The Economic Determinants of the On-farm Management of Rice Cultivars in the Rhone River Delta (France)

The aims of our paper are to identify economic determinants of theon-farm cultivars diversity and to empirically characterize the farmers'diversi…cation choices. We focus on the private decision making processinvolving the choice of rice cultivars and the corresponding allocation offarmland. For a speci…c crop, the choice of cultivars, and the resulting cul-tivars portfolio, involves the farmer comparing bene…ts and costs. Amongthe many costs involved, we focus on diversity's management costs. Ourresults rely on original data collected during the spring 2009 in the studyarea, and involve a sample of 86 economic units growing rice. We es-timated a count data model, in which the endogeneous variable is thenumber of cultivars grown on the farm. After that, we studied the factorsexplaining the portfolio choice in terms of commercial rice grain, and theon-farm repartition between these di¤erent types. A multinomial logitmodel was used, with three alternatives, be specialized into a particulartype of rice grain (long or round), or grow simultaneously these two types,or nally be diversi…ed with niche market varieties. And nally we esti-mated the percentage of long rice compared to the percentage of roundrice with a linear regression model. The results con…rm the importanceof the interactions between market related bene…t and the managementconstraints on land and labor.