Does land fragmentation affect farm performance? A case study from Brittany, France

Laure Latruffe and Laurent Piet ()

No 13-04, Working Papers SMART from INRAE UMR SMART

Abstract: Agricultural land fragmentation is widespread around the world and may affect farmers’ decisions and therefore have an impact on the performance of farms, in either a negative or a positive way. We investigated this impact for the western region of Brittany, France, in 2007. To do so, we regressed a set of performance indicators on a set of fragmentation descriptors. The performance indicators (production costs, yields, revenue, profitability, technical and scale efficiency) were calculated at the farm level using Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data, while the fragmentation descriptors were calculated at the municipality level using data from the cartographic field pattern registry (RPG). The various fragmentation descriptors enabled not only the traditional number and average size of plots, but also their scattering in the geographical space, to be taken into account. Our analysis highlights the fact that the measures of land fragmentation usually used in the literature do not reveal the whole set of significant relationships with farm performance and that, in particular, measures accounting for distance should be taken into consideration more systematically.

Keywords: agricultural land fragmentation; farm performance; cartographic field pattern registry; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 Q12 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff and nep-geo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Working Paper: Does land fragmentation affect farm performance? A case study from Brittany, France (2013)
Working Paper: Does land fragmentation affect farm performance? A case study from Brittany (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rae:wpaper:201304

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