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Exploring cost dominance in crop farming systems between high and low pesticide use

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess cost dominance in direct inputs between arable crop-based systems using low or high pesticide levels per hectare. Our investigation departs from a traditional efficiency analysis and aims at comparing two minimal direct cost functions excluding pesticide expenses. This means that we evaluate the gap between two efficient frontiers instead of focusing on individual farm inefficiency scores. Our only objective is to compare two optimal cost benchmarks for systems respectively defined with high or low pesticide levels per hectare by varying their scale and output mix. A robust approach frontier is introduced to control the influence of potential outliers and unobserved heterogeneity. Based on 707 French crop farms observed in 2008, our simulations show that agricultural practices using less pesticide per hectare are unambiguously more cost-competitive in terms of direct inputs while inducing no other substitution costs. This cost dominance is a robust phenomenon regardless of the size and scope of crop activities, which supports more ecofriendly practices.

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Notes

  1. Eure-et-Loir Département is an administrative area in the center region of France, located southwest of Paris.

  2. That farmers are assumed to have the same market power, which seems rather acceptable based on their similar specificities in terms of size and output mixes within the same local area (Eure-et-Loir Département).

  3. The assumption concerning the relative homogenous pedoclimatic conditions throughout the sample is based on a large interdisciplinary study “Ecophyto R&D” carried out by the French “Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique” (INRA) for the French ministries in charge of agriculture and the environment (Butault et al. 2010). In that empirical research, France is divided into eight large regions to cover the diversity of soils, climates and pest pressure (Jacquet et al. 2011). One of these homogenous regions is “Centre-Poitou” which includes the Eure-et-Loir Department.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the “Agence Nationale de la Recherche” on the project “Popsy: Arable Crop Production, Environment and Regulation”, Decision No. ANR-08-STRA-12-05. We used a database of CERFRANCE Alliance Centre. Special thanks to Loïc Guindé, Henri-Bertrand Lefer, and Frederic Chateau for assisting us in the database construction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lille 3 and IÉSEG School of Management, LEM-CNRS (UMR 9221), 3 rue de la Digue, 59000, Lille, France

    Jean-Philippe Boussemart

  2. LEM-CNRS (UMR 9221) and IÉSEG School of Management, 3 rue de la Digue, 59000, Lille, France

    Hervé Leleu & Oluwaseun Ojo

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  1. Jean-Philippe Boussemart
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  2. Hervé Leleu
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  3. Oluwaseun Ojo
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Correspondence to Jean-Philippe Boussemart.

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Boussemart, JP., Leleu, H. & Ojo, O. Exploring cost dominance in crop farming systems between high and low pesticide use. J Prod Anal 45, 197–214 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11123-015-0443-1

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