A key area of sustainable agriculture is the economic sustainability of agricultural holdings. Agricultural holdings should achieve such an income that they are able to cover all of their costs. As part of this study, an indicator of entrepreneurial income and an indicator of economic profit were proposed. Economic profit, in contrast to entrepreneurial income, considers the costs of lost opportunities, so-called opportunity costs. For this purpose, three indicators of the opportunity costs of production factors of labor, land, and capital were defined and calculated. To assess economic profit between different groups of holdings, an economic viability index is established, which identifies a holding as sustainable or at risk. This indicator is composed of the entrepreneurial income indicator and the difference between entrepreneurial income and economic profit. Based on FADN data of a five-year time series, it was confirmed that extensive holdings specializing in grazing livestock are among the most economically endangered subjects. The highest proportion of sustainable holdings was found in holdings specializing in milk production. From the size point of view, small holdings are most endangered, which was confirmed for all production focuses. In contrast, more large and very large holdings were included in the group of viable holdings.

Economic outcomes in relation to farmers’ age in the Czech Republic | Zuzana Hlouskova, Marie Prasilova | Agricultural Journals

Farm outcomes based on cluster analysis of compound farm evaluation | Zuzana Hloušková, Michaela Lekešová | Agricultural Journals

The paper aims at vertical price transmission of the agri-food market in the Czech Republic. It is focused on the analysis of price transmission in pork meat by investigating the short-run and long-run relationships within the product and the speed of establishing the equilibrium relationship. For this purpose, there is employed specially VECM (Vector Error Correction Model), impulse-response analysis, and decomposition of variance of VECM, which show the system’s reaction. The applied approach considers five alternatives in the Johansen approach. The results suggest that there is an existence of the equilibrium relationship in vertical markets and this relationship is simultaneous and demand-driven. The impulse-response analyses show the response of the processing price to one standard deviation shock to the agriculture price from approximately 15–20 periods reaching long-run equilibrium. The response of the agriculture price to one standard deviation shock to the processing price reaching long-run equilibrium is also from approximately 15–20 periods.

This study investigates the adoption of precision agriculture technologies (PATs) in the Czech Republic. Using unbalanced panel data from the Czech Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) survey spanning the period from 2017 to 2021, it aims to identify the drivers and barriers to the adoption of PATs in Czech field crop production. The estimation of a probit binary choice model with a within-between random effects (WBRE) specification – a novel approach to addressing heterogeneity in panel data choice models – reveals that PATs adoption is significantly influenced by socio-economic factors such as labor intensity, indebtedness, manager education, and farm economic size, as well as environmental factors such as localization and land quality. Furthermore, the adoption of PATs is associated with temporal dynamics in labor intensity, production efficiency, specialization, and land ownership. The findings underscore the need for targeted policy measures to promote the adoption of technology and enhance agricultural efficiency. The contribution of this study lies in deepening the understanding of the determinants and barriers to precision agriculture adoption in the EU context, where empirical research remains relatively scarce.

Multicriteria assessment of Czech farms | Zuzana Hloušková, Michaela Lekešová, Monika Hlaváčová, Ludmila Pánková | Agricultural Journals