 Chair of Agricultural Economics and Policy D-USYSOpen OpportunitiesThis master thesis examines the bottlenecks in climate change adaptation for arable crop farming, with a focus on the behavioral and socioeconomic factors. By analyzing survey data from 700 farms in Germany, it aims to identify the key barriers to effective uptake of adaptation measures and provide insights for developing more efficient and targeted strategies to enhance agricultural resilience to climate change. - Agricultural Economics
- Master Thesis
| Livestock farming is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within agriculture, raising the question of whether reducing livestock populations is essential for achieving low-emission agriculture. This thesis examines whether such reductions are a necessary condition and identifies bottleneck levels of livestock counts for given GHG emission targets. Using Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), the research also explores the potential of alternative mitigation strategies, such as feed optimization, manure management, and technological innovations. - Agricultural Economics, Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences
- Master Thesis
| Die Bachelorarbeit untersucht, wie Volksinitiativen und Referenden in der Schweiz die Agrar- und Ernährungspolitik beeinflussen und zur Transformation des Ernährungssystems beitragen. Im Fokus steht, inwiefern direktdemokratische Instrumente die Nachhaltigkeitsdimensionen – ökonomische, ökologische und soziale – im Ernährungssystem beeinflussen. Durch eine qualitative Analyse von Volksinitiativen und politischen Debatten wird aufgezeigt, wie Zielkonflikte zwischen diesen Dimensionen entstehen und welche politischen Anpassungsprozesse durch die direkte Demokratie angestossen werden. - Agricultural Economics, Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences
- Bachelor Thesis
| Pesticide-free (non-organic) crop production is currently gaining ground in European agriculture as a new alternative pathway between conventional and organic farming. To successfully produce crops without using pesticides, farmers must adopt sustainable crop protection measures, e.g., following the principles of integrated crop protection (IPM) or agroecological crop protection (ACP). Even though both production systems, i.e., pesticide-free non-organic and organic, work without pesticides, the alternative crop protection measures used may differ between organic and non-organic farms. To date, little is known about potential differences between farming systems without pesticides regarding the adoption of alternative crop protection strategies. - Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences
- Master Thesis
| Agriculture is widely recognized as one of the most vulnerable sectors to the adverse effects of climate change, which is particularly true for arable farming. Projections indicate that these effects will worsen in the coming decades. Farmers will have to adapt to the changing climate. Multiple climate change adaptation strategies have been suggested over the last decades, including, e.g., diversification, conservation tillage or crop insurance. However, little is known about the behavioral factors influencing the adoption of such strategies. This master thesis aims to investigate the influence of farmers’ behavioral characteristics on the uptake of climate change adaptation measures in the context of German arable farming. - Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences, Economics
- Master Thesis
| Agriculture is widely recognized as one of the most vulnerable sectors to the adverse effects of climate change. This thesis aims to identify effects of weather shocks on farm structural indicators. It combines official statistics provided by the EU with meteorological data and provides causal estimates of weather shocks on farm structural indicators using econometric methods. - Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences, Economics
- Master Thesis
| Die Bachelorarbeit untersucht die Absatzförderung in der Schweiz vor dem Hintergrund der Herausforderungen für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Hülsenfrüchten aufgrund hoher Produktionskosten und fehlendem Grenzschutz. Ziel ist es, die Funktionsweise der Absatzförderung, die Auswahl geförderter Produkte sowie die Potenziale für die Aufnahme von Hülsenfrüchten zu analysieren. - Agricultural Economics
- Bachelor Thesis
| Beschreibung und ökonomische Interpretation der Marktordnung eines Schweizer Agrarmarktes - Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences
- Bachelor Thesis
| Dairy production holds significant economic and social importance in Europe (European Commission 2020). However, the sector is a major contributor to environmental pressures, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ammonia emissions (European Commission 2024). Developing effective agri-environmental schemes to help farmers mitigate these pressures is therefore a key policy objective in many European countries. The success of such schemes often hinges on the level of compensation provided to farmers and the costs they incur to comply with the associated regulations. To address this, some studies have adopted production-based approaches using farm-level data to estimate the costs of mitigating environmental pressures, aiming to establish fair compensation for farmers participating in these schemes (e.g., Peerlings and Polman 2004; Mamardashvili et al. 2016; Dalheimer et al. 2024) However, there is a lack of comprehensive literature reviews examining whether certain environmental pressures have been prioritized over others when estimating these costs. Filling this gap could provide valuable insights for designing agri-environmental schemes that address environmental pressures in dairy farming more holistically.
- Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences, Economics
- Bachelor Thesis
| Biodiversity is widely recognized as a critical challenge to agricultural production (Dainesem et al., 2019). This issue has been acknowledged by many European countries, leading to the implementation of specific policies and instruments, such as agri-environmental schemes aimed at reversing biodiversity decline (Pe’er et al., 2017). In Switzerland, two primary policy instruments address biodiversity conservation. The first is a set of cross-compliance requirements, known as the Proof of Ecological Performance, which mandates that farmers allocate a portion of their land to ecological focus areas (FOAG 2021). The second, which complements the first, involves action-based and result-based direct payments designed to preserve and enhance biodiversity (Huber et al. 2024). The success of such agri-environmental schemes often depends on the level of compensation provided to farmers and the costs of farms to comply with the regulations in agri-environmental schemes. Consequently, some studies use production-based approaches with farm-level data to approximate the cost of biodiversity conservation (e.g. Peerlings and Polman 2004; Gullstrand et al. 2014; Dalheimer et al. 2024). However, two significant gaps remain: 1) no study has calculated the cost of biodiversity conservation at the farm level using these approaches for Swiss dairy farms 2) no study has examined whether the choice of the farm level biodiversity measure can affect the magnitude of the estimated. Addressing both gaps can be very informative for the efforts of Swiss agricultural policy for designing effective biodiversity conservation schemes.
- Agricultural, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences, Economics
- Master Thesis
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