Ludwig Lauwers

• Ghent University

Recently, the use of improved technologies and increasing technical efficiency have been considered the two major pathways to sustainably increase agricultural productivity. The main aim of this study was to explore which factors might facilitate the designing of more-targeted extension and advisory services ( eas ) that can reduce technical ineffi...

Interest in using smartphone-based technologies for farm management is growing. However, existing research does not adequately address the effect of farmer knowledge and awareness in their intention to use such technologies. The aim of the present study is to identify the main factors that influence farmer intention to use a Farm Management Smartph...

Benchmarking farms, in order to advise farmers to cure inefficiency, may be biased if heterogeneity is not accounted for. Technological variability in agriculture indeed happens, but productive efficiency analysis with frontier methods usually assumes homogeneity. Heterogeneity influences investment motives and production strategies, but is not alw...

As waste treatment companies are pivotal for a shift towards the circular economy, more insight into their decision-making process is needed. This paper explores how waste treatment companies make decisions facing the circular economy by using a qualitative research approach (semi-structured interviews, workshop, focus group) with 10 companies and...

Despite the huge potential for milk production, interventions to improve productivity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are barely based on specified farm classifications. This study aimed to develop robust and context-specific farm typologies to guide content of extension farm advice/services in Uganda. From a sample of 482 dairy farmers, we collected d...

The Welfare Quality® consortium has developed and proposed standard protocols for monitoring farm animal welfare. The uptake of the dairy cattle protocol has been below expectation, however, and it has been criticized for the variable quality of the welfare measures and for a limited number of measures having a disproportionally large effect on the...

Vernieuwde visie van de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor Integrale Duurzame Landbouw en Voeding. De Raad pleit voor een fundmentele paradigmashift van lage voedselprijzen en korte-termijnefficientie naar een systeem dat gezondheid vooropstelt.

There has been a global shift towards intensification in the dairy sector in recent years which may have considerable impact on the cost efficiency and economic returns of farms. Considering this, the goal of this study is to offer an empirical analysis of the effect of variable external input use on dairy farms. Employing a novel Activity Analysis...

A wide variety of public and private initiatives aim to support on-farm sustainable development. But these sustainable farming initiatives (SFIs) show considerable variation in their success to do so. To understand success factors and propose appropriate strategies for continuing and expanding SFI’s, we scrutinized the developmental history of Veld...

A multitude of farm-level sustainability assessment tools (SATs) exists, reflecting a variety of agricultural practices and sustainability perceptions. Tools differ and insight is lacking about how they match with farmers’ needs. This paper examines whether and how existing SATs focus on the farmer’s strategic decision-making. The potential of the...

Although precision livestock farming (PLF) technologies ensure various dimensions of more precise information, the question arises to what extent additional preciseness provides more value. Literature gives insufficient anchor points to estimate the value of information (VOI) obtained with PLF technologies. This study proposes a conceptual framewor...

Modelling is key to adapting agriculture to climate change (CC), facilitating evaluation of the impacts andefficacy of adaptation measures, and the design of optimal strategies. Although there are many challenges tomodelling agricultural CC adaptation, it is unclear whether these are novel or, whether adaptation merely addsnew motivations to old ch...

Turkish livestock sector plays very important role in the Turkish GDP and the use of manure affects the environment but the farming sector want the farmers to employ the use of more integrated manure practice. The study assessed the economic impacts of integrated manure and chemical fertilizer used and the manure management practices sustainable fo...

The emerging bioeconomy requires vast amounts of biomass that current value chains cannot provide. Novel biomass value chains therefore need to be developed. To date, only few novel value chains emerged and additional research on their development is much needed. This paper presents the results of an exploratory case-study analysis of a corn stover...

Les autorités régionales belges doivent, ces jours-ci, se prononcer sur les différentes options de réforme de la Politique Agricole Commune (PAC) proposées par l'accord européen de juin dernier. Ce numéro spécial de Regards Economiques se penche sur les effets et les enjeux de cette réforme. Plusieurs questions sont abordées. En quoi consiste cette...

