Explaining Finnish Farmers' Policy Responses with Environmental Attitudes

In general, farmers are often found to be resistant to environmentally targeted agricultural policies. On the other hand, a part of farmers are clearly self-motivated to undertake farm practices that are beneficial to the environment and resource conservation. What motivates these farmers to participate? How much of this participation can be explained with attitudes, and where these attitudes arise from? In this paper, we analyze the effect of farmers‟ attitudes towards environmental policies and related issues on their farm level policy choice. The policy response analyzed is farmers‟ choice to implement voluntary contract-based special measures in the current agri-environmental support scheme. Our results show that farmers fall into different groups in terms of their environmental attitudes. In addition, farmers falling into same group have similar behavior in making their policy choices. The paper will be further improved with more detailed analysis on the farm level and geographical factors behind the farmers‟ attitudes. That second stage of our analysis will reveal, whether those farmers operating under more vulnerable environmental conditions and thus, higher environmental risks, are more willing to implement voluntary and more demanding policy measures.