What Motivates Farms to Associate? The Case of Two Competing Czech Agricultural Associations

The study investigates determinants of affiliation with the two strongest associations in Czech agriculture. These represent Agricultural Association grouping large-scale enterprises and Association of Private Farmers, respectively. Our objective is to analyze whether associations with different types of members (large-scale enterprises vs. private farmers) experience different motives for joining or lapsing. Moreover, we investigate if there are characteristics of the associations' members which positively correlate to membership. The results imply that political lobbying is the main entry incentive for both large-scale enterprises and individual farmers. Informal information exchange is a more significant motivation for private farmers than for agricultural enterprises. To the question of who affiliates, we found that the probability of association membership of individual private farms significantly increases with employment of external workers and their commercial orientation, and the probability of association membership of large-scale agricultural enterprises significantly increases with the increasing share of livestock production on the total agricultural revenues and the increasing share of employee ownership.