Les autorités régionales belges doivent, ces jours-ci, se prononcer sur les différentes options de réforme de la Politique Agricole Commune (PAC) proposées par l'accord européen de juin dernier. Ce numéro spécial de Regards Economiques se penche sur les effets et les enjeux de cette réforme. Plusieurs questions sont abordées. En quoi consiste cette...

Actors in the agri-food system are increasingly urged to more sustainability, but actions to organize the system's sustainable development encounter difficulties, such as overcoming trust between actors, aligning different views on sustainability or finding the right tools to monitor sustainable development. This suggests that more guidance is need...

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a promising concept for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation in sustainable agricultural development, but empirical evidence from the farmers’ viewpoint is scarce. This paper contributes to empirical insights on the knowledge creation in CoPs as valued by farmers. Using concepts from CoP theory (domain, communi...

Pig delivery weight optimisation (PDWO) has been studied extensively and has resulted in several optimisation models. A previous participatory analysis of the problem has revealed that existing models are too complex and might therefore be under-valorised. Farmers desire a simple but reliable model based on available farm data to learn about the pr...

The Welfare Quality® (WQ) protocol for on-farm dairy cattle welfare assessment describes 33 measures and a step-wise method to integrate the outcomes into 12 criteria scores, grouped into four principle scores and into an overall welfare categorisation with four possible levels. The relative contribution of various welfare measures to the integrate...

Many tools to analyse and support sustainable development exist, but their use in the agricultural sector remains obstructed by the sector’s complexity and diversity. The objective of this research was to analyse, with a participatory action-research approach, various aspects of the design and use of sustainability assessment tools. The research or...

This article identified network characteristics critical for successful agricutural innovations within networks, or a set of interrelated organizations aiming at knowledge exchange for innovations. To explore key success factors, the research questioned how networks cope with innovation characteristics and combined network characteristics with four...

While second-generation biomass resources, such as agricultural residues, are crucial for the development of the bioeconomy, value chains and markets of locally available agricultural residues remain uncommon. Current research predominantly provides useful insights into technological or techno-economic aspects of agricultural residue harvesting and...

Sustainable farming initiatives (SFIs), which aim to support farmers’ adoption of sustainable practices vary in the degree of farmer participation. In this study, we explored the influence of SFI design characteristics on farmer motivation to participate. Based on self-determination theory, we framed farmer participation by linking participants’ mo...

Although prototypes of automatic lameness detection systems for dairy cattle exist, information about their economic value is lacking. In this paper, a conceptual and operational framework for simulating the farm-specific economic value of automatic lameness detection systems was developed and tested on 4 system types: walkover pressure plates, wal...

Simple Summary Most prototypes of systems to automatically detect lameness in dairy cattle are still not available on the market. Estimating their potential adoption rate could support developers in defining development goals towards commercially viable and well-adopted systems. We simulated the potential market shares of such prototypes to assess...

Sustainable crop protection (SCP) has many facets. Farmers may therefore perceive transition to SCP as very complex. The Dual Indicator Set for Crop Protection Sustainability (DISCUSS) can handle this complexity. To provide targeted support throughout the transition to SCP, complexity capture must be synchronised with the time course of on-farm dec...

Frequently acknowledged as coming forward to environmental issues by reducing external input use, low input (LI) dairy farming is gaining attention. The absence of a clearly delineated description of LI dairying, however, hampers identification and analysis of these farming systems. This paper aims at empirically examining, EU wide, the farm struct...

We investigate farmers’ intentions to apply biodiversity conservation practices from a psychological perspective, using an adapted version of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), including group norms and putting emphasis on moral norms and self-identity. The study is based on a quantitative survey (n = 99) in Belgium, analysed using confirmatory...

Production diseases in dairy cows can have significant effects on farm business performance. Decisions about controlling production diseases are mainly based on veterinary advice. However, from an economic perspective, mere diagnosis of disease does not provide enough information for intervention decisions. Well-founded decisions are based on knowl...

Farm-specific optimization of pig production can be supported with a production function mechanistically derived from dynamic growth and feed intake information, hereafter called performance curves. Production–theoretical optimization requires, first, an accurate description of underlying processes and, second, possibilities for calibrations with a...

