Abstract
Voluntary approaches to improving sustainability in agriculture can contribute significantly to reduce the sector’s negative environmental impacts and provide a foundation for sustainable land use and farmers’ incomes. We investigate what motivates farmers to implement comprehensive sustainability management on their farms. For this purpose, we use a structural equation model (SEM) to evaluate the individual factors influencing the decision-making process within the technology acceptance model (TAM). Our empirical data from 363 farmers fit the theoretical model very well. The model confirms a positive influence of expected economic rewards and subjective norms on the perceived usefulness of such an innovation. However, ease of use is most important, as it is related directly to the stated intention to use a standard. In addition, the data indicate a high, significant, and direct effect of prior knowledge of on-farm sustainability management on stated intent to use a standard. These findings can serve as a starting point to improve not only existing sustainability management systems, but also emerging farm management information systems (FMISs), or agri-environmental schemes with the aim to make their use more attractive. However, further research is needed to verify the results by means of practical applications.
Highlights
(2) What are the most important impact factors? (3) What implications do the results have for the further development and promotion of sustainability standards? our study aims at identifying reasons for the low uptake and identifies measures for future improvements in standard design and its promotion
The participating farmers do not expect any significant improvements in technical performance, efficiency gains, and increases in productivity or reductions in production costs from the introduction of a sustainability standard
Regarding the economic rewards deriving from the process optimizations, some of them expect even higher labor input
Summary
Strategies to achieve greater sustainability in agricultural production processes range from focusing on organic farming [10,11], offering more efficient agri-environmental management schemes [12,13], and fostering smart farming technologies [14,15] and digital agriculture [16,17] to improving farm management [18,19,20] or implementing systematic farm sustainability management [21,22]. The individual decisions of farmers play an important role
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