Farmers’ Willingness to Accept Animal Welfare Practices: A Discrete Choice Experiment with German Pig Producers

Improving the welfare of animals is an important aim in livestock farming. Thereby, farmers’ willingness to implement animal welfare practices directly influences the welfare of animals. Therefore, this paper investi-gates pig farmers’ preferences and willingness to ac-cept the implementation of animal welfare practices. We study individual preferences for specific animal welfare measures that are part of a hypothetical animal welfare program. The data are analyzed with a mixed logit model in WTA space and show that German pig farmers require statistically significant compensations for implementing animal welfare practices. We find ev-idence that farmers’ choices are driven by their trust in the consumers’ willingness to pay, their evaluation of the efficiency of specific animal welfare practices and farm characteristics. Our results further reveal that ac-counting for farmers’ preferences aids in understand-ing their willingness to implement specific animal wel-fare practices. Regarding the improvement of animal welfare these findings are highly relevant for politi-cians, food industry and producers in order to support animal welfare program design and to identify the costs of welfare improvements on the meat supply chain and future profitability.

提升动物福利是畜禽养殖业的重要目标之一。据此，养殖户实施动物福利举措的意愿，直接关乎动物的福利水平。有鉴于此，本研究针对德国生猪养殖户的偏好与接受动物福利举措落地的意愿展开探究。本研究聚焦于一项假设性动物福利方案所涵盖的特定动物福利措施，考察养殖户的个体偏好。本研究采用意愿接受（Willingness to Accept，WTA）空间下的混合Logit模型对所获数据进行分析，结果显示，德国生猪养殖户在实施动物福利举措时，要求获得具有统计显著性的补偿金额。研究发现，养殖户的决策受其对消费者支付意愿的信任程度、对特定动物福利措施效率的评估以及养殖场自身特征等因素驱动。本研究结果进一步表明，考量养殖户的偏好，有助于深入理解其实施特定动物福利举措的意愿。针对动物福利提升这一目标，本研究结论对于政策制定者、食品行业从业者以及肉类供应链各参与方均具有极高参考价值，可助力其优化动物福利方案设计，同时明晰肉类供应链中动物福利提升的相关成本，以及该举措对未来盈利能力的影响。