As lameness is a major health problem in dairy herds, a lot of attention goes to the development of automated lameness-detection systems. Few systems have made it to the market, as most are currently still in development. To get these systems ready for practice, developers need to define which system characteristics are important for the farmers as...

The Welfare Quality (WQ) protocol for on-farm dairy cattle welfare assessment describes 27 measures and a stepwise method for integrating values for these measures into 11 criteria scores, grouped further into 4 principle scores and finally into an overall welfare categorization with 4 levels. We conducted an online survey to examine whether traine...

This poster summarizes the main topics and aims of our current research concerning automatic lameness detection systems.

While previous research has shown the potential of automatic lameness detection by means of a pressure mat, these systems are currently not adopted in practice due to their high cost and low on-farm applicability. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate to what level the size (0.61 × 4.88 m) and resolution (0.0127 × 0.0127 m) of the pre...

Grazing management (GM) interventions, such as reducing the grazing time or mowing pasture before grazing, have been proposed to limit the exposure to gastrointestinal (GI) nematode infections in grazed livestock. However, the farm-level economic effects of these interventions have not yet been assessed so far. In this paper, the economic effects o...

As lameness detection in dairy cattle using visual locomotion scoring is cumbersome and subjective, research efforts are dedicated to develop automatic lameness detection systems. ‘Tender hoof placement’ and the distribution of the body weight over the four legs are possible lameness indicators, but no research exists on how to derive from automati...

The seemingly straightforward question of optimal pig delivery weight is more complex than meets the eye. Despite abundant research insights, the industry continues to request additional applied scientific decision support on the delivery weight problem. The current objective is to investigate whether and how the complex decision of delivery weight...

The surge in modelling pollution-generating technologies has issued several approaches and techniques that mainly differ in the way undesirable outputs are included in the models (disposability assumptions) but also on the structure of those models. Theoretical discussions have been provided on many of these approaches (Dakpo et al., 2016). Our aim...

Consumers have increasing, but highly variable, interest in sustainability attributes of food, including ethical aspects, such as animal welfare. We explored market opportunities for animal-friendly cow’s milk based on segmentation (cluster) analysis. Flemish survey participants (n = 787) were clustered (n = 6) based on their intention to purchase...

Feed plays a key role for dairy farmers to produce in an environmentally sustainable and competitive way. It determines both costs and natural resource demand. In this paper, we investigated whether and how dairy farms could simultaneously reduce feed costs and overall natural resource use in the feed supply chain without reducing farm revenues. We...

Environmental measures in an agricultural context often lead to extra constraints in current farming. This suggests trade-offs between the environmental objectives and profitability. Whether trade-offs exist, or may be turned into win-win, depends on creative farm options to comply new constraints. This paper concentrates on Ecological Focus Areas...

Responding to future challenges and societal needs, various actions are taken in agriculture to evolve towards more sustainable farming practices. These actions imply strategic choices and suppose adequate sustainability assessments to identify, measure, evaluate and communicate sustainable development. However, literature is scarce on the link bet...

Abstract published in ’Proceedings of the 50th Congress of the International Society for Applied Ethology’. Different consumer segments’ interest in information about dairy cattle welfare measures Sophie de Graaf1, 2, Filiep Vanhonacker1, Jo Bijttebier2, Ludwig Lauwers2, Frank Tuyttens2, Wim Verbeke1 1Ghent University, Coupure links 653, 9000 Ghent...

Concern about the welfare of production animals is growing among various stakeholders, including the general public. Citizens can influence the market for premium welfare products by expressing public concerns, and consumers—the actors who actually purchase products—can do so through their purchasing behavior. However, current market shares for pre...

Knowledge is being recognized as a crucial resource in the search for more sustainable farming practices. We present a literature review, discussing i) the types of knowledge at stake, ii) by who and how it can be created or acquired optimally, and the different associated learning processes and iii) on the role of networks and communities in suppo...

