Organizational design and environmental performance: The case of French dairy farms

Abstract

Understanding the processes related to the adoption of best environmental practices is an important challenge to support the transition to more sustainable agriculture. Our paper aims to contribute to this issue by analyzing the relation between farm's organizational design and environmental performance. We used data of 47562 dairy farms from the 2010 French Agricultural Census and employed econometric analysis to study the correlation between farm's internal and external factors and environmental performance. The environmental performance is approached by a score based on the adoption of nine best management practices. The results show that while the internal, structural and managerial resources, through which farms can increase their absorptive capacity, play an important role, external factors, particularly the type of market environment in which farms operate, play a key role in environmental performance. The results also highlight the central role of farms' spatial environment and, more specifically, the strong correlation with the environmental performance of the neighboring dairy farms. Finally, policies to promote locally farmer's experience exchanges, to supporting diversification, high quality products and short circuits can bust the environmental performance of dairy sector.