Abstract
Does it matter whether farmers receive advice on pest management strategies from public or from private (pesticide company affiliated) extension services? We use survey data from 733 Swiss fruit growers who are currently contending with an infestation by an invasive pest, the fruit fly Drosophila Suzukii. We find that farmers who are advised by public extension services are more likely (+9–10%) to use preventive measures (e.g. nets) while farmers who are advised by private extension services are more likely (+8–9%) to use synthetic insecticides. These results are robust to the inclusion of various covariates, ways to cluster standard errors, and inverse probability weighting. We also show that our results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias. Our findings have implications for the current debates on both the ongoing privatization of agricultural extension and concerns regarding negative environmental and health externalities of pesticide use.
Highlights
The realization of more sustainable agricultural systems depends on farmers’ production and technology choices which, in turn, are based on information and social learning
We find that farmers who are advised by public extension services are more likely (+9–10%) to use preventive measures while farmers who are advised by private extension services are more likely (+8–9%) to use synthetic in secticides
We find no relationship between public extension and the use of insecticides, but we find that farmers who receive their advice from private extension are 8 – 9 percentage points more likely to use synthetic insecticides
Summary
The realization of more sustainable agricultural systems depends on farmers’ production and technology choices which, in turn, are based on information and social learning. Consistent with our hypothesis, we do find that farmers who receive their advice from a public extension services are more likely to use preventive measures (e.g. nets) while those advised by private extension services are more likely to use synthetic insecticides These results are robust to controlling for other sources of informa tion such as peers and own research, farmers’ age, gender, earnings, risk preferences, farm size and area of leased land, as well as the actual infestation level, as well as fixed effects for main production, sampling year, and Canton, and using standard errors that account for intraCanton dependence of observations and heteroscedasticity.
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