Although automatic lameness detection systems seem promising, their high cost price and low on-farm applicability impede their adoption in practice. The object of this study was to find out whether lameness detection sensors such as Gaitwise can be downscaled to smaller and cheaper systems by using less sensors. The reduction in sensors was achieve...

A quasi-experimental approach was used for assessing the farm-economic impact of substituting the use of antimicrobials by good management practices, namely biosecurity measures. To account for technological progress and to avoid selection bias, propensity score matching was used to estimate the difference-indifference of the technical parameters b...

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is the coordination of energy and material flows among geographically proximate firms to increase economic performance while reducing environmental impact. Although IS is gaining popularity as a sustainability strategy, implementation is proving difficult. In an attempt to understand these roadblocks to implementation, we...

p>Industrial symbiosis (IS) is the coordination of energy and material flows among geographically proximate firms to increase economic performance while reducing environmental impact. Although IS is gaining popularity as a sustainability strategy, implementation is proving difficult. In an attempt to understand these roadblocks to implementation, w...

Purpose – Building on the risk balancing theory and on recent discussions the appropriateness of using farm income maximization as behavioural assumption, this paper extends the risk balancing framework by accounting for business-household interactions. The purpose of this paper is to theoretically introduce the concept of farm household risk balan...

Efficiency analysis is used for assessing links between technical efficiency (TE) of livestock farms and animal diseases. However, previous studies often do not make the link with the allocation of inputs and mainly present average effects that ignore the often huge differences among farms. In this paper, we studied the relationship between exposur...

Biogas plant managers often face difficulties in obtaining feedstock at stable and affordable prices. The context in which the biogas plant manager needs to purchase the feedstock could be important when the biomass is also used in valorization trajectories besides anaerobic digestion. Using a combination of qualitative research and agent-based mod...

Bio-based products potentially decrease consumption of non-renewable fossil resources compared to their fossil-derived counterparts, but are more demanding for bio-productive land use. Although thermodynamics-based resource accounting methods are available for calculating overall resource efficiency from a life cycle perspective, their accounting f...

Greenhouse growers increasingly consider conversion, because of fluctuating market prices and decreasing expected margins. Molecular farming (MF), using genetically modified (GM) plants as protein factories, is one of the eligible options to enhance profitability. Given current legislation and public opinion on GM plants, in particular in the EU, t...

Despite the great pressure on global natural resources, few LCA studies focus on total resource consumption and the efficiency of the use of those resources. Moreover, a total resource use assessment for agricultural systems is highly relevant because many of these systems have become high input/high output systems in order to achieve higher produc...

When rural planning complexity increases, such as in rural areas with a high urbanisation pressure, decision support tools can assist in determining which agricultural land should be given priority for preservation. Theoretically, traditional land valuation methods can cope with the multiple criteria at stake, but literature reveals a gap between t...

Organic (ORG) and low-input (LI) dairy farms may have environmental advantages compared to high-input (HI) farms, but may also be less competitive in economic terms. This paper focuses on resilience in relative profitability of ORG and LI farms compared to HI farms in EU countries. Both a trend and a shock scenario were developed, based on milk and...

The comprehensive risk analysis of a business such as farming entails questions on what is at stake, how important is the risk concern and how to deal with it. We performed a sequential mixed method, with the in-depth interviews in the first stage (n = 35), followed by a survey on the Flemish FADN (n = 614) in the second, to investigate the farmers...

Adoption of sustainability assessment tools in agricultural practice is often disappointing. One of the critical success factors for adoption is the tool development process. Because scientific attention to these development processes and insights about them are rather limited, we aimed to foster the scientific debate on this topic. This was done b...

Although the literature on sustainability assessment tools to support decision making in agriculture is rapidly growing, little attention has been paid to the actual tool choice. We focused on the choice of more complex integrated indicator-based tools at the farm level. The objective was to determine key characteristics as criteria for tool choice...

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EQ2FTGQWSkZMd8ntuPzE/full The importance of risk perception and risk attitude for understanding individual’s risk behaviour are independently well described in literature, but rarely combined in an integrated approach. In this study, we propose a model assuming the choice to implement certain risk management strate...

