A Stepwise Innovation toward Viable Educational Services in Agriculture: Evidence from Japan

Although the educational function in agriculture is attracting growing attention as a kind of multifunctionality in agriculture, these services are not yet provided as a viable farm product. This paper explores how the educational externality could be internalized to establish a viable market for these services. We focused on educational dairy farms in Japan and used a questionnaire survey to quantitatively evaluate the attitudes of operators toward establishing viable services. First, a conceptual framework was presented to express operators’ orientation toward an economically viable service by incorporating a stepwise internalization process of positive externalities with the help of a social learning network. Then, empirically, statistical tests were conducted and factors that determined this orientation, a viable service determinant function, were explored by the ordered logit model. The result showed that, first, the higher the number of visitors to the farm, the more operators were oriented toward a viable service while no connection with ordinary dairy production was shown. Second, social learning was effective for initiating the internalization process. Third, marketing skills became more important for upgrading the internalization level. Consequently, it is important to create opportunities for those farmers who want to provide consumers with educational services to learn a new role for agriculture and to establish a new income source in a stepwise fashion.