Using Farm Cost Accounting Data To Estimate Crop Rotation Effects: An Approach Based On a Smooth Mathematical Program with Equilibrium Constraints
Résumé
Crop rotation are key features of environmentally friendly cropping systems. Yet crop sequence acreages, which are required for estimating crop rotation effects, are rarely recorded in farm-level datasets such as the farmaccounting panel datasets generally used to estimate economic models of farmers’ crop production decisions. We propose here an original estimation procedure aimed at estimating crop rotation effects on yield and chemical input uses, while simultaneously reconstructing farms’ unobserved crop sequence acreages. This approach relies on a bi-level optimization problem which is solved by using a Mathematical Program with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC) approach.
Simulated data, based on real observations of farms’ production decisions for four crops are used to assess the performance of our approach. The results obtained on these simulated data demonstrate the ability of our proposed approach to simultaneously recover crop sequence acreages and estimate crop rotation effects on crop yield and input uses.