Complying with greening in Germany: The case of ecological focus areas and crop diversification

With the Common Agricultural Policy reform in 2013, greening measures were introduced to establish a stronger link between payments made to farmers and environmental performance. We examine how the greening regulations for ecological focus areas (EFA) and crop diversity (CD) affected the management of arable land using data of the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) of five German federal states for the years 2010 to 2018. The objective of the paper is to analyse if certain observable farm and/or site characteristics can be linked to the compliance of greening rules. Moreover, we want to analyse how compliance changed over time and how farms reacted to changes in the regulation.
Around 40% of the farms were obligated to CD or EFA regulation, respectively, cultivating 90% of total arable land. With respect to CD, most farms would have fulfilled the requirements even before the implementation.
Even with low ambition level of greening, there was already a positive correlation in the number of (partial) drop-outs and management intensity. The findings confirm the limited environmental effectiveness of uniform obligations in support schemes.