Designing an effective small farmers scheme in France with environmental and employment conditions

The 2014 CAP introduced the Small Farmers Scheme (SFS), offering small farms the option of an unconditional annual lump-sum payment per farm replacing the standard first pillar direct payments. This paper assesses the acceptability in France of an extendedversion of the 2014 SFS for the post-2020 CAP: it includes conditions on farmers’ environmental efforts and on salaried employment. The results of a discrete choice experiment conducted at the scale of France with 608farmers receiving less than 15,000€ in first pillar payments show that an SFS with an environmental certification prerequisite is attractive to French small farmers, notably in the market gardening sector. We provide simulated results of the uptake rate and budgetary impacts of different SFS scenarii on the population ofnon-retiredFrench farmersbased on the last agricultural census.