Farmers’ Attitudes toward the Future of Direct Payments: An Empirical Study from Germany

The new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform has met with large-scale protests from farmers throughout Europe, intending to change one of the most controversial components: direct payments. We analyze German farmers' attitudes and understanding of direct payments. The study employs a sur-vey of 435 farmers collected from January to Febru-ary 2021. Using cluster analysis and quantitative content analysis, we identified three distinct groups: (1) The “Independents” (43.7%) are entrepreneurs and have a competitive mindset. They would prefer to abolish direct payments associated with more freedom from policy conditions. (2) The “Conservatives” (27.0%) advocate an income policy based on direct payments, and they reject higher environmental standards. (3) The “Environmentalists” (30.3%) em-phasize a pronounced environmental awareness, fa-voring an environmentally performance-based ap-proach. The results show that policies are often per-ceived differently than they are intentionally designed. Improving the effectiveness of the policy measure requires sufficient information about the CAP's objec-tives for farmers, focusing on more transparent com-munication strategies. From a policy perspective, a more differentiated design of policy instruments and longer transformation periods are needed to engage farmers in policy change.