Ökonomik nachhaltiger Agrar- und Ernährungssysteme
Aktuelles
New article on Farmers’ Voices in European Protests: Diverse Complaints, Emotional Tones, and Policy Responses
The 2024 farmers’ protests across Europe signaled widespread dissatisfaction in the agricultural sector. While low farm incomes and restrictive environmental regulations are commonly cited grievances, little is known about underlying motivations and individual farmers’ reasons for protesting.
Our study explored individual farmers’ protest motivations in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse concerns shaping agricultural discontent across Europe. We analyzed rich text data from 2,232 farmers, collected through surveys using an open-ended question designed to elicit unprompted, top-of-mind protest reasons. By using a combination of hand and AI-assisted coding, we quantify protest reasons across countries, assess the emotional tone of farmers’ answers, and explore how this aligns with policy responses.
The results reveal that the reasons for protest differ across countries. German farmers most often complained about bureaucracy, French farmers emphasized financial difficulties, Belgian farmers voiced a wide range of concerns, while Dutch farmers focused mainly on political issues. The tone of farmers’ answers also varied: specific frustrations were often expressed in an annoyed angry tone, while broader topics seem to trigger aggressive anger.
You can read the full article here.New article on media coverage of farmers’ protests
The recent farmers’ protests in Germany generated large media attention, prompting questions about how the protests and their motives were portrayed. We analysed 147 newspaper articles from six major German media outlets to explore reporting frequency, key topics, and tone. Protest events and policy criticism were the most prominent themes, with differences in tone observed across media with different political orientations. These patterns highlight how media framing can vary and why understanding such differences is important for public communication and policy dialogue.You can find the full article [here].New Article on Communication Framing in Agricultural Climate Action
This paper investigates effective communication strategies to enhance farmers' engagement with climate change mitigation. Through an online survey experiment of over 500 Irish livestock farmers, it examines the impact of message framing—focused on reputation concern or expenses—on information engagement, knowledge, and intentions to adopt greenhouse gas mitigation measures. The findings reveal the complexity of motivating climate action, suggesting that advisory programs should employ positively framed messages to generate interest, despite challenges inherent in discussing climate change mitigation.
New Article on Climate Change Mitigation in the Dairy Sector
Combining climate change goals with economic targets is crucial for the dairy sector, which is a significant contributor to agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide. In this paper, we assess economic and climate change implications of dairy production with panel data of Irish dairy farms from 2013 to 2021. We calculate transient, persistent, and overall eco-efficiency with respect to GHG emissions by way of stochastic frontier analysis. Despite high overall eco-efficiency, our results uncover significant variability across farms, with some showing improvement and others decline in eco-efficiency over time. You can find the full article here