Farmers' motivations to reduce their use of pesticides: a choice experiment analysis in France

While reducing the use of pesticides is a major challenge in developed countries, dedicated policies did not yet result in a large adoption of lowpesticide agricultural practices. We analyze farmers’ motivations to reduce -or not- their use of pesticides. We use a discrete choice experiment including, besides other attributes, the role of harvest-risk in farmers’ decisions, whereas it has barely been studied in the quantitative literature. Our results indicate that risk is a strongly significant factor: farmers need to receive in average 79 euros per hectare and per year to compensate the risk of encountering one additional year of poor harvest out of ten. The administrative burden that may come along with a practice change also significantly affects farmers’ decisions. Reducing health and environment impacts is a motivation only for a minority class of farmers: mainly those who have some sources of revenues from outside the farm.