Policy impact analysis of penalty and reward scenarios to promote flower-ing cover crops using a business simulation game

Due to several existing limitations for the use of silage maize as biogas substrate, flowering cover crops are currently a much-discussed alternative. Using a business simulation game, the present study investigates whether the implementation of a reward and a penalty policy will improve the uptake of flowering cover crops in the production programs of farmers. The re-sults indicate that penalty policies lead to a stronger increase in the size of the cultivation area of flowering cover crops than reward policies, even though both policies have the same in-come effect.