Several studies in agricultural economics have shown that farm production is normally inefficient in comparison to the best practice farming. This implies that more food could be produced with the existing inputs, or that the existing production could be made less costly. During the last two decades, several authors have addressed this question and studied various drivers and restraints for efficient farm production to help farmers develop their businesses and become more successful. Given the on-going debate about insufficient supply of food, and about the need for development of rural firms, a thorough understanding about what drives and restrains efficient agricultural production is still of high importance. Therefore, this book summarises and discusses literature that has investigated reasons for inefficient production, and thus how agricultural production could become more successful. Based on this, the book discusses what aspects need more research in the future to understand what drives and restraints efficient farm production. In particular, the synthesis is based around the following aspects: farm size and its effect on efficiency, farm strategy and its effect on efficiency, farmer managerial capacity and its influence on efficiency, collaboration between farmers and its impact on efficiency, operational managerial practices and their effect on efficiency and, finally, critical success factors and their links with efficiency.

We estimate the effect of drought duration on farm performance, examine farmers' historical adaptation to drought conditions, and determine the maximum drought duration beyond which farmers' adaptation to drought condition would start to diminish assuming existing adaptation patterns persist. We adopt a novel panel regression method called the “mean observation OLS” (MO-OLS) that allows for multidimensional slope heterogeneity, and thus captures the presence of adaptation in the model estimation. We apply the MO-OLS method to a dataset from south-central Sweden, spanning the period 2001-2018. The results suggest that a one day increase in drought duration leads to a reduction in agricultural net value added by approximately 5%, with systematic variation in the effects across the municipalities in south-central Sweden. The findings also indicate a very low adaptation to drought conditions from 2001 to 2015, followed by a modest adaptation from 2016 to 2018. The results further highlight that farmers' adaptation to drought conditions would be less effective at mitigating economic loss under a scenario where drought duration exceeds 26 days.

Mastitis control options (MCOs) are management actions that are adopted to prevent mastitis in dairy herds. In this study, the psychological constructs attitude, social norms and perceived behavioral control are used to explain farmers' adoption of MCOs. So far, little research has used psychological constructs to explain adoption of MCOs. Based on recommendations by a Swedish dairy association (Växa) aimed at farmers, a total of 15 different management areas, representing MCOs for contagious and environmental bacteria, were used to characterize adoption behaviors. A total of 286 Swedish full-time farmers specializing in dairy production participated in the survey. Four different farmer groups were identified through a cluster analysis of similarities in how farmers adopted MCOs together with data on bulk milk somatic cell count and subjectively evaluated somatic cell counts on the farms. Regression analyses were performed to test whether the psychological constructs could explain differences in adoption across the MCO groups. Results revealed that farmers' decisions about which set of mastitis control options to adopt as preventive actions were explained by the farmers' perceived behavioral control of the situation and by differences in subjective norm. The attitude construct did not contribute to predicting the adoption of mastitis control options. Results suggest that work aimed at implementing MCOs should be complemented by programs specifically designed to improve the ability of farmers to use and/or combine MCOs to both alleviate and prevent mastitis. They also suggest that there is little to gain from programs aimed at fostering attitudes to prevent mastitis. We interpret the findings as indicating a need to strengthen perceived behavioral control as well as subjective norms among Swedish farmers' regarding their preventive work with mastitis. Understanding how to affect farmers' behavior, and thus reducing and controlling mastitis, will have positive effects on animal health and welfare in general.