Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations in Organic Farming Practices and Subjective Well-Being: The Case of French Organic Farmers

This paper examines how different motivations for engaging in organic farming may impact the farmers’ subjective well-being using a large-scale 2023 survey database from the French Agence Bio and leveraging the multi-dimension of well-being. Three measures capturing both affective and cognitive aspects of the well-being of farmers brought by their involvement in organic farming are used: Feelings of Pride, Satisfaction, and Feeling of Happiness. We focus on the effects of two types of motivations: intrinsic and extrinsic. Our results indicate that most intrinsic motivations, including concern about public health and human health, concern about the environment, and the request for autonomy in farming decisions, significantly and positively impact both the affective aspect (i.e., Pride, Happiness) and the cognitive aspect (i.e., Satisfaction) of farmers’ well-being. In contrast, extrinsic motivations related to the request for profits earned from fair prices and the response to demand incentives exert a negative influence. Besides motivations, our multi-dimensional well-being analyses also reveal that income, farming experience and difficulty, and production types significantly impact both affective and cognitive well-being. It is shown that social comparison (income) does not matter while social ties do. Finally, some aspects of farming characteristics and lifestyle factors (e.g., number of working hours and number of vacation days) contribute to cognitive well-being, while others (e.g., support from family and others) are associated with affective well-being.