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Abstract
The paper develops a mathematical programming model for assessing the impact of
Environmental Policy instruments on French winegrowing farm’s adoption of pesticides-saving
technologies. We model choices with regards to investment in precision farming and
plant protection practices, in a multi-periodic framework with sequential decision, integrating
uncertainty on fungal disease pressure and imperfect information on equipment performance.
We focus on recursive models maximizing a Utility function. These models are applied on a
representative sample of 534 winegrowers from the French Farm Accountancy Data Network
(FADN). As expected, both ecotaxes and green subsidies make precision farming equipment
more profitable, but the investment rate remains however low and concentrated on basic
systems. One explanation is grower’s financial constraint in a context of market crisis and
farm indebtedness. Shortcomings and further development of the models are discussed.