas) to target environmental objectives.
The heterogeneity of perceived participation costs among respondents suggests that
farmers will be likely to transfer EFA requirements between them. This could be realised by farmers with high opportunity cost renting low opportunity cost land from
other farmers. Such trade would result in the EFA being concentrated on the least
productive land in a region. If instead a spatially inclusive and comprehensive distribution of the EFA is considered advantageous from an environmental point of view,
policy would have to specify the distance from a farmstead within which EFA requirements must be met. Alternatively, the policy could prohibit farmers from maintaining
EFA land in one location for a number of years. The requirement to rotate the EFA
would ease incentives to rent less productive land in large distances from the farmstead. However, both these options could lead to significant administrative burdens.
The empirical analysis in this paper provides a basic understanding of the likely
responses of landholders to the new “greening” instrument. We lay the foundation for
predicting landholder willingness to comply as a prerequisite for the policy’s environmental effectiveness. We emphasise, however, that the empirical results reported in this
study and the conclusions drawn are tentative in that the sample is not representative
of the German farming community. The reader should also note that the analysis in
this paper falls short of a comprehensive cost–benefit assessment of “greening”. Such
an assessment would balance conservation benefits with farm-level costs and