Dealing with farm heterogeneity on modeling agricultural policy: An Agent Based Modeling Approach

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been gradually transformed from directly supporting prices and production to a decoupled scheme, where farmers receive a payment per hectare regardless of their production decisions. Within this framework and given the multitude of CAP's objectives, ranging from market competiveness to multifunctionality of agriculture, the inclusion of the heterogeneity of farms on modeling CAP will continuously arise in the immediate future as a key research question. In this paper we make a brief discussion of the aspects of farm heterogeneity within the agricultural policy modeling context and we show that Agent Based Modeling approach, coupled with Object Oriented System Analysis, is a very good alternative for considering all aspects of diversity of farms. Finally we present Agroscape, a flexible ABM Agricultural Policy Framework that can easily incorporates both behavioral and capacity heterogeneity presenting a proof-of-concept case study.