Organic farming adoption in the French wine sector: can cooperatives make a difference?

In France, organic farming adoption has slowed down despite ambitious targets set by the European Green Deal and the French National Strategic Plan. The role that cooperatives, as key stakeholders, can play in encouraging the adoption of environmental practices remains underexplored in the literature. This study examines how they may promote organic farming by adjusting the design of the contracts established with their members. Using a discrete choice experiment with winegrowers from a wine cooperative, we assess farmers' preferences for contract attributes such as environmental requirements, advisory services, partial vineyard contracting, price premiums, and yield-loss compensation mechanisms. We choose the wine sector as it faces a major challenge in reducing pesticide use. Results show that winegrowers are highly responsive to market-based economic incentives such as a 30% premium and compensation options for yield loss. They have heterogeneous preferences regarding the inclusion of environmental requirements within the farming contracts. A latent class analysis identified three groups of winegrowers: a majority are Adverse to change (61%), others are specifically Reluctant to organic (26%), and the smallest group are Ready to adopt organic (13%). While cooperatives' farming contracts can be a potential instrument to increase the uptake of organic farming, additional tools and policies are needed, at least in the shortterm, to scale up its uptake.