Farmers' willingness to switch to ecological agriculture: A non-parametric analysis

Abstract

The present study estimates the farmers’ willingness to switch to organic agriculture by using the one-and-one-half-bound dichotomous choice contingent valuation method. We survey 200 farmers in the Kwangsi-myeon, Yesan-gun (Chungnam, Korea) and ask them at what revenue level (based on a 40 kg bag of eco-friendly rice) they would be willing to switch from the conventional agricultural methods to organic agricultural methods. The Turnbull model, a non-parametric method, was then used to estimate the willingness to switch to organic agriculture. The presented results show that farmers would be willing to convert to organic agriculture if their revenues were increased to 107 369–109 230 KRW per bag from the reference value of 60 000 KRW.