Analysing Production Technology and Risk in Organic and Conventional Dutch Arable Farming using Panel Data

This paper compares the production technology and production risk of organic and conventional arable farms in the Netherlands. Just-Pope production functions that explicitly account for output variability are estimated using panel data of Dutch organic and conventional farms. Prior investigation of the data indicates that within variation of output is significantly higher for organic farms, indicating that organic farms face more output variation than conventional farms. The estimation results indicate that in both types of farms, unobserved farm-specific factors like management skills and soil quality are important in explaining output variability and production risk. The results further indicate that land has the highest elasticity of production for both farm types. Labour and other variable inputs have significant production elasticities in the case of conventional farms and other variable inputs in the case of organic farms. Manure and fertilisers are risk-increasing inputs on organic farms and risk-reducing inputs on conventional farms. Other variable inputs and labour are risk increasing on both farm types; capital and land are risk-reducing inputs. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2009 The Agricultural Economics Society.