Organizing vegetable supply chains: results of a survey of farmers

Abstract

German horticulture earns 21.2% of the total production value of German agriculture – on merely 1.3% of the total production area. Despite this important economic standing, agricultural economic research focuses more on other agricultural sectors like meat or milk supply chains. The present study aims to analyze the organization of the horticulture supply chain. In order to fill this gap in research, the impact of various management instruments on performance at an individual farm level as well as in the whole horticultural supply chain get analyzed by using the partial least square method. For this, German vegetable farmers participated in an online survey in 2013. The innovative empirical analysis thereby is based on existing literature and the contingency theory. The results show that the individual farm performance is positively influenced by factor endowment of the farms as well as by trust and business climate between the different levels of the supply chain. In contrast, the external situation of the farms does not exert any meaningful influence on farm performance but on organizational farm parameters of the supply chain.