Farmer behaviour toward herbicide-free agriculture and conservation tillage

Title: Farmer behaviour toward herbicide-free agriculture and conservation tillage

Balancing conflicting policy goals is a key challenge in the transition to sustainable agricultural systems. An important example is herbicide use reduction potentially conflicting with conservation tillage—which often strongly relies on herbicide use. This paper investigated the joint uptake of two agri-environmental schemes, conservation tillage and herbicide-free agriculture systems.

The researchers used a combination of detailed survey data on farmer behaviour, environmental and agronomic data, and census data on the complete population of all farmers from Switzerland.

The findings based on a multinomial logit and fixed effects multinomial logit indicate that, conditional on observable factors, the systems are not complementary, but joint adoption occurs for 35% of farmers. Behavioural factors explain 26% of joint adoption behaviour, emphasising the role of risk taking, openness to innovation, and biodiversity valuations in farmers' decisions

The analysis provides broader implications for assessing and navigating conflicting sustainability goals in agriculture globally.

Viviana Garcia, Niklas Möhring, Yanbing Wang & Robert Finger (2025). Farmer behavior toward herbicide-free agriculture and conservation tillage. American Journal of Agricultural Economics. On-line 12 May.

Full-text available here

See also:

Pesticide-free agriculture: insights into farmer adoption across crops (2025)