Spatial Analysis of Environmentally Friendly Forms of Farming in the Plovdiv District

The importance of environmentally friendly forms of farming grows constantly in the sup­port provided by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU). EU member-states are obliged to implement agri-environment and climate measures, and can choose to de­velop the compensatory measures in Natura 2000 zones or Organic farming. Member-states define the geographical scope of each measure and sub-measure during programming. However, the achievement of the measures’ objectives de­pends on the uptake and participation by farm­ers, which is voluntary for all measures. The pa­per aims to investigate the spatial relations in the territorial distribution of environmentally friendly forms of farming in the Plovdiv district, and the main factors determining it. The method of spa­tial regression analysis is used, including ex­ploratory spatial regression and geographically weighted regression. Two models are developed to separate the influence of the socio-economic and territorial characteristics from the support provided by the different CAP measures and schemes. The first model – the SETm.model – comprises the socio-economic and territorial characteristics at municipal level. It explains 97% of the phenomenon of environmentally friendly forms of farming in the Plovdiv district. The fac­tors with the highest influence are the population above working age, arable land and permanent pastures. The second model – SETm+Policy. model, adds CAP policy support variables to the socio-economic and territorial characteristics. It explains 99.3% of the studied phenomenon. The factors with highest influence are the total sum of support for nature-friendly forms of farming, per­manent pastures and price of the agriculture land.