Young farmer and farm performance

Recent data on the Italian farms con-firm the excessive aging of farmers. Most of the literature argues that a low inclusion of young people in the management of the farms determines a reduction in strength and farm efficiency, consequently increasing the risk of disinvestment of farming. The resolution of this problem becomes, therefore, an imperative for the Common agricultural policy (CAP), wanting to prevent the abandonment of domestic agriculture. So, much of the literature has devoted to this topic, but it has rarely provided statistical evidences on the relationship between age of farmer and farm performance. With the aim to added empirical evidences on this issue I use different econometric techniques on a panel data of the Farms Accounting Data Network (FADN), trying, primarily, to investigate in detail this relationship, showing the changes in the different productive contest and for dissimilar dimension of farm performance; secondly, to verify the presence of a probable reverse causality in this correlation, which is determined by the top per-forming farms that encourage young entrepreneurs to get into the agricultural business. The main results showed that: there is a positive correlation between young farmers and farms performance that remain positive even if I focused in specific agricultural sec-tors and using different proxy for farm performance; but when I control for the endogeneity of the age variable the relationship young-performance change the sign, showing that the observed “performing effect” of young farmer is due mainly to the ability of the elderly farmer, aiming pass or sell their farm, rather than the skill of the young farmer incoming.