Farm Accountancy Cost Estimation and Policy Analysis of European Agriculture

Assist with the identification of cost of production for specific organic enterprises and environmental indicators using farm accountancy data (FADN)

Project Aims:

To address the usefulness and appropriateness of the present FADN data to measure cost of production for agricultural commodities;
To develop a ‘general’ cost of production model for EU agriculture that is easy to use by practitioners and reliable;
To test and implement this cost model in an EU context on a large scale (several agricultural commodities and most of EU member countries);
To assess the relationship between cost structure and farm performance, farm technology, environmental quality and farm heterogeneity;
To provide methodological improvements to the ‘general’ cost of production model;
To evaluate agricultural policy measures using models based on the production cost estimates.

ORC's Role:

Collecting and collating information on the costs of production for a range of organic products (including wheat, milk, potatoes) in several European countries.
Reporting on the structure and policy environment of organic agriculture in those countries.
Investigating the possibility of using FADN data (in this case Farm Business Survey data) to derive environmental indicators from economic data and using these indicators to compare organic and non-organic agriculture in the UK

Project leader and partners:

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
Université catholique de Louvain
Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria
Johann Heinrich von Thünen-Institut
Landbouw-Economisch Instituut B.V.
Corvinus University of Budapest
Estonian University of Life Sciences
Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Bulgaria
Lund University

Deliverables:

Odefey, L., Berner, A., Offermann, F., Gerrard, C.L., Padel, S., Lampkin, N., (2011), Organic farming: implications for costs of production and provisioning of environmental services, FACEPA deliverable 7.3, September 2011, Report to the EU Commission

Project Output:

Gerrard, CL; Moakes, Simon and Padel, Susanne (2012) The use of Farm Business Survey data to compare the environmental performance of organic and conventional farms. International Journal of Agricultural Management, 2 (1), pp. 5-16.

Gerrard, C.L., Padel, S., (2011), Production costs across the EU in 2006, Organic Research Centre Bulletin, 105, p9-10

Previous Relevant Work:

Project – The Potential for Extending Economic Farm-Level Benchmarking to Environmental and Other Aspects of Farm Performance