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Abstract
Different views exist on the future
development of organic agriculture. The Dutch
government believes that in 2010 10% of the farm land
will be used for organic farming. Others have a more
radical view: due to increasing emphasis on sustainable
production in the end all farming will be organic. Others
believe in a more pessimistic scenario in which the
recent growth in organic was just a temporary upswing
and that the share of organic farmers already reached
its maximum. In this paper different potential scenarios
for the further growth of organic farming are evaluated
using Bayesian techniques. A nonlinear logistic growth
model explaining the share of organic farms is estimated
using available historical data for Dutch agriculture.
Various scenarios imply different prior values for the
parameters. Because of the non-linear model
specification a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is used to
simulate the posterior densities of the model parameters.
Finally, using Bayesian model comparison techniques
probabilities can be attached to the different scenarios.
The proposed methodology is a promising tool for
analysing technology diffusion in general when different
scenarios for diffusion are possible and limited data is
available.