Recovering cropping management practices specific production functions: clustering and latent approaches

R educing the use of pesticides and more generally of chemical inputs is a topical issue for governments . Economists generally advocate taxation for reducing polluting input uses. While econometric models tend to show that the pesticides price elasticity is low , these models mostly consider short - term adjustment s . Mid - term adjustment s of variable input uses are expected to be larg er as reducing such uses require farmers to change their cropping management practices (CMPs) . CMP is a notion closely related to the economists ' production function s and use d by agricultural scientists for characterizing crop production technologies . Yet, data lacking on farmers ' CMPS prevents direct empirical analyses of CMPs ' performances and adoption p rocesses. The main objective of this paper is to propose original approaches for identifying farmers ' CMPs in farm accountancy pan e l datasets with cost accounting. We consider that each CMP is characterized by a specific production function and propose a pproaches for identifying farmers ' CMPs and the related production functions either sequentially or simultaneously. We demonstrate the relevance of our approaches through an empirical application based on a French arable crop farm accountancy unbalanced panel dataset covering the 1998 - 2014 period . Albeit preliminary, our empirical results demonstrate that our approaches perform relatively well. For instance, they enable us to identify thre e wheat CMPs used by farmers.