Economic effects of adoption to agroecological farming practices in conventional and organic farming

Farmers in Sweden and other EU-countries face a growing demand for high quality food, threats posed by climate change and a shift in policy to a larger emphasis on environmental sustainability.

There is a large need for studies that can assess strategies to reduce trade-offs between food production and environmental degradation to guide individual farmers and policy making.

Agroecology is an approach to farming with the potential to integrate ecological, social and economic principles and research has shown that it can support biodiversity and minimize agricultures negative externalities on the environment. However, there is only limited scientific evidence of its potential to be economically viable.

The overall aim of this project is to identify to which extent agroecological farming has the potential to strengthen farm economic viability in Sweden.

This project applies a novel multiscale approach at field, farm and regional level to model the adoption and impacts of agroecological farming practices.

We will follow farms over the last 20-years and map out changes in their diversified crop and integrated crop-livestock production activities.

Our results will provide farmers and policymakers with valuable advice on how to produce high quality food, with minimal negative effects on the environment, in a way that has the potential to be ecologically, economically and socially sustainable.