To respond to the challenges of sustainable farm development it is no longer sufficient for farmers to be a craftsman. Entrepreneurial and management skills are becoming an important requisite. Farmers are thus forced to learn and further professionalize in the field of entrepreneurship. The research aims to operationalize the complex multidimensio...

DISCUSS, the Dual Indicator Set for Sustainable Crop protection Sustainability Surveys, was designed to help farmers achieve more sustainable crop protection. The indicator set pairs risk indicators POCER , with response indicators a management questionnaire. Both parts of DISCUSS are indicators in their own right, but the dual risk-response setup...

Multifactor productivity growth measures can be constructed using different input–output concepts. We estimate three distinct productivity growth measures respectively based on gross output, value added, and cash flow and discuss their economic interpretation. By making use of an index theory based decomposition model, we deviate from making neo-cl...

Risico-analyse in de landbouw roept vragen op over welke risico’s er van belang zijn en hoe met risico omgegaan kan worden. Op basis van een sequentiële mixed-methode, met diepte-interviews in de eerste fase (n = 35), gevolgd door een enquête bij landbouwers van het LandbouwMonitoringsNetwerk (n = 614) in de tweede, onderzochten we de risicopercept...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence of risk balancing behavior by European farmers. More specifically, the authors investigate strategic adjustments in the level of financial risk (FR) in response to changes in the level of business risk (BR). Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a correlation relati...

The impact of gastrointestinal (GI) nematode infections in dairy farming has traditionally been assessed using partial productivity indicators. But such approaches ignore the impact of infection on the performance of the whole farm. In this study, efficiency analysis was used to study the association of the GI nematode Ostertagia ostertagi on the t...

A participatory - expert-driven – approach was used to create DISCUSS, a dual indicator set that pairs a pesticide risk assessment system with a farm inquiry. DISCUSS was designed for implementation in farmers’ discussion groups, coached by an advisor. Before taking it from the design table into practice though, some additional conditions need to b...

Rural areas in densely populated regions face increasing competition for land. Consequently, land use planning processes must attempt to balance the goals of diverse stakeholders and the process of reaching consensus becomes more complicated. By investigating the perception of the actors involved in rural planning, this research contributes to the...

Traditional eco-efficiency measurements insufficiently support trade-offs analysis. The objective of the paper is to explore trade-offs analysis support from the branch of productive efficiency analysis techniques. The paper focuses on the linear programming based data envelopment analysis (DEA) models, adjusted for an analogous treatment of the ec...

Helminth infections are considered to be an important constraint on livestock productivity worldwide. The economic impact of these infections or their control strategies has traditionally been assessed by their effect on animal performance indicators or traditional economic calculation methods (e.g. budgeting and cost-benefit analysis). Because the...

This paper explores how a decision support system (DSS) can be developed that complies with the critical success factors of such systems. A participatory approach is used to develop Pigs2win, a DSS for Flemish pig farms. Pigs2win uses frontier analysis for comparative farm analysis. The participatory approach influences the selection of stakeholder...

Farmers are being called to use plant protection products (PPPs) more consciously and adopt more sustainable crop protection strategies. Indicators will help farmers to monitor their progress towards sustainability and will support their learning process. Talking the indicators through in farmers' discussion groups and the resulting peer encouragem...

Greenhouse growers increasingly consider conversion, because of fluctuating market prices and decreasing expected margins. Molecular farming (MF), using genetically modified (GM) plants as protein factories, is one of the eligible options to enhance profitability. Given current legislation and public opinion on GM plants, in particular in the EU, t...

Traditionally, agricultural economists employ farm level modeling for a variety of purposes. Central to these modeling techniques is the behavioral assumption of farm profit maximization, or, when risk preferences are put into play (risk aversion), utility maximization. However, there is abundant literature, from different (sub)disciplines such as...

The importance of risk perception and risk attitude for understanding individual's risk behaviour are independently well described in literature, but rarely combined in an integrated approach. In this study, we propose a model assuming the choice to implement certain risk management strategies to be directly driven by both perceptions of risks and...

economic-ecological trade-off; production theory; emission function; materials balance principle