How Experts Explain Farmers' Choices in Germany
Land Use Policy 65 (2017) 93–108 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy j ournal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol The EU’s ecological focus areas – How experts explain farmers’ choices in Germany a,b,∗ b,c a a b Yves Zinngrebe , Guy Pe’er , Stefan Schueler , Jonas Schmitt , Jenny Schmidt , a,∗ Sebastian Lakner a Department for Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 5, 37073 Göttingen, Germany b Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental research (UFZ), Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany c German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103 Leipzig, Germany a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) have recently been introduced as key element in the greening of the EU’s Received 22 July 2016 Common Agricultural Policy. In 2015, farmers across the EU have implemented EFAs for the first time. Data Received in revised form 16 March 2017 for German federal states indicate a strong variance in EFA decisions with an overall dominance of catch Accepted 21 March 2017 crops, nitrogen fixing crops and fallow land – two of which bear limited benefits for biodiversity conserva- Available online 10 April 2017 tion. This article explores how experts explain EFA choices. We conducted 35 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with representatives from the Ministry for Agriculture, farm advisory services, and farmers’ Keywords: associations in each federal state. Applying content analysis we clustered the factors mentioned as deter- Common agricultural policy Greening minants for farmers’ EFA choices into the categories administrative considerations, economic considerations, local factors, ecosystem considerations and policy incentives.
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