CONSOLE_WP3_Task3.2_ Pan-EU survey of farmers and other rural

Data collected from the French farmers’ survey with in addition to the pan-european questions, the choice experiment data. The objective is to better understand their expectations for the implementation of payments for environmental services contracts (PES). The CE was included as a section of a pan-EU survey on the acceptability of agri-environmental-climate contract solutions, conducted in spring 2021 among 130 farmers located in Brittany, Normandy and Pays de La Loire. Voluntary farmers were contacted to organize a face-to-face interview after being recommended by intermediaries (farmers union, organizations of milk producers, farmers associations…). The first section of the survey includes general information on farmer and farm characteristics, and the second section on the impact of contract characteristics on the willingness to adopt contractual solutions. In particular, farmers were asked to state from a scale from 1 to 5 how much would the possibility to collectively agree on environmental targets and measures at landscape-level together with other land managers, and to receive a common payment to be distributed among participants, increase or decrease their willingness to enroll? In this third section dedicated to the CE, respondents were introduced to the context, objective and rules of the game of the CE, and to the contract parameters (those fixed and those varying from one alternative to another). Preliminary questions were included to help the respondents estimating their current levels of management requirements (individual status-quo). The current soil cover duration was calculated from the stated hectares of permanent grasslands, arable crops, permanent crops and total utilised agricultural area (UAA), as well as the average number of days with bare soil on arable lands and proportion of grass cover on the permanent crops surfaces. The current hedgerows density was calculated from the total UAA and total meters of multispecies multilayer hedgerows currently present on the farmland. Farmers were then asked 9 times to choose the preferred option among 2 contract alternatives and the status